January 12, 2021 5 min read
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If your company has a million social media impressions, has been featured twice in the New York Times, and received a new celebrity recognition in the last month, your marketing campaign could be a huge success.
However, unless your marketing goals are tied to your overall business goals, all of these numbers are more about vanity than growth. They sound great, but they sound hollow when it comes to conveying your company’s goals and priorities. Your marketing department will best support business strategy when you work with the leadership team and the company’s business goals. However, if the two stay in isolation, even the most flashy numbers won’t support your company’s goals.
For example, if you want to have annual sales of $ 100 million to $ 1 billion, a strategic planning process that incorporates marketing and corporate governance can help you develop alignment and meet your overall goals.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that having specific, measurable, and achievable goals are critical to a solid marketing strategy. To do this, companies must first avoid these common pitfalls:
- Your corporate cake is missing a layer. When top management sets the year-end goal of increasing sales by 20 percent but the marketing team can’t decipher what it actually takes to get there, you’re missing a strategic layer between leadership and marketing. A strategic planner or chief marketing officer can provide the extra layer necessary to take your goals to the top.
- Everyone assumes that business and marketing goals are the same. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. Sub-goals can help your company determine how marketing is affecting how.
- Goals and tactics are thrown into the same mixer. Tactics like PR campaigns, paid advertising, social media marketing, and email contact are different from goals like business expansion. While they are working together, they are not one and the same and should be treated as separate components of your strategic plan.
Once your teams are moving in the same direction, you can use the following three strategies to successfully translate business goals into substantial marketing goals.
Related Topics: Use These 5 Steps To Build A Marketing Plan
Create meaningful sub-goals
While “Achieve $ 200 million in annual sales in all companies” and “Double New Leads This Year” are both valid business goals, they don’t tell marketing what it can do to support those goals.
On the other hand, sub-goals are measurable and can lead your marketing team from goal to strategy. Rather than “duplicating new leads,” your executive team can focus on what is specifically needed to duplicate new leads.
For example, you can convert “Achieve annual sales of $ 200 million” into sub-goals for changing from “$ 30 million to $ 40 million in sales by Q2” and “Our service must be attractive to customers like XYZ ” translate.
Likewise, “doubling new leads” can be translated into “We need to get X new customers in the Y market”, “We should improve our service through …” and “We need to work with organizations like this.”
These smaller and more specific goals can help your marketing team intelligently influence your business goals.
Related: How To Get To Marketing Goals
Turn meaningful sub-goals into concrete marketing goals
This step is more fun than it sounds because it involves collaboration. It gives your marketing team and strategic planners a chance to come together, get creative, and make change. More collaboration creates more insights that can take your business to the next level.
Here, too, all marketing goals must be specific, measurable and achievable.
For example, if the company’s goal is to have $ 30 million to $ 40 million in revenue by the second quarter, your marketing team could break this down into the following goals: Our sales team needs 20 new customers worth $ 200,000 per quarter. To convert that many customers, Team X needs leads.
Your business goal of attracting specific customers could be to ensure media coverage in specific publications to increase targeted awareness, create a new potential pipeline, or demonstrate expertise in a specific subject area. All of your marketing goals should come from your global sub-goals.
Related Topics: 10 Marketing Strategies To Drive Your Business Growth
Develop your marketing strategy
Once you have all of the above on hand, you can easily convert business goals into marketing goals using your marketing strategy and plan.
These are the steps your marketing is likely to be already familiar with: After you’ve worked with the relevant internal teams, it’s time to identify your target audience, think in narratives or stories that provide a consistent, relevant way to to at least achieve one of your goals: work with content before you plan to run it, and choose the ideal channels for each audience. Many companies make the mistake of spreading themselves out on every channel instead of doing some of them really well.
Finally, make sure you have a solid method in place to track success and accountability. If you can’t keep track of them, your goals will remain nebulous and you will be amazed by every repost and headline, even if it’s not related to where your organization wants to go and how it wants to get there.
Regardless of whether you are trying to increase sales, awareness or your pipeline, the right strategy can efficiently and creatively guide you from the idea to the action and goal achievement. And then the right social media impressions, headlines and notes are the icing on the cake and the confirmation of your strategy.
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