Business without marketing can’t be a business that will promise and deliver something valuable for customers, employees, and entrepreneurs themselves. As an entrepreneur, you will need to invest a large amount of your efforts to effectively market your company.
But, the real question is what do you really want to achieve with your marketing efforts for your business?
If you know what you want to achieve it will mean that you are on half of your achievement journey because only in such a way you will know how to achieve everything that you want to achieve.
Let’s take a look at some processes in defining what are the most important marketing achievements for your small business.
1. Start With Your Business Goals
What we want to achieve with our marketing efforts in large part will depend on what we want our company to achieve as overall.
Interestingly, we come to the real problem because there is a need to align business goals and your entrepreneurial personal goals. Where are the marketing goals in this relation?
Usually, an entrepreneur has his own goals, he wants a specific lifestyle, wants to fulfill his own desires… On the other side, the company also has its own goals expressed through sales, achieving profitability, growth, development…
Also, the company’s and business’s goals are not the only goals here. There are also customers with their own goals based on satisfying specific needs or solving specific problems.
So, one of the most important purposes of marketing is supporting the whole company in the achievement of the company’s goals through helping customers to achieve their own goals and helping entrepreneurs in the achievement of their own goals.
What you need to do is a piece of paper to write your business goals. So you have something like:
- Increasing profit for 10% in the next year and
- Expand business in the specific region with two new stores.
2. Transfer Your Business Goals Into Marketing Goals
The key question in this step is how your marketing efforts will help in the achievement of your business goals.
For example, for a 10% increase in profit as a business goal you can use the following process:
- Determine the amount of income that will bring 10% more profit for your company.
- Determine the number of customers your company will need in order to increase the income required for profit increase by 10%.
- Determine possible influential factors for the average sales amount, expenses or anything else that somehow would affect your company to not achieve the sales that can bring 10% more profit.
- Determine the percentage you need in order to increase the number of customers that will buy your products and services increase in order to achieve that amount of profit.
In this case, your marketing goal can be increasing the number of customers by 30% for next year with better-targeted marketing tactics.
3. Your Marketing Goals Should be SMART Goals
Once you have your marketing goals, you need to check whether the goals are SMART goals.
For example, you would have set the following objectives:
- Increase the number of customers by 30% for next year with better-targeted marketing tactics.
SMART goals mean they are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-limited
A first goal is a specific number by which we can measure the achievement, so it is specific and also measurable. But, can you achieve it? You must answer this question now. Maybe 20% is something more achievable and realistic, and it will require you to work on increasing the average sales amount from the current customers to reach 10% more profit.
When you are sure that your marketing goals are specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic check if they are time-limited. In this case, the goals have explicitly noted that they need to be achieved in the period of the next 12 months.
In such a situation probably you will have other goals from the example above:
- Increase the number of customers by 20% over the previous year in the next 12 months
- Increase annual average sales amount by 10% over the previous year.
These are SMART goals for your marketing efforts.
As you can see, when you have the SMART goals you are halfway to achieving what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts.
