How do you measure success in your company’s marketing campaigns? Increased sales are your ultimate goal, but you may not see an immediate uptick in sales even if you are doing everything right with a new SEO or social marketing campaign. Knowing which benchmarks to track along the way and setting the right goals from the start can allow you to better assess your success so that your effort isn’t wasted. If you aren’t sure what types of goals are right for your marketing strategy, look at the following guidelines:
Emphasize SMART Goals
Naturally, you will want to set goals intelligently, but it’s also important to be SMART with your goals. Here are the guidelines for SMART goals:
Specific
It is not enough to simply say that you want more site traffic or an increase in newsletter subscribers. You should identify a specific figure that you want to hit with these goals, and you should target a key demographic so that you know your audience is engaging with your marketing materials.
Measurable
If you cannot measure your goals, then you’ll have no way to know if you’re reaching them. With more specific goals in mind, it should be possible to track them along the way and measure real progress.
Attainable
Amateur marketers often try to take on too much at once, reaching for overly-ambitious goals with a single campaign. Select the most essential goals to start and challenge yourself, but don’t reach for perfection overnight.
Realistic
Part of selecting attainable goals is understanding the resources required to reach those goals. If you know that your marketing team is not capable of ramping up content or creating new visual media, you might need to rework your immediate goals as you seek the additional talent you need.
Time-Bound
You can always push off goals that don’t have defined deadlines, so be sure that every goal is paired with a clear timeline so that there’s always accountability among the team.
Don’t Focus Only on Sales
Customers are often not ready to make a purchase after their first encounter with your brand. They need to work through the marketing funnel in various decision-making phases, which will have unique methods of tracking. Today, the most important step may be getting new followers to like your social pages, but those followers might be ready to make purchases in the future, and they will have your company in mind. If your focus is only on the end goal of making sales, you might lose customers early in the purchase process, so be sure to diversify your goals to account for each decision-making phase.
Seek Genuine Followers Over Bigger Numbers
Along with setting goals that are too focused on sales, marketers tend to fall into the trap of focusing too much on quantity over quality. In other words, there is a trend toward being universally appealing in marketing methods so that more people are inclined to read blog posts, share videos, and engage with social posts. However, it’s important to know your target demographic so that you don’t waste time chasing followers who aren’t that likely to buy from your brand. With genuine, dedicated followers—even in smaller numbers—you can feel confident that your marketing strategy will achieve a higher ROI by reaching people who are more likely to make a purchase.
Consider What’s Right for Your Business
It can help to look at what competitors are doing or consider marketing strategies that have worked for other businesses, but don’t latch on to a campaign just because someone else is doing it. As you set your goals, it can help to write out the mission statement of your business as well as an ideal vision for a successful marketing campaign. Keep these in mind so that you do what’s right for your business, even if it doesn’t conform to traditional marketing wisdom.
Track Your Progress Consistently
You’ve taken the time to set numerical, measurable goals, so you should follow up by analyzing the data from your marketing efforts. Choose marketing tools that you like and will continue using and check in regularly to be sure that you don’t miss out on valuable information about your customers’ behavior. When you can get a data-supported perspective of what’s working for your existing campaigns, you can set even better goals in the future. You can also rework your goals if you find that you’re far exceeding your initial goals or falling short of them.
At Pennington Creative, we understand what it takes to create effective marketing campaigns, and we can help you reach your goals with a talented content creation team. Our writers, designers, and editors can fit into your existing marketing team, or we can take over as your primary content providers. To discuss your ideal vision for your company’s marketing department, contact us on our website today.
