You are smart, but how about your marketing goals? Are they smart too? When thinking about your marketing strategy and goals over the next 12 to 24 months, start with defining what makes you successful in your efforts. By understanding your goals you can create metrics to know what your return on marketing investments or ROMI are. A great criterion for setting goals is one often attributed to Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives S.M.A.R.T. criteria. SMART is an acronym for specific measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Here are 7 goals to help you reach your goals. We like goals, ok?
Goal #1: Establishing Brand Awareness
It is tricky to track brand awareness efforts. The best way to understand your brand’s overall reach is to look at impressions, reputation, engagement levels, and sentiments about your brand. How often are people interacting with your brand and where? Other questions to ask when tracking brand awareness:
- Do you track where people heard about you? How about who specifically recommended you or where the referrals came from?
- Do you track the number of times your logo or brand experience was out there for the world to discover?
- Do people say to you, “Oh I see you everywhere?” Track that too!
- Was your brand on the radio, TV, or Facebook, referred by a friend, co-worker, or your brother’s mother-in-law’s sister’s boyfriend? Who helped you earn the new business and why?
- What were the keywords used if it was a website search?
Goal #2: Generate and Nurture Your Leads
Are you tracking your leads which turn into opportunities and eventually new clients? Creating benchmarks by month, quarter by quarter, and year by year is a smart way to track which marketing efforts are working and which ones to axe. There are several free customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to use for this purpose. Here is a list of the top 10 free CRM systems according to Capterra: http://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/
Goal #3: Examine Customer Acquisition
Tracking your average customer acquisition cost (CAC) will help you determine the rate of return in your investment of time and money. Here are questions to consider when looking at how you get customers:
- What lead sources are turning out to be most useful to your efforts?
- What types of marketing activities seem to be working well?
- What is not working as well?
- What can you enhance and omit from your efforts?
Goal #4: Establishing Thought Leadership
Are you doing all you can to establish yourself as a thought leader? If more people are exposed to your expertise, you will be seen as the expert in your field, enticing potential prospects to trust and buy from you. Check out this link from www.inc.com providing you with 10 tips on establishing yourself and/or your brand as a Thought Leader: http://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/10-ways-to-establish-yourself-or-brand-as-a-thought-leader.html
Goal #5 Track Website Traffic and Maintain your Website
Do you know who is using your website and how they are getting there? Make it a goal to frequently track your website analytics and make notes as to how often unique visitors are coming to your site. For top ranking on the search engine results page, it is helpful to increase the amount of time your visitors spend on your site. Did you know that search engines will rank your site higher if you have rich media on your site, including video and images? Optimizing your website with relevant keywords, having a well-produced video on your site, and ensuring your site stays fresh will help with your marketing efforts. Learn more about video SEO and how we can help attract and retain visitors to your website, click here for more info. { link to the Video SEO article Angie posted last month}.
Goal #6 Customer Retention or Loyalty
Do you have a plan in place to retain your current clients and turn those clients into brand evangelists? Look into your number of current clients/ customers, and identify who your key clients are. This will help you understand your ideal clients and can help you to pre-qualify prospective clients as well. Here are three tips on retaining clients from Entrepreneur.com
Goal #7 Sales
Specifically, set your goals on how much in sales revenue you want to increase by a specific time frame and determine your strategy for accomplishing these goals and tracking them along the way. Are the goals you are setting realistic? How are you going to measure your success? Determine which efforts can be attributed to the sales you have made previously and then how they will affect your sales moving forward. Track your sources. Look at the ways in which contacts were made, who made them, how often, and when the sale was made. What kinds of brand awareness campaigns were happening at that time, and what type of tools and techniques were employed? What works, and what doesn’t? Keep in mind you not only want to track the number of sales but the quality of the sales you make.
So when setting and tracking your marketing goals, use the S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria, be sure to make them visible or post them to a goals board so you can track them and check in on them often to see your ROMI is performing.
