Effective marketing goals can help you have your best year ever.

Goal setting is an important part of doing business. If you really want to grow your business, you should set goals for every important part of your business and that most certainly includes marketing. You’ve likely heard that goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time sensitive—what we call SMART goals. I’m a big believer in SMART goals and recommend my clients use SMART as a way of constructing and evaluating the goals they set. SMART gives you a good framework when it comes to setting out your goals. But before you start setting SMART goals, I want you to think through these building blocks.

Understand Your Audience

All marketing starts with your audience, and without knowing who they are it will be difficult to create a marketing plan that will work for you.

Know Your Products and Services

Understanding how your products and services benefit your audience will also help you know where to start with your marketing efforts. Does your audience know that they need what you have, or do you need to educate them?

Know Your Purpose

You may have goals for various purposes for your marketing such as generating leads, spreading awareness, building your email list, getting more social engagement or something else entirely. The important thing is to understand the purpose of the marketing that you’re doing.

Where Do You Stand Now?

Knowing where you are starting from is critical. If you don’t have much of a list or a social media following, then it’s important to decide what you should do first. Should you build more of a following and if so, exactly how will you accomplish it? And how will you measure your “following”—people on your email list? People who engage with your Facebook posts? Likes? Shares? Retweets?

Where Do You Want to Be?

Once you know where you stand, it’s time to think about where you want to be. When you think about where you want to be, make sure you pick specific, measureable outcomes. If you say, “In the future I would like to have more leads,” it won’t be that helpful. In every case I can think of, being more specific will be more helpful.

Determine What Is Next

Now that you know where you are and where you want to be, you need to think about what you should do next and what you’ll need to do when you accomplish that. Knowing what you’ll do next when you reach a particular goal is helpful when setting marketing goals for your business. It’s not always first things first — many marketing efforts happen concurrently: building your blog, building your list, marketing to the list. But some things are first things first, and for those things you need to think sequentially from one goal to another.

Map It All Out

Creating a map on paper of where you have been, where you are now, and where you want to go will help you succeed in the marketing goals that you set for yourself. It will also enable you to see gaps in your choices so that you can fill them.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Your marketing efforts need a strong foundation. Get good at the basics before you try advanced strategies. You want to start where you are now, and work your way up to where you want to be. Too many people spend too much time and effort pursuing advanced strategies when they would accomplish much more by sticking to the basics. Once the basics are well established, then consider advanced strategies. Avoid the bright, shiny object syndrome.

Do the research you need to do in order to know your audience, learn your products, and to evaluate where you stand today. Then you’ll be able to choose the best marketing goals for your business today and in the future.

If you’re not sure how to set good marketing goals for your company, feel free to email me. I’m here for you and I want you to succeed.