How to set marketing goals and keep them

Workshops are a great way to reinvigorate your team members and engage with them in taking ownership of your company direction. When you have key stakeholders that benefit from the outcomes of marketing at a marketing workshop, you will find that these members of your team will actively participate in following through on key actions that derive from the meeting.

When it comes to having marketing goals in a business, it's important to:

• Make your goals realistic: If you are seeking to double your business, but spend no extra resources and funds on marketing, then this would be highly unrealistic. Look into your industry average for growth rates and work out what investment your business is able to do in marketing, then ascertain what is a fair growth rate that is achieveable but at the same time pushes your team to excel.
• Put a marketing plan in place: By documenting your marketing plan and goals, you will be 313% more likely to experience success according to Coschedule's recent survey. It's easy to put together a marketing plan either by using a technology like Robotic Marketer, or by just writing it down yourself.
• Put your plan in a project management software: It's great to have goals and a marketing plan, but without putting together an implementation plan, it probably won't happen. Ensure that you have  a weekly cadence for marketing activities in place, key stakeholders responsible for the delivery of marketing and the right support infrastructure in place.
• Set KPI's: If your goals are year-on-year, then you need to set in place either monthly or quarterly KPI's so that if you are not edging towards your goal at the required pace, you can adapt your strategy and make relevant changes.
• Celebrate: If your team helps the company reach it's marketing goals, then everyone should celebrate the win. Set in place upfront how the team will celebrate so that everyone can work towards the achievement.

In my experience in marketing, it is important to regularly remind everyone on the team of the goals that are in place and how performance is measured. It's also important to continually reinforce the success of little wins along the way bringing the whole team with you. 

Marketing can be fun but it's also work and repetitive in many ways. Adhoc marketing doesn't work, and for those who continually set marketing goals and then stray from the marketing plan when a bright new idea arises, you will find that goals are harder to achieve.

Make them easy. Set a plan in place, a way to deliver on that plan and measure your performance along the way.