Every year your small business should have marketing goals.
If you’re interested in growing your company, they’re the target you need to focus on.
But setting goals is a very different thing from hitting them.
It’s easy to decide what you’d like your small business to do, but it’s often much more difficult to make it happen.
Today, I want to help you shift the way you think about your goals and understand what it will take to hit them.
It’s incredibly valuable information, so make sure you’re paying attention.
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Hitting Your Small Business Marketing Goals Is Often A Challenge
Look back at the last few years you’ve been in business.
Have you hit your goals every year?
If you’re normal, the answer is no.
Most small business owners don’t.
Most small business owners don't know what it takes to hit their marketing goals. Click To TweetThat doesn’t mean you’re failing, though. So don’t get down about it.
What it means is that, while you have the best intentions in setting goals and you probably do better every year as a result, you’re not sure what it takes to get to the next level.
Until you do something about that, you’ll have growth, but you’ll rarely hit the goals you set for yourself.
It Takes A Plan For Your Small Business To Hit Its Marketing Goals
There’s one major thing your small business is missing if you’re not used to hitting your marketing goals.
You need a fully-formed plan to do it.
What I’m about to share is the process of building a goal-hitting roadmap.
Applied properly, you’ll see yourself hit more of your small business’ marketing goals far more often.
You’ll know what it takes to hit them and what to adjust when you don’t.
I’m about to make you a master goal hitter.
You Need To Define Your Small Business’ Marketing Goal
First things first: if you’re going to hit your goals, you need to set them.
Goalsetting is one of the most critical parts of small business marketing.
If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, how can you know if you’re succeeding?
So, define your target for the year.
- How much new traffic are you looking for?
- What percent of traffic will become leads?
- How many leads will become customers?
- What percentage of your sales will come from referrals?
From there, you can set quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily incremental goals.
Think of them as milestones to help you measure your progress along the way.
These milestones will help you stay on track throughout the year.
Remember some important tips to great goal setting.
- Goals have to be specific. Ambiguity makes hitting a goal impossible.
- You need to choose goals that can be measured. No opinions.
- Every goal must be actionable. If you can’t actually do it this year, maybe put it off until you can.
- Make sure the goals are realistic. If you’re just starting your blog, don’t expect to hit a million daily views this year.
- Give every goal a deadline. That’s what the milestones are for.
By setting smart goals, you’ve already improved your chances at hitting them.
Determine The Metrics Your Small Business Will Measure Marketing Success With
Once your small business has marketing goals, you can determine how to measure them.
There are often lots of ways to determine the different elements of each of your goals.
For example, is website traffic anyone who loads your site, or will you subtract bounces from those numbers?
You’ve got to make sure your whole team knows the rule you’re using to measure by.
That’s going to keep confusion to a minimum and assure that adjustments get made at the right time in the right direction.
Take a close look at the metrics that relate to each of your goals and marketing strategies.
If you’re not measuring them, you’ve got a change to make.
You’ll need to track everything you can in order to make the most of your marketing strategies.
When it comes to each component of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to know how those metrics relate to your goals.
That way, as the right numbers start to grow, you can duplicate the tactics that work.
For example, your email click-through-rates are going to have an overall impact on your site traffic.
By tracking and studying the right data, your odds of hitting your goals become more controllable.
What Kind Of Marketing Budget Does Your Small Business Have?
This is the part of marketing that will tell you if your small business is going to hit its goals.
If your budget doesn’t match what you’re trying to achieve, you clearly won’t.
Take an assessment of the money you can put towards your marketing strategies.
On average, if you want to see growth, you should be spending about 10% of your total revenue on marketing.
But what that final dollar amount is going to look like will vary for every business.
On the low end, you may not have very much at only 10%.
It may be necessary to increase your marketing to 20% or 30% of your revenue.
If you can afford to make those adjustments, you can definitely apply enough funds to your marketing strategy to see a decent impact.
If you can’t, you’ll need to take a look at lower-cost marketing tactics that you can do yourself.
You’ll also want to be aware of your goals.
If they’re financially out of reach, maybe they’re set too far away from you to hit this year.
Reduce the goal and gear towards the higher one when your marketing budget can be increased.
The most important thing is to understand where within your marketing plan the money has to go.
Plan carefully where you’ll spend for the greatest marketing impact possible for your small business.
Build A Strong Marketing Campaign For Your Small Business
With the marketing foundation in place for your small business, it’s time to create your strategy.
