How to Correctly Define Your Marketing Goals and Achieve Them with Precision

1. What are marketing goals?
2. Why is it important to set marketing goals?
3. These are typical marketing goals that could also be interesting for your company
4. How do I set marketing goals?
5. How do I formulate marketing goals?
6. Step-by-step guide: How to achieve your marketing goals
7. These softwares support you in achieving your marketing goals
8. You can only achieve something with your marketing if you set goals

Marketing - colorful images, funny slogans and no value added to your company. Maybe you have also been confronted with this still prevailing misconception when you have told them that you work in marketing. Yet this claim is as far removed from the reality of strategic marketing as the sun is from the moon. Most marketing departments work with a clearly defined marketing strategy that provides guidelines for their employees' actions. From this strategy you can then derive your marketing goals. But isn't the field of marketing too vague and intangible for you to define firm goals? Not at all.

To illustrate this, we have summarized for you what marketing goals are, why it is important that you define marketing goals and what typical marketing goals are. We then define how you set marketing goals that suit you and how you formulate them. Afterwards, we will give you some tips on how to achieve your marketing goals and introduce you to some tools that can support you in this.

What are marketing goals?

Let's start with the basics. Marketing goals are states defined by you that you want to achieve through your marketing activities in the future. Goals can refer to your company, your department, specific products or campaigns. They distinguish themselves from sales or purchasing goals only in the target size that you set. You can use your turnover, sales or profit, your market share, your followers, leads, requests and customers or your reach, rankings, clicks or conversion rates.

Which target sizes you use for the definition of your marketing goals depends closely on your strategic orientation and company goals. You can define short-term, medium-term and long-term goals. These form the core components of your marketing strategy. All colleagues in your department align their daily work with these, ideally jointly defined, goals. After all, these goals should have been achieved by the specified deadlines.

Why is it important to set marketing goals?

Even if marketers are the creative minds of your company, they can't just work on without setting their marketing goals. Because they are the basis for the daily tasks and set the direction. When you set these goals, you define the state that you aim for with your marketing measures. This also means that you question each measure before its implementation as to whether it supports you in achieving your marketing goals.

Your goals act like a compass that you can use at any time. They ensure that all your team members pull in the same direction, even though each of you may be working on a different project. Because you question the meaningfulness of your tasks in relation to achieving your goals, you don't waste valuable time and resources that you could invest in important and effective measures. You no longer follow trends because you just do it now or you have seen it with your competitors.

On the contrary, you can invest your working time in the tasks and projects that are important for your department and thus also for your company. Your marketing goals are therefore directly linked with the company goals and the economic success of your company. So first think about what goals you want to achieve with your marketing and then derive your strategies and concrete measures from them.

Another advantage of marketing goals is that you can clearly document the achieved success. If you have goals, you will pursue them, monitor them and prepare the data for your decisions accordingly. In this way, rather vague and intangible marketing topics become tangible hard figures that are comprehensible for everyone. Because as the saying goes, numbers don't lie.

These are typical marketing goals that could also be interesting for your company

But what do typical marketing goals look like now? That depends entirely on what kind of goals you are pursuing. You can distinguish the following types of marketing goals:

• Strategic marketing goals
• Tactical marketing goals
• Economic (quantitative) marketing goals
• Psychological (qualitative) marketing goals

We will look at what examples for the different categories can look like in the following section.

You can distinguish marketing goals in the areas of strategic, tactical, psychological and economic.

Strategic Marketing Goals

Strategic goals for your marketing are long-term and of central importance to your company. These include the opening up of new target groups or new markets, increases in sales or the improvement of your employer's image. Also finding market gaps and increasing your profile in your industry or among consumers are strategic marketing goals.

Tactical Marketing Goals

Tactical marketing goals, also known as operational marketing goals, deal with the operational business of your company. In contrast to strategic goals, they are rather short-term and are subordinated to the strategic marketing goals in the hierarchy. Examples of tactical marketing goals are the improvement of sales volume or the achievement of a defined gross margin.

