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“Marketing is the heart of business” you must heard that by now. But what makes it so? What are the goals of marketing? What are some examples of marketing goals? What’s the importance of the marketing goals?
If you are looking for answers to those questions, A) you are not the only one, and B) you are in the right place. Marketing is the complete process of discovering, foreseeing, and fulfilling customer demand, and its ultimate goal is to connect a product with its target customer.
Setting an appropriate and well-defined goal is crucial because you and your entire team will be working toward it. To help you out on this mission, I have tried to design this article with all the relevant information.
Let’s start exploring.
What Are the Marketing Goals?
Marketing goals are a set of specific and measurable objectives used by businesses to accomplish their entire marketing strategy. These objectives ensure that work is in line with the organization’s overarching business goals.
Marketing goals might differ from business to business depending on the company’s overall business goals and objectives, its competitive landscape, and the current condition of the market. From raising brand awareness to generating revenue, it serves many purposes.
Businesses develop their marketing objectives using a variety of frameworks, including the SMART, AIDA, and CLEAR models. If you are solely focused on the growth and success of your business, there is no alternative to setting realistic, attainable goals and working towards them.
There are multiple frameworks available for setting and achieving marketing goals. Let’s talk about some of the widely used ones:
SMART is an abbreviation that stands for
S – Specific: Goals need to be clear and well-defined so that your team knows what they are working toward.
M – Measurable: Goals should be calculable, and their progress should be easily trackable.
A – Attainable: Goals should be realistic. Yes, challenging but still attainable, considering available resources and possible risks.
R – Relevant: Goals that align with your business’s overarching goal.
T – Time-bound: Setting a deadline to ensure that marketing plans are completed on time.
AIDA, a widely used framework for designing effective marketing and ad campaigns, stands for:
A – Attention: Setting strategies to get the attention of your target customer
I – Interest: Once you get their attention, the next phase is to start building interest by providing information about your product or service.
D – Desire: Then, create a desire for your product by showing how it will solve their pain points.
A – Action: Finally, encourage them to buy your product or service. You can add a “Call to Action” button here.
Clear stands for:
C – Collaborative: Setting goals in collaboration with all stakeholders to foster a sense of ownership.
L – Limited: Setting goals with a limited scope so they become attainable.
E – Emotional: The goal is to make a personal and emotional bond with the team so that they can be energetic and motivated.
A – Appreciable: Breaking down goals into smaller steps to make them more manageable, and easily trackable.
R – Refinable: The goal is to be flexible, adaptable, and improvable to meet new challenges.
OKR means
O for Objectives: Three or five goals that are defined, measurable, and time-bound that are aligned with overarching company goals and objectives
KR for Key Results: Analyzing key results to evaluate the progress towards achieving those goals.
The balanced scorecard framework uses the following four perspectives to measure and demonstrate a business’s performance:
Financial: It measures the organization’s financial performance using metrics such as revenue growth, profitability, and ROI.
Customer: It collects and analyzes metrics such as customer retention and satisfaction rates to get a clear picture of customer satisfaction.
Internal process: This process uses metrics of productivity, and cycle time to assess the efficiency of business internal processes.
Learning and growth: Learning and growth perspectives are reviewed by assessing the organization’s employee engagement and training programs, as well as its capacity to recruit, retain, and develop its people.
Marketing goals differ from industry to industry and from business to business. Here are 7 major marketing goals:
Imagine it’s a hot summer day and you are having a cold drink; you probably pictured Coca-Cola or Pepsi, right? Well, this is what brand recognition is all about.
Brand awareness serves as a major element of a business’s marketing strategy because of its contribution to the brand’s increased visibility and consumer recognition. Think of it: if no one knows about your product, how are you going to sell it?
Every brand has a unique personality and a unique voice. To create brand awareness, you need to understand it first. Once you get it, you can easily design your brand awareness strategies. Some of them include:
Around 4.74 billion people on earth are using social media these days. So is your target audience. To create brand awareness among your target audience, you need to find out where the majority of them are spending time. Then you can run campaigns filtering by interest, demography, and other factors.
The goals of content marketing in building brand awareness are to inform, educate, and create awareness through entertaining ways. You can create blogs, infographics, E-books, and videos focusing on customers’ pain points and the solution you are offering through your product.
