Startup Guides > 6 Tips To Achieve Marketing Goals

All marketing managers struggle with one thing. How to set goals for marketing department. It sounds like a simple-enough task, but over time I came to see goal-setting as something of an art; it requires practice, constant refinement, focus and a little bit of playfulness (unless you want to drive yourself crazy).

How do you set goals that are challenging yet still achievable (is there an exact formula for this, like always shoot for x% more than last month)? How many goals should you set--one, three, six? Should you focus on a new goal every week, month, semester, quarter or year? If you're a small company and you need to achieve quick growth, how do you pick which goal is most important when there are a billion urgent things that need to happen? How do you stay focused on your goals (once you've finally decided on them) and not let other stuff get in the way, like tempting partnership opportunities or new tactics you want to try out?


Following six tips will help achieve marketing goals:

1. Set Achievable Goals:

The key to setting achievable marketing goals is to spend time evaluating your current position. Many startups set lofty, unattainable goals and end up discouraged, which can be detrimental in the early days. On the other hand, some startups set easy, insignificant goals and end up missing out on growth potential....

Take the time to really understand your growth levels to date. If you run a popular blog and traffic has increased by 8-10% for the last four months, you know that a 12-15% month-over-month increase in blog traffic is a challenging yet attainable goal. Don't be the startup that shoots for 20% or the startup that considers anything above 8% a win.

And don't forget to use online marketing sites to achieve your marketing goals. You can visit 40billion.com which is a fastest-growing network of entrepreneurs and crowdfunders. They specialize in promotion of small businesses by broadcasting and promoting to its large network of several million users across the most popular social networking sites for small businesses - including Twitter, LinkedIn, 40Billion, and even Facebook. Innovative services such as promoted company listings were created for small entrepreneurs to tap into a growing, active network online without spending thousands on pay-per-click ads or traditional advertising. They also offer crowdfunding promotion and promote crowdfunders and their campaigns/projects.

2. Types of Goals:

In terms of what types of goals, you should be setting, it depends heavily on what stage your startup is in. Early on, focus on engagement goals and collecting feedback to validate your product or service. Later on, focus on growth metrics. There are no universals when it comes to metrics, unfortunately. What's important is that your core goals are tied to major business objectives.

The single most important thing to remember about marketing goals is to stay focused. Choose 1-2 core goals that impact the bottom line and 3-5 supporting goals. Anything more than that will distract you from what's most important (as will changing goals too often).

3. Goals must be realistic:

The most important thing in setting a marketing goal is that it must be authentic.

Overall there's no "right" goal; you want something that isn't easily achievable but also something that's realistic so you don't feel overwhelmed. Break our goal into a daily target so--even if our goal is a billion--we know on a specific day if we are on track.

One HUGE caveat about setting goals is not depending on the goal for your happiness. To stay on track, review these goals with your team or by yourself every Monday. If you're ahead of schedule, keep doing more. Are you behind? If so, what do you need to change?

4. Process:

Goal-setting process must include experiment, learn and change. Have a hypothesis. It should include testing and experimenting. Try to go into each new marketing goal with as much information as possible. Talk through what you want to change and why, study past patterns, perform audits, and consider all the possibilities. When you've done all the groundwork, it's easier to have a good idea of what you think will happen as an ideal outcome.

5. Communicate:

Communicate more than you think you should. Review your marketing metrics every week as part of a Friday morning session. The frequency of these sessions will let you revisit results right away and move quickly on new ideas to reach your goals faster and avoid surprises. Frequent check-ins and smaller goals on the way to the big goals seem to help all stay on the same page.

6. Don't have to win all the time:

Be OK with failing (sometimes). Sometimes we make our marketing goals too challenging and we aren't able to reach them. That's OK; we don't know everything! We often can learn as much from those moments as we can from the big triumphs. When this happens, we'll set up some new experiments to try and start measuring again.

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