How to Create Successful Marketing Goals

Every successful marketing strategy begins with a set of clearly defined marketing goals. Your goals will not only drive what you do but also how you’ll do it, thus providing a clear pathway to success. 

Clearly defined goals help guide your focus, provide motivation, measure your progress, improve performance, and help overcome procrastination.

It’s been said that those who set goals are 10x more likely to succeed than those who do not set goals. But with something so important to your overall business planning process, you might be wondering where to start.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the following to ensure you’re on the right track for determining your marketing goals for the following months and year!

1. Common marketing goals
2. Align your marketing goals with your business goals
3. Start drafting your marketing goals with SMART goals
4. Have a plan to execute your goals
5. Measure and monitor your goals

Common marketing goal examples

Your marketing goals should be the foundation of your marketing plan and strategy and ultimately tied to the success of your business’s overall growth.

Most marketing goals are typically based on one of the following objectives:
• Build brand awareness
• Promote new products or services
• Generate quality leads
• Increase sales
• Develop brand loyalty
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Expand into a new market

When determining your marketing goals, you should ask yourself, “What do I want my marketing efforts to accomplish? What improvements will make the biggest impact on my business?”

With that being said, here are a few common marketing goals to consider:
• Increase website traffic
• Grow social media following
• Increase social media engagement
• Increase email subscriber rate
• Drive more blog traffic
• Create more thought leadership content
• Increase the number of resource downloads
• Increase ad conversion rate
• Increase email open rate
• Increase email click rate
• Increase ad impressions
• Generate more ad clicks
• Generate leads
• Generate more qualified leads
• Improve lead conversion rate
• Schedule more demos
• Increase the number of positive customer reviews
• Improve customer relationships

Align your marketing goals with your business goals

As mentioned before, your marketing goals should drive the direction of your marketing efforts, but they should also align with your overall business goals to ensure your investing your time and resources in the right areas.

Be sure to understand the main business objectives to ensure your marketing goals are relevant to the bigger picture. Here are a few examples of how your marketing goals should align with your business goals.

Ex: Let’s say one of the business goals is to increase revenue. A good marketing objective to help reach this goal would be to generate quality leads through a targeted paid media campaign. 

Ex: If one of your business goals is to improve customer service, a possible marketing goal could be to increase the number of customer reviews by creating a customer feedback campaign to gather feedback from their previous experience.

Start drafting your marketing goals with SMART goals

A good tip when drafting your marketing goals is to write your goals down! A study has shown that those who have written goals are 3 times more successful than those who have unwritten goals.

Make it clear what exactly you want to achieve and how you will go about doing it using the SMART goal framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Let’s break this down.

Specific:

Each goal must be clear and specific with the description of what exactly you want to achieve.  Try to answer the following questions when creating your marketing goals:

• What will I accomplish?
• Why is this goal important?
• Who does this goal pertain to?
• Where will this happen?
• What are the conditions?
• How will this happen?
• When will this happen?

Ex: Instead of saying, “I want to increase social media followers” say, “ I want to create more thought leadership content on Facebook to increase my Facebook following by 10% in the next 6 months.”

Measurable:

You must be able to track the progress of your goal with a certain metric. This will make it clear what needs to happen in order to achieve your goal. Think of these questions when drafting your marketing goals:

• How much?
• How many?
• How will I know when I’ve accomplished this goal?

Ex: Saying you want to increase your number of Facebook followers by 10% gives you a clear number of what needs to be achieved, including a point of reference when tracking your progress.

Attainable:

While you do want to push yourself, your goal still needs to be something you can actually achieve. If your goal isn’t realistically possible, then you’ll lose motivation and give up. To set an achievable goal, consider these questions:

• What are my constraints and challenges?
• How will I accomplish this goal?

Ex: Take a look at your past metrics to gather a realistic idea of what you’re capable of doing. If you’re wanting to increase your social media followers on Facebook by 10% and you’ve seen in the past few months that you’ve been steadily increasing your subscriber rate by 7% then this is likely an attainable goal for you to achieve.

Relevant:

Why does this goal matter? At the end of the day, your goals should be relevant to the bottom line of what you are wanting to achieve. 

• Why is the goal important to you?
• Will this goal help with the bigger picture?
• Is it the right time?
• Am I the right person?

Ex: If one of your marketing objectives is to generate more quality leads and you know that 25% of your customers came from Facebook then yes, the goal of increasing your Facebook followers is definitely a relevant goal for your marketing team.

Timely:

Every goal needs to have an end date so you have the motivation to meet that goal within the allotted time frame. Hold yourself accountable and determine a realistic timeline. If not, you’ll get distracted with other priorities and never get it done. 

• When will this happen?
• Do I have the time and resources to accomplish this?

Ex: I have budgeted 1,000 hours in the next 6 months to create thought leadership pieces that will increase our Facebook followers by 10%.

Have a plan to execute your goals

Now that you’ve determined your marketing goals, it’s time to create a plan with the details on how you’ll actually achieve it. After all, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.” 

Ask yourself the following questions:
• Who will be in charge of this task?
• What resources do I need to achieve this goal?
• What actions are required to reach this goal?

First, write down a list of all the tasks that you’ll need to complete to achieve your goal(s). Then, prioritize your tasks and estimate how long each task will take. And finally, schedule out your tasks in a calendar to keep track of due dates. We recommend using a project management tool like asana to track your daily tasks.

Measure and monitor your goals

Lastly, be sure to track and measure your progress weekly and monthly so you know if your efforts are successful or not. We recommend using tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot to easily monitor your metrics.

If your efforts seem to be working then you might consider allocating more resources towards achieving that goal. Or if it appears something isn’t working then review the metrics to see what changes can be made, and start testing different criteria to see if anything improves.

Need help?

Need some more help clearly defining your marketing goals? Reach out to Pyxl for a quick 2021 digital marketing strategy consultation to discover how we can take your business to the next level. We’ll work with you to define your goals and discuss the solutions to get you there.

Updated: Apr 04, 2023