Despite the rise of the internet and digital advertising, many businesses continue to rely on traditional advertising strategies such as billboards and television-radio-print advertisements to reach a larger audience.
You can also conduct public relations to generate good media buzz and establish relationships with influencers.
When people get to know your brand, they will talk about it. Though it’s quite tough to get the exact measure of it, you can get an idea using online tools.
N.B: If you are a beginner, you can use Google Trends, a free tool, to learn what people are looking for when they search for your brand on Google.
To sum up, “Without sales, there is no business.” This is why businesses set their marketing goals to boost their sales and maximize their profit. Here are some strategies for boosting sales that you can use:
Pricing properly might be a blessing for your business’s revenue. For instance, if your product has a strong reason to have a higher value, you can charge a slightly increased price. In contrast, reducing prices might give your business a competitive advantage too.
A business can streamline its sales funnel by finding and solving the barriers of the buyer’s journey. This might include providing customer support, offering additional products in a bundle, providing specific information, smoothening the purchasing process, etc.
These tactics encourage customers to buy additional and higher-valued products. For example, when the customer looks for a mobile handset, you can offer them to purchase a screen protector and case along with it, this is cross-selling.
In another scenario, offering those same customers a high-end phone with better performance will be upselling.
There are many ways to measure a business’s revenue goals, including:
Let’s say a potential customer has heard about your business through an ad that leads him/her to visit your website. What will be your next move? turning this awareness into consideration for your product, right? That is what generates leads.
In business, a “lead” is any person who shows interest in a business’s product. To get access to a service (for example, a free trial of software), the lead provides their communication details, such as their email address, and phone number. The business counts this as a generated lead, and the sales team follows the sales funnel to turn these leads into fresh contacts they can get in touch with.
Not all leads will become your customers. To get your targeted number of customers, you might need a lot of high-quality leads. There will also be some customers who will be skeptical of your products. Your marketing team can nurture these leads to turn them into future customers.
There are many effective marketing tactics for lead generation, like email, social media, and content marketing. Let’s discuss some of these lead-generation strategies:
Yes, this age-old method still works! Even in 2020, 80% of marketers mentioned that they used email marketing as their marketing strategy. Since email consists of lots of text, you can attract your subscribers’ attention using interesting copy and a colorful design.
I know I’ve mentioned content marketing before, but the goal of content marketing here is to capture the attention of your potential customers so you can generate leads from them. This content can include materials like blog posts, infographics, videos, e-books, and others that provide value to the audience.
The goal of SEO is to attract potential customers to a business’s website by ranking highly for relevant keywords on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Properly implemented SEO will help your website rank better on search engine result pages. You can perform online keyword research to find out what your target audience is searching for and then incorporate those keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and URLs.
N.B: If you are a beginner, you can use the free Keyword Research Tool from Google to start with.
There are plenty of key metrics that a business might use to measure the success of their lead generation efforts, such as:
According to Bain and Co,
“Improving customer retention by 5% can boost profitability by 25% to 95%”
As a marketer, it is just as important, if not more, to retain your present customers as it is to get new ones. Keeping your current customers is not only profitable but also cost-efficient; as attracting new customers costs five times more than keeping an existing one.
When you delight your customer and earn their satisfaction, they will continue to buy your product. It will increase the customer’s lifetime value and make them an ambassador for your brand. “Word of mouth” will then do the rest!
Businesses use a variety of tactics to increase customer value. Some of them consist of:
When you go above and beyond simply selling your product, your customer will never forget you. Good customer support includes features like being responsive, managing easy communication channels, being empathic, solving customer issues in a timely manner, etc.
Everyone wants to belong somewhere, to be a part of a community. Creating groups on social media, and hosting/sponsoring events, helps connect your brand with your customer and develop a loyal customer base.
Some customers might purchase your product and then forget about you. Some might also visit your webpage and leave without making a purchase. You can keep your company in front of them and encourage them to purchase by running retargeting campaigns.
You can use the following methods to track the growth in your customer’s lifetime value:
Thought leadership is making your brand an expert in your industry. The overarching goal of thought leadership is to position your business as a credible and trustworthy source of information and insight.
According to a survey,
“66% of marketers place thought leadership as a high priority for their marketing organization.”
Though they look similar, the key difference between thought leadership and brand awareness is the focus of their goals. While brand awareness focuses on raising recognition of a brand, thought leadership focuses on establishing a business or individual as an authority in their field.