Economic (quantitative) Marketing Goals

Next we look at the economic marketing goals, which can also be referred to as quantitative marketing goals. These goals or rather their fulfillment, you can control in terms of value and numbers. Since you have hard figures anyway, you don't have to interpret anything into the values and the analysis usually runs quickly and easily. Typical examples for quantitative marketing goals are the increase of your profit or turnover, the expansion of your market share, the generation of leads, the optimization of your marketing funnel or the reduction of your advertising costs. The fulfillment of these economic target sizes contributes significantly to the success of your company, which is why they are often set by higher hierarchical levels and are highly prioritized.

Psychological (qualitative) Marketing Goals

Besides the hard facts, you can and should also set somewhat softer goals for your marketing. Qualitative marketing goals are oriented towards psychological indicators, which is why they are also referred to as psychological marketing goals. Their fulfillment depends not only on the performance of your team, but also on the individual perception of your target group. For this reason, they are much harder to measure than quantitative goals. They usually can be described better than explained by numbers. Common examples of psychological marketing goals are the improvement of your image and your brand awareness in the industry and among end customers or the increase of your customer loyalty and the trust of your buyers in your company. You can try to find out whether you have succeeded in this, for example, by surveying your customers.

When defining your marketing goals, remember that your goals are always interrelated. You can differentiate between various goal relationships:

• Goal indifference: The two goals are independent of each other and therefore do not influence each other. Example: Your department reduces advertising costs by 20% while you hire new colleagues to expand the department
• Goal harmony: Your set goals complement each other. Example: A higher conversion rate contributes to the increase of your sales.
• Goal conflict: The goals of marketing are opposed to each other. Example: Your advertising costs have to be reduced by 30% while the turnover of your company is supposed to increase by 60%.
• Goal antinomy: Your goals exclude each other. Example: You increase your advertising budget by 20%, but you are not supposed to place any advertising in the stipulated period.

How do I set marketing goals?

In your marketing department, you should indeed define your own measures, but not cook your own soup. Because when setting your overarching marketing goals, you should not lose sight of the big picture - the company goals. After all, these influence your work and the output of your work the company result. They are therefore in an interaction with each other. When defining your marketing goals, you can proceed as follows:

• Look at the company goals: Where should it go in the next few years? Where is the focus? What challenges are there to be mastered?
• How can your department support your company in mastering these challenges?
• What challenges do you see in your area? Where do you stand compared to the competition? What do you want to offer your customers? Where do potentials open up that you can use?
• Which topics do you consider important with regard to your product portfolio, your distribution channels, your communication and your price development? Consider involving other departments that you work with as well. These can be sales, purchasing, product development or even the HR department if you should also take care of communication towards applicants.
• Write everything down and then prioritize what the most important targets are for you. You will not manage to take on all of them at once.
• Remember to formulate short-term, medium-term and long-term marketing goals. This will allow you to cover short-term relevant trends as well as far-reaching, business-relevant objectives. Make sure you only choose a handful of goals so that you can keep an overview and don't have to jump around wildly to serve the different marketing goals. Less is sometimes more here too.
• Formulate your marketing goals together and make sure that everyone agrees with the goals and nobody has serious objections. After all, from now on you have to pursue these goals together every day.
• The goals are in place, but that's when the hard work really starts. Now it's time to develop a strategy on how to implement your marketing goals. With a strategy, you make it possible to identify individual sensible measures. Set these down in a shared roadmap.
• The many small sub-goals you hold down as milestones. Now you can get to work on your daily tasks.

It's perfectly alright to exchange ideas about your goals with friends or comrades-in-arms and get inspiration. However, it is important that you define your marketing goals individually for your company. In doing so, you should take into consideration your target groups, the parameters of your company and their needs in order to select the right targets for you.

How do I formulate marketing goals?

You want to set your goals, but also achieve them. For this, you need to know when you have achieved them. The more precisely you formulate your marketing goals, the better you can determine the corresponding measures of your marketing mix. It is then also apparent not only for you, but also for external parties, when a goal has been reached. You can avoid misunderstandings about achieving your goals if you formulate your marketing goals

• Clear and understandable
• Timely realistic
• And resource efficient

formulated. In Project Management these criteria are defined in the form of the SMART method. For a goal to be considered SMART, it must meet the following characteristics:

Specific: What is the exact target size, such as turnover, customers or market share? Your goals must be formulated precisely.

