January is a good month to set goals. The start of a new year is always a good opportunity to think afresh. Perhaps you’ve already set, started work on (and ditched!) some personal goals, but what about your business?

If growing your business is part of the plan for 2019, you’ll need to set clear and effective goals for your marketing activity. It’s all too easy to spend money on marketing and see little return.

Each business will have different requirements from its investment in marketing.

• For some, marketing is about acquiring new customers and all efforts are focused on generating leads. Marketing, aligned to the business plan, needs to play its part in increasing the numbers, which may be sales revenue, number of units sold, sales conversion rates, share of a customer’s spend or overall market share.
• For others, marketing is about reducing churn and selling more to existing customers. In this instance you can look at setting goals related to customer retention, customer satisfaction, whether you have exclusivity to supply particular customers and whether you’ve saturated all opportunities with existing customers.
• Some businesses will need to use marketing to tell the world about new products and services. This is where brand awareness and audience reach comes into play, where marketing will need to demonstrate that new and existing audiences have tuned in.
• For other companies, marketing will need to improve communication so that customers and stakeholders feel included, valued. Perhaps it’s about delivering a measured increase customer satisfaction.

There are many ways to ‘skin a cat’, it seems!

It’s only when you set clear goals that you can begin to measure the impact of your marketing. After all, if you’re not clear what you want to achieve, how will you know if you achieved anything at all?

Trying to do too much

In our experience, many companies water down the effects of their marketing activity by trying to do too much all at once.

It’s best to focus attention on the most important goals which will make the biggest difference in the short, medium and long-term.

Deciding what to focus on will depend on your business plan, as this dictates your priorities. But it will also depend upon the resources at your disposal. If you haven’t got marketing experts to help you deliver the plan, you’ll find it difficult to build the momentum required for successful marketing.

How can we help?

We support in-house marketing managers or act as the outsourced marketing department for our clients.

When working with in-house teams, we are often tasked with managing specific marketing activities, like social media or email marketing.

When working with companies which don’t have in-house resource, we usually devise tailor-made marketing plans and then implement each aspect.

By working in a focused way, delivering well-devised plans to meet meaningful goals, the difference we make can be incredible. Find out more about our flexible marketing support.

To explore how we might help your business to harness the power of focused marketing in 2019, please get in touch for a no-obligation discussion with Claire or Carol on 01606 610808.