Hello blog readers. My name is Stacy Conner. I’m a Senior Marketer here at Portent Interactive and my focus is on developing marketing strategies for our clients. Marketing strategy is a lot of fun! I thought it might be helpful to start a beginning level or 101 series on general marketing principals and Internet marketing. Let me know what you think!
Goals – Where Do I Start?
The first step in starting a new marketing campaign, a new marketing job, or a new marketing relationship with an Agency, is understanding and
evaluating your goals.
First off, are goals preset for you?
If so, that doesn’t mean you stop there and blindly try to accomplish them. Many times goals are set by people who don’t have the understanding of
the true measurable of a position or department. If not, then evaluating the company goals and working backwards from there to the parts you can
impact is a good first step.
After initial understanding of the goals,
is determining if the goals impact or are in alignment with the company’s main goal. For example, if the company’s main goal is increasing profits
at current expense levels, gathering new sources of leads may not be the best goal for marketing. A better goal might be evaluating and increasing the
quality of current leads. Profitability might be increased by a decline in number of leads and an increase in the quality of leads. Different goals,
but more aligned with company’s direction.
Do they need to be challenged?
Sometimes even the company goals need to be challenged by the major stakeholder of the project or department. Examples here could be a company that
measures sales, versus profits. Completely different decisions could be made based on profits, versus sales. A growing organization may push for
sales, trying to gain market share. An established or commodity market makes measuring profitability a better move. Make sure you are measuring the
right one.
Measurability and Impact?
An example here is that a company may be measuring sales from leads generated by the marketing department, but the marketing department may only
have control over the incoming leads. If marketing passes those leads to sales. What is the process to measure quality of leads and, for that matter,
quality of the sales efforts with the leads? Benchmarking your own statistics or those in the same industry is a good place to start. Resources can be
Marketing Sherpa for Internet Statistics, Google Analytics Benchmarking and many Industry associations.
Responsibilities?
Are you in control of all or as many as you can handle of the variables that can impact your goal? If you are told to advertise here, by mucky
mucks……but it’s not the best buy or the right target market, it makes being held accountable unfair and needs to be addressed. The other side of this
coin is that when you do make a decision like this, the results are more effectively on your shoulders.
You have nothing to start with?
Sometimes, you are starting at the beginning of a process and may not have any information to begin with to create improvement goals. Then you need
to evaluate what will make the most difference to the organization in terms of company goals. This could be profit, signups, awareness or anything
else, create a one page dashboard to track your key performance indicators. And reevaluate often. Make sure the actions you are taking are impacting
the companies overall goals and shift when necessary.
Next time I'll explore Evaluating Resources
