How To Set Marketing Goals

By Indeed Editorial Team

Published June 1, 2021

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed's data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Setting goals is a crucial element of successful marketing efforts. Marketing goals, which are outcomes you aim to achieve through marketing techniques, can help you create a great marketing strategy. If you want to strengthen your company's marketing efforts, setting marketing goals is a great place to start. In this article, we explain the role and benefits of marketing goals, and we list steps that you can follow to set strong marketing goals.

What are marketing goals?

Marketing goals are specific outcomes that your company aims to accomplish through marketing efforts. Setting marketing goals can help your marketing team be more successful because you can use your marketing goals as a basis for your marketing plan.

Benefits of marketing goals

There are many benefits of setting marketing goals, including:

Creating clarity

Setting marketing goals can help clarify employee roles, important tasks and other components of your marketing strategy. This can help avoid confusion about different marketing team members' responsibilities, which can increase productivity, leading to increased success.

Driving marketing strategies

Marketing goals can also help you improve your marketing strategy. Once you set good marketing goals, they can drive your marketing strategy and all your marketing efforts. Focusing on specific goals you want to meet can help you strengthen your marketing strategy.

Staying on track

Goal-setting is also important to stay on track. Setting strong marketing goals can help your marketing team complete tasks on schedule so that your company can get timely results. Goals can also help your team members determine what tasks are most important for them to complete, which can help keep marketing campaigns on track.

How to set marketing goals

Here are four simple steps that you can follow to set your own marketing goals:

1. Think about your company's overall goals

The first step to setting great marketing goals is to think about your company's overall goals. It's important for your marketing efforts to drive the success of your company. Think about your company's sales, revenue and brand awareness goals as well as other major goals your company wants to meet.

2. Brainstorm marketing goals

You can brainstorm marketing goals that align with your company's overall goals. Think about how you can use marketing to reach major company goals. For example, if one of your company's major goals is increasing brand awareness, you could set a marketing goal to increase your company's social media followings.

3. Write your goals in the SMART format

A key step in setting marketing goals is writing your goals in the SMART format. Using the SMART format can help keep your goals understandable to everyone on your marketing team, making them more likely to be successful. SMART goals are:

Specific: Be sure to write specific goals so that all people involved can clearly understand them. Try to use concise language and mention specific metrics and actions involved with each goal.
Measurable: Focus your marketing goals on specific metrics that you can use to measure your results. Measuring your progress can allow you to adjust your goals if needed.
**Attainable:** Try to write goals that your marketing team can achieve. Making your goals attainable can help your marketing team members stay motivated and avoid burnout.
****Relevant:**** Be sure to create goals that are relevant to the overall goals of your company that you previously identified.
****Time-based:**** Set a deadline for each of your goals that marks when you want your team to achieve them. If you would like, you can also create a timeline for each goal that includes deadlines for each task involved with the goal.

4. Monitor progress

After you've implemented marketing goals, it's important to monitor your marketing department's progress toward meeting them. To monitor progress, be sure to come up with metrics. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that can help you determine how well you're meeting your goals. Be sure to choose KPIs that relate to your specific goals to help you measure your progress as effectively as possible. Some common marketing KPIs are:

Customer retention rate: Your customer retention rate expresses the number of customers that remain loyal to your company over time. Increasing your customer retention rate can increase your sales, making customer retention rate a valuable marketing KPI.
**Conversion rate:** An important digital marketing KPI is conversion rate. Conversions are instances of website visitors completing an intended action, which can include creating an account, making a purchase and more. The conversion rate, which is expressed as a percentage, is the number of visitors to your website who complete the action.
****Social media engagement:**** Measuring social media engagement can help you evaluate how often customers are interacting with your company. Social media engagement metrics can be different for different social media platforms. On some platforms, you might track likes and comments, while you might track views or impressions on other platforms. You can also easily track the number of followers you have on social media platforms to gauge the size of your audience and how quickly it's growing.
****New leads:**** Your company's number of new leads can be a valuable marketing KPI. Leads are people who are interested in buying your product or service. Increasing the amount of leads that you have can help your company close more sales, increasing its revenue.

Examples of marketing goals

You can set your own marketing goals by writing out your goals in the SMART format. Here are some examples of marketing goals that follow this format:

Increase website traffic by 30% by this time next year.
Improve conversion rate by 15% by the end of the quarter.
Generate 50 new leads each week.
Reach 50,000 social media followers by the end of the year.
Launch a new marketing campaign by October.
Gain 150 new email subscribers each month.