B2B Marketing Strategy - Make Your Marketing SMARTer

Marketing Goal Setting

Setting Realistic Goals

If you set marketing goals for your team that aren't realistic this will hurt your efforts in the long run. Great goal setting means setting realistic goals. One of my earliest jobs was working as a fundraiser, I reported to several different field managers. They aimed to motivate our teams and improve totals. There was one field manager in particular that would look at the total dollar amount earned the night before and raise our team goal to well above that number. She meant to inspire us to do better, but it had the opposite effect on the team.

With such lofty, irrational expectations, the team rarely met their goals. Instantly, we went from being happy about surpassing our quota from the previous night to feeling demoralized from never being able to meet our goals.

The lesson here: Pushing you and your teams to achieve more than before will drive growth, but setting unachievable goals will only punish and discourage your team. Your first lesson in setting marketing goals is to use the carrot without the stick.

Realistic goal-setting is the first step to building a top tier marketing strategy, but it’s not the only one. To make meeting goals clear and satisfying to your team and clients, you must harness the power of a SMART marketing process.

Marketing Tools for SMARTer Marketing

Here are the tools you need to be SMART about your marketing strategy:

Specific Marketing Goals

Set distinct deadlines and numerical goals. For instance, asking your telemarketing teams to work harder to increase their opportunities ASAP is rather vague and can be interpreted differently by various team members. However, asking your telemarketing team to schedule three conference calls by the end of the week gives team members a clearer sense of the attainable goal they must shoot for. Be specific so that your teams know what you are asking for and how to achieve it.

Measurable Marketing Goals

Ensure that you can track your goals. From increased content downloads to improved customer satisfaction, make sure that you can measure progress accordingly.

Attainable B2B Marketing Goals

The goals you set can be challenging, but they must be reachable. Don’t ask your inside sales to uncover 10 opportunities in a week, for instance, when their previous record is only 4 in a week.

Realistic Goals

Be honest with yourself about your resources and abilities. There are always obstacles that you and your teams will need to overcome, but all goals should be proportionate to your staffing.

Time-bound Goals

Give yourself a deadline, whether it be every week, quarter, or year. Understanding your previous performance will give you a good yardstick to measure and estimate challenging, yet attainable goals for the future.

Here are a couple of more thoughts to consider when setting and achieving your SMART marketing goals:

Setting Marketing Goals that You Care About

Goals are more than numbers. Setting goals can be a way to revisit your sense of purpose as an organization. If your short term goals don't have a tie in to your overall organizational goals then it's time to reconsider the value of the short term goals.

The key here is to establish your core marketing goals. We call these your flywheel marketing metrics. These are the ones you should care about the most because they are the drivers of your big goals. Once you establish these you should be laser focused on improving them.

Staying Focused

Setting too many goals can pull your team in too many directions. Try to choose a couple of core goals and several supporting goals that will help you achieve these results.

In the long run, setting short-term goals can make long-term goals seem easier to reach and more reasonable. Dividing projects into a step-by-step process also makes larger goals seem more attainable. For instance, our telemarketing teams have both daily and weekly goals.

Setting a quota of total leads per week and per day will help you in your path to achieving your goals with more consistency. Understanding the effort that it takes to hit your goals can help your team manage their day. With every scored opportunity and dial, our teams know they are getting closer to that end goal.

Outbound Marketing: Power in Numbers

In special cases, we concentrate a collective group of our teams into one intense, day-long effort to meet the goals of a special campaign. Working within a strict time constraint, a smaller team races to earn a defined number of opportunities. To do this, team members increase their number of dials and up the chances of making more contacts.

While a Blitz campaign can raise the pressure on the team, we encourage a fun and high-energy atmosphere. Team members rally together and compete for extra incentives, like bonuses or gift cards. Donuts and pizza are provided at the team huddles at the start and end of the day in celebration of blitz day.

Overall, goals that are well-defined and reasonable help clients feel that they are getting their money’s worth while your teams reap the rewards of achievable outcomes that enhance office morale and motivation. Choose your goals wisely and strategize better ways to meet them.