Setting Great Marketing Goals

I received an email newsletter headed ‘Are you marketing effectively’ this month. It set me thinking. How do you know if you are marketing effectively? It may not be as obvious as you might think.

For me, there are a few critical things you need in place before you can even consider whether you are being effective with your marketing activity and they are GOALS, GOALS, GOALS!

Unless you know what your marketing goals are you are unlikely to be effective. Some might argue ‘That’s easy, unless I’m selling more, my marketing isn’t working’. Well, hold your horses. Marketing can achieve many objectives and your goals might be about things other than sales.

Great Marketing Goals

Here are just a few legitimate goals for your marketing activity:

• Raise the profile of your business and create awareness amongst your target market
  Comment – People have to know you before they will buy from you. The more familiar your company, product or brand, the easier it will be to make a sale. You don’t get involved in sponsorship expecting to generate sales leads – it’s more about raising awareness .
• Increase spend per client or increase frequency of purchase
  Comment – Servicing clients costs money. If you can get 20 clients spending the same amount as 30, you win by reducing client servicing costs by a third. If you have minimising client servicing costs then any increase in spend goes straight to the bottom line.
• Legitimise price increases with existing clients
  Comment – Most businesses will need to increase their prices at some point. For those with repeat purchase clients this can be a real problem unless the price increase is communicated carefully, ideally with plenty of advance notice.
• Launch a new product or re-launch an existing one
  Comment – Very often we come up with new products or services, launch to the wider world but fail to communicate to the existing client base, perhaps assuming they wouldn’t be interested.
• Identify and cultivate new sales partners or routes to market
  Comment – If you are struggling to sell through traditional direct routes to market you may need to explore alternative ways of reaching your target audience, perhaps by packaging your services alongside others or developing partnerships where others cross refer clients to you either for a fee or on a reciprocal arrangement. Obviously you’d use very different marketing methods to cultivate partnerships than you would to try and market direct to potential clients.
• Reducing sales, servicing or admin costs
  Comment – Sales through a sales person are costly. If you can provide opportunities to buy direct (either online or via the telephone) you’ll reduce costs. Or if your product is complex and you provide frequently asked questions and fact sheets you can reduce the amount of time taken to sell.
• Increasing client recommendations
  Comment – For professionals a massive proportion of business comes from referrals and recommendation. Don’t leave things to chance – be proactive in asking and encouraging staff to ask for recommendations at every opportunity. An incentive for client recommendations might be a better use of your marketing investment.
• Improve relationships with existing clients
  Comment – Finding new clients costs a lot more than servicing and selling more to existing ones. Ignored clients will spend less with you and in worst case scenarios they’ll leave.
  And of course there are many more legitimate marketing goals. Unless you start with a clear and measurable set of objectives you’re very unlikely to be ‘marketing effectively’.

Until next time, good luck with setting SMART marketing goals and improving the effectiveness of your marketing.

Further reading:

10 questions to help you develop a marketing plan

10 marketing tips

As a marketing coach Teresa works with new marketing managers and small business owners to enhance their marketing performance.

Contact Teresa on 01789 740396 or by email.

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Written by Teresa Harris, Second Opinion Marketing. Teresa is an independent marketing consultant working with professional practices, small businesses and public sector bodies to develop effective marketing plans which achieve their business objectives.


©2010 Second Opinion Marketing. All Rights Reserved.