From publishing content to hosting websites, there are many strategies businesses use to establish thought leadership. Some examples are:
Thought leadership is all about producing valuable content on various platforms that recognize and resolve consumers’ pain points. Content could include blogs, articles, as well as outreach and guest blogging to collaborate with other trusted brands to create insightful content.
Making connections with other thought leaders and influencers in your field is essential for your success. Activities like joining industry events, and being active on online groups and forums, not only strengthen your relationship with the industry but also enhance your exposure to your followers as a thought leader.
If you create content with large gaps, no one will find it valuable. Regularly sharing your expertise and thoughts on industry-related subjects will help you position yourself as a thought leader.
Evaluating thought leadership can be difficult because it frequently depends on more subjective measurements like industry perception and brand reputation. You can measure thought leadership by considering the following factors:
Assume someone searched for your niche product, and you ranked on the second page. Scary, right?
Only 9.47% of people click on results on Google’s second page.
That is why marketers seek to have their brands appear on the first page of Google. In addition to providing a competitive advantage, improving SEO contributes to increased brand awareness, lower advertising costs, high-quality lead generation, and other benefits.
Improving SEO can involve a number of strategies, such as:
Both on-page and off-page SEO optimization are required to rank higher on the SERP. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s content, meta tags, and structure so that it is SEO-friendly. On the other hand, off-page SEO optimization primarily focuses on backlinking.
Keywords are the core of SEO. Finding out the keywords your target audience is searching for and implementing those keywords properly into your website’s content and meta tags helps your SEO to rank better.
Technical optimization ensures that a website is technically sound. Improved website speed, easy navigation, and mobile browser optimization all contribute to a website’s visibility and ranking on SERP.
You can evaluate the success of your SEO by considering these factors:
Rebranding is a marketing process that changes a product’s overall image, including its appearance, packaging, and messaging. The goal of rebranding is to change a customer’s perception of a product, revive a brand, or make a product more efficient to fit into a competitive market.
Rebranding helps a business stand out from its competitors by increasing the business’s reach and modernizing its reputation to appeal to a younger market.
Rebranding can include a variety of different tactics, such as:
Rebranding might include the change of a business’s name, logo, and visual identity. While a changed name might better align with a business’s mission and target market, an updated visual identity might convey its new message to customers.
Businesses revise their previous messaging and language to better align with their mission, value, or target market. It’s important to keep in mind the audience, competitive landscape, brand identity, simplicity, tone, and language while revising the messaging and positioning.
Modernizing the website and overall digital presence is a rebranding tactic that helps to enhance the user experience, raise brand awareness, and boost conversions. While upgrading your online presence, you should focus on the website’s design, layout, functionality, and content optimization.
You can evaluate the effectiveness of your rebranding campaign by considering the following metrics:
Planning is crucial for every business that wants to grow and continue to expand. Setting marketing goals is an essential component of any business plan. Why? Well.
“Without a goal, you can’t score.” This applies to business goals as well. Setting specific, attainable goals helps you stay on track. Instead of doing random things, your workforce focuses on following a set of instructions to bring out the maximum ROI for your business.
Tracking progress is essential for understanding how your business is doing and where it can improve. Numbers alone won’t give you a clear picture of your marketing efforts. However, if you compare it with your marketing goals, you will get a better sense of your current position.
When you’ve set a specific and measurable goal, you know where to put your resources. It will help you with budgeting, prioritizing specific areas, and assessing whether marketing initiatives are increasing the organization’s success as a whole.
Specific marketing goals help you with effective internal-external communication. For instance, you can coordinate the tasks among your internal department and also, inform your digital marketing agency to design your marketing campaigns, and content as per your marketing goals.
Setting marketing goals builds accountability, and attaining them can generate a sense of accomplishment. So, when your business team is aware of your marketing objectives, they are more likely to be motivated and productive in their work.
In conclusion, setting marketing goals is vital due to its impact on every aspect of a business, from defining particular goals to monitoring progress, making data-driven decisions to staying aligned with overarching business goals—everything!
If you are still reading, I just want to wish you good luck on your journey! As you strive to make the most of your company, I hope my discussion in this article is about what the marketing goals are. marketing goal frameworks, measurement methods, and necessities will be helpful to you.
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