Measurable: So that you can monitor your goals and ascertain whether you have achieved them, they have to be measurable. When it comes to quantitative goals, you can probably define measurability quite easily by saying that your sales should increase by 15%. However, with the qualitative goals, the component of measurability is not always so easy to define. Try to define suitable KPIs for your goals, by which you can measure your target achievement.

Attractive: Formulate your marketing goals in an appealing and positive way, so that you also feel like fulfilling them. They must also be accepted by all team members.

Realistic: Can you achieve the goals set? Are they realistic? Feel free to rely on benchmarks and your experiences. Ambitious goals can motivate you, whereas unrealistic goals bring about exactly the opposite.

Time-bound: As a final component, a SMART goal must also be time-bound. This means that you assign it a fixed deadline in the form of an end date or a fixed number of months. This way you also have an end date at which you can check the fulfillment of your marketing goals.

The goals that you define according to the SMART method are: Specific, measurable, accepted, realistic and timed.

If you consider these components, your marketing goals could for example sound like this:

• We will achieve 10% more leads through our inbound marketing by the end of the year.
• We will double our turnover in the next 4 months by consumer-specific advertising.
• We will increase our market share in the women's clothing segment by 20% in the next 1.5 years.

If these minimum requirements are met, you can align and plan your work steps on them.

Step-by-step guide: How to achieve your marketing goals

Now you have come quite far with your marketing goals. You know what marketing goals are, why you should define them for your company, and know the different types of goals. The goals are defined and SMART formulated. But how do you make sure you really achieve the marketing goals?

1. Step: Define company goals or use them to define your goals
2. Step: Define economic marketing goals that contribute to the fulfillment of your company goals, e.g. "We need to serve 30% more customers to increase our sales by 20%."
3. Step: Define psychological marketing goals that support your economic goals and go hand in hand with your company goals.
4. Step: Develop ideas and concrete measures for the implementation of your marketing goals. Vote on these together and write them down.
5. Step: Set yourself milestones by breaking your big goals down into smaller, more reachable interim goals. These are given fixed deadlines and the things-to-do that need to be completed by this point in order for the milestone to be considered "achieved".
6. Step: Implement these measures in your daily work.
7. Step: Control your KPIs regularly and record them to evaluate the success of all measures and your marketing goals.

Different marketing tools can support you in the documentation of your goals, their achievement and their tracking.

These softwares support you in achieving your marketing goals

For the implementation of your goals in measures, which you can implement in your daily work, you can use Marketing Automation Tools or Project Management Tools. These could include for example:

• Active Campaign
• monday
• awork

Active Campaign

The Marketing Automation Tool Active Campaign supports you in the customer-specific communication, whereby you can achieve different goals for different target groups. This is combined with email marketing campaigns, CRM components and other features. The costs for Active Campaign start at USD 18.75 per month and user for the Lite package and rise to up to USD 1171.75 per month and user in the Enterprise package.

monday

The Project Management Software monday allows you to design workflows and projects quickly and execute them more efficiently. This simplifies the control of your goals and you can keep the defined measures for the different milestones at one place. Prices start at €8 per user per month for the Basic package and rise to €16 per month and user for the Pro version.

awork

Another software that can support you in your marketing goals is awork. The project management tool bundles all your to-dos that you have defined for your marketing goals. You can document the organization within your team based on Kanban boards, lists and timelines. Important milestones can be documented and their fulfilment monitored. The premium version costs you €10 per month and user and the enterprise version €15 per user and month.

We have compiled detailed reports and evaluations of these and many other Project Management – and Marketing Automation Tools for you on OMR Reviews.

You can only achieve something with your marketing if you set goals

With marketing goals, it's like with routines - it's not enough to define them once. They have to be defined regularly and reviewed, controlled and managed. After all, your market, your company and also your target groups change. Accordingly, your goals will also always look different. It will certainly take some time until the definition, implementation and continuous measurement of the most important and effective marketing goals have become second nature. But you will see that the effort is worth it. When your superiors and colleagues notice the traceable goals and your marketing measures tailored to them, you will never again be confronted with the fake news that your marketing department does not contribute to achieving the company goals and the value creation associated with them.