How to create marketing goals that lets you focus and execute effective campaigns and increase your ROI

Why should you create goals in marketing? Imagine you and your friends got together a Saturday to share some snacks and a couple beers while watching a soccer game. You hear the crowd and the standing ovations as the teams enter the field. It's an important game between your favorite team and their number one rival. The game starts, the crowd is roaring, the nachos are hot with melted cheese topping and the ice-cold beer is frosted. Now, imagine the game was played without goals and the players are running up and down the track, but no-one knows when or if they scored at all. How would the players keep the motivation going, how would the players know if they were good, whether to celebrate or what they should practice?

Would you even watch the game at this point?

Goals are important because they allows you to focus and gives you the clarity you need to execute well. Before starting any marketing campaign, I think it’s important to identify what you hope to gain from your efforts. What is it that you like to achieve? What would have to be true for you to be proud? Effective campaigns have goals. Clearly defined goals that can be measured. 

How to define a goal

So how do you define a goal? Your goal should be composed of four elements. The objective, the motivation, the effort, and the key performance indicator (KPI) The KPI it’s kinda like the physical goal in a soccer game example above. The KPI is the measurement used to determine if you have achieved your goal or not. Only when you have determined your goal will you be able to work efficiently and measure the outcome of the job you have done. 

Ok let’s have a look at the process.

First, we’re going to begin by defining your objective. Ask yourself what you would like to achieve with your campaign?

• Would you like more visits to your website?
• Do you want to sell more products and services?
• Would you like more prospects to call you?
• Do you want to collect leads?
• Or maybe you want more customers to come through your local store?

These are just a few examples of objectives that I find relevant for paid advertising. Having a clear objective gives you clarity and is the foundation in building effective marketing campaigns.

Next up is defining your prospects motivation. Ask yourself, are your prospect looking to buy, are they looking for information, or are they comparing products and prices? These are all different behaviour and therefor calls for different marketing strategy.

“People with goals succeed because they know where they're going - Earl Nightingale”

Our effort defines what you want out of your campaign, what you want to achieve. Is it to sell a product, provide information or tell your prospects about your money back guarantee? The effort tells you what you need to do.

Finally, once you have completed the previous steps you need to define a clear KPI. You want it to be specific and a deadline. Benefits or a deadline is that it gives you a timeframe to work within. If you are the kind of person who likes a challenge, this is it! To put it this way, your KPI needs to be measurable. It's only when you have this in place that you can measure whether you've scored or if you just ran up and down the soccer field.

Your KPI needs to be measurable

Once you have defined your KPI you will have a clear goal and roadmap towards it. You will know your objective, the prospects motivation, what you must do and how to measure your result.

Knowing this will let you structure and build your campaign in an effective way. And once you have started, you will test, modify and tweak it, optimize and test repeatedly until you reach your KPI. If you fail, which is fine, you will fail time to time. It just shows that you’re learning, the benefit of online marketing is that, regardless of outcome, you will have a lot of data telling you what went wrong and giving you hints to what you can do to improve your performance and eventually reach your KPI.

Goal driven campaigns is effective and will increase your ROI because they let you focus. Where there is clarity there is and where there is focus there is results. Results that will amaze you!

I hope you find this message valuable, please leave a comment or message me, I’ll answer them all personally. Don’t want to miss out on related topics in the future? Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.