What are Marketing Goals?

Have you ever wondered why you were spending money on marketing? Have you looked at your financial reports and thought, how do