You need to build the roads that your traffic will come in, the gateways that will convert them to leads, and the processes that will get them to buy.
The best way to do that in the modern world is with a solid inbound marketing strategy.
Inbound marketing is the process of bringing leads to you from the internet.
It involves several different digital marketing elements, including SEO, content marketing, lead funnels, and paid advertising.
It’s the whole online marketing shebang wrapped up in an integrated strategy.
I’ve talked about the value of inbound marketing a lot, so I don’t think I need to repeat it again.
Here’s what you need to remember:
- Publishing a blog 4 or more times a week earns 4.5 times as many leads.
- Videos can improve purchases by 181%.
- About 25% of the US listens to podcasts.
- Most online time is spent on mobile devices.
- Over half of your site’s traffic will come from Google.
- People buy what they see on social media.
- Email marketing has a 3,228% ROI.
Inbound marketing done right can earn you all these benefits.
Just be prepared to put in the work to make the strategy work.
Collect The Marketing Data From Your Small Business’ Campaigns
With a solid small business marketing strategy in place, it’s time to see what’s working.
Those metrics you chose earlier need to be collected.
That means you’ll need some software in place to make that happen.
CRMs are great for that.
Most CRMs can be integrated into your website and automatically collect the data you need to analyze your marketing strategies.
They also offer a lot of other great automated features that ease some of the workloads for your marketing team.
When choosing a CRM, you’ll need to account for a few factors.
- Do the features you need fit your budget?
- Does the CRM integrate with the software and applications you’re already using?
- Can you try it out or get a demo before you buy it?
- Is there an option specific to your industry?
- Are customization and training available?
- Is it easy for you and your team to use?
- If you’re international, does the CRM comply with GPDR?
You’ll need to make sure you’re getting as much information from your CRM as possible.
However, you’ll want to pay attention to other sources of data too.
Look at the data the Google Marketing Platform offers, as well as the information you can get from your Facebook Pixel.
Your email provider should have all the information you’ll need from your email campaigns as well.
Don’t hesitate to find other great sources of data about your campaigns, too.
You can’t ever have too much information when you’re trying to maximize your marketing strategies.
Analyze, Adjust, And Re-Orient Your Small Business’ Marketing Angle
Once you get to your first measurement milestone, it’s time to analyze your small business’ marketing success.
At this point, you’re either making the expected progress or you’re not.
If you are, you shouldn’t need to change much.
Look for the individual pieces of content that did best and find their common threads.
That will allow you to bring your future content the same kind of success.
However, if you’re not on track, you need to find out why as early as possible.
It’s important to note that, if you’ve never done any kind of inbound marketing before, your results will come slowly.
Don’t let early goals be too unreasonable for long.
It’s better at the early phases to assess your goals than your strategy if you’re too far off target.
But if your goals are where they should be, your content needs to be adjusted.
Analyze where it’s going wrong.
- Am I getting top-of-the-funnel traffic (usually on social media)?
- How am I ranking on search?
- Is my content getting visitors?
- Are my visitors converting to leads?
- Is my team following up with leads properly?
- Are we closing new sales?
These questions can help you identify where in your marketing strategy you’re struggling.
If you’re getting great social traffic, but your content isn’t getting visitors, you need to change your content.
If your social media content is getting poor reach, but you’re getting 50% of your reach to make an action, maybe you should consider what your social looks like.
Find what’s working and what’s not and adjust as necessary.
Don’t Be Afraid To Scrap The Marketing Your Small Business Already Has In Place
Sometimes your small business’ marketing campaign bombs out.
It’s easy to try to salvage it, especially if you’ve already spent a lot of time and money on it.
But in some cases, that’s a bad idea.
Sinking more of your budget into a campaign or strategy that’s fundamentally broken will hurt you.
It won’t help at all.
No matter what, you can’t be afraid to walk away from a campaign or strategy like that.
“But Michael. What about the money and time I spent?”
That’s already gone. Forcing yourself to move forward with something that doesn’t work will only cost more.
Scrap your broken strategies and failed campaigns as early as you can identify that they’re bad.
Save yourself from wasting more time and money on something that’s not going to work.
With A Plan In Place, You’ll Hit The Marketing Goals Your Small Business Has
Yes, hitting your small business’ marketing goals is that straightforward a process.
By planning to win and adjusting along the way, you’ll see many more goals achieved than you ever have before.
That’s going to change the way you set goals.
It’s also likely to change the goals you set.
When you know what it takes and how to make it happen, your goals are more than in reach.
They’re all but yours.
