7 expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business

Most marketing advice begins the same way, with "set your goals."

And while it may feel repetitive, it's absolutely true. Marketers who set goals are nearly four times more likely (about 376 percent) to report success than those who don't.

Of course, in the simplest sense, goals help you understand where you are at, where you want to be and when you get there.

But how do you go about setting relevant and achievable marketing goals? The following are seven expert tips to do just that.

Align your marketing goals with your company-wide objectives

Your marketing efforts inherently should support your broader business objectives. What are the overall needs of your company?

Because marketing can achieve a wide variety of goals for a brand, the more you can sync up your marketing goals with your overall business plan, the better.

For instance, if your company prioritizes growing brand loyalty among current customers over getting new customers, your marketing should align with this. Or, perhaps your business has a specific revenue goal that you can support with a certain number of lead conversions. There are many possibilities.

Go big with your marketing goals

Of course, this isn't to say that your goals should be so big that there's no hope or accountability in achieving them.

Instead, it's important to set a high goal that has a path for success, where even if you fall short, you're still making significant strides toward what you want to see.

The key here is that you build a habit of learning from the outcomes of your efforts (whether you hit that big goal or not) rather than classifying them as failures because they fell short of a big goal.

Your marketing goals should be measurable

Fortunately, in digital marketing, metrics can be tied to nearly everything. All you have to do is tie specific metrics to your goal.

But it's often not enough to simply want "more conversions."

For example, considering the price of your product or service and the cost-per-click on either your Facebook or Google ads, you can determine your conversion rate (how much you're paying for each conversion). Then, you can see where you need to be to make a profit (or increase profit) and use that conversion rate as your goal.

This is also where the widely used SMART framework can help you turn a vague goal into an achievable one. SMART stands for:

For example, "get more email subscribers" is not a SMART goal. "Grow our email list from 2,000 to 2,600 subscribers by the end of Q2 by adding a pop-up offer to our three highest-traffic blog posts" is.

See our seven tips to start your first marketing campaign, which walks through applying SMART goals to a specific campaign.

Let historical data inspire your marketing goals

A great way to plan for the future is to look to the past. How was your business performing last year? What fueled that? Are there any trends to take note of?

You also can look at past marketing data. What campaigns were the most successful? Why? How did they perform?

Building on what has been accomplished historically is often a great starting point.

Embrace experimentation

Not every marketing goal can be based on past performance and metrics. Your business could be launching something entirely new where there is no historical data.

When that is the case, you don't have to feel pressured to set an official goal right away. Instead, set a timeframe (such as three to six months) for you to experiment and get an understanding of baseline performance. Then, you can make an informed decision on what your goal should be.

Think macro and micro marketing goals

Rome wasn't built in a day, and even your biggest marketing goal shouldn't be the only goal your business has.

Having smaller, micro goals along the way will help you not only stay focused and on track but also experiencing small wins as you go. And who doesn't appreciate the little victories?

For example, you might set a macro goal of total content posts on a particular social media platform. Let's just say 50 per month. Within that, you can break that down to how many per week, how many are promotional, how many are educational, how many are of each content type (video, blog article link, etc.) and so on.

Consider the macro goal the umbrella, and the micro goals all the stems within the umbrella that help it fully extend.

Consider your time, budget and resources

It's easy for any goal to become a bit "pie in the sky" when key factors (including time, budget and resources) aren't involved.

But in order to set achievable marketing goals, it's important to assess the amount of time it should reasonably take to reach a particular goal, how much it might cost and any other investment of resources that it will take.

For example, if you're launching multiple campaigns at the same time, you may need to be realistic about what can be accomplished with that sort of pressure on your resources.

On the flip side, you might notice the opportunity to hit a goal if you simply doubled your budget for it.

Either way, time, budget and other resources all play a role in the attainability of your goals.

In conclusion

Setting achievable and effective marketing goals is both an art and a science, for sure. But doing so is critical to your overall marketing success. Once you have your goals set, it's time to make a plan and work toward that success. Just be sure to track your performance so that you know if you're hitting your goals or not.

If setting goals for the year ahead is what brought you here, see our tips for setting marketing goals for the new year as well.

Check out our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners for an overview on everything you can embrace in your marketing strategy. Plus, we have a handy to-do checklist that you can use.

While you're considering how to set achievable marketing goals, think about your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.