Marketing Basics: Defining Your Goals
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Note: Make sure to check out part 1 and 2 of the Marketing Basics series:
A marketing plan is useless if it doesn’t include goals. Goals provide you with a direction for your business. They also act as a measuring stick for the performance of your marketing plan. After all, how can you know if your marketing strategy is effective if you don’t have anything to measure it against?
When setting goals for your business and marketing plan, it’s important to set both long-term and short-term goals. More importantly, you need to be realistic. There’s nothing wrong with shooting for the stars, but unrealistic goals will make it impossible to measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan.
Here are just some of the questions to ask yourself when setting goals.
1. What do I want my business to look like in 5 years? Do you remember how your high school counselor would ask you “Where do you want to be in 10 years from now?” The point of that was to help you create a vision and a purpose for your life. Well, that’s why you need to ask this question of your business. By having a long-term vision for your business, you’ll be able to keep your eye on the bigger picture. This will help ensure that the daily decisions you’re making are in line with your ultimate goals.
2. How many new clients do I want by the end of this year? This is an example of a more short to moderate-term goal. The reason this is such a good question is because it forces you to set an actual number. See, a lot of people will say “My goal is to have more clients by the end of the year.” But how many more? By setting an exact goal, you can precisely measure how successful your marketing strategy is at achieving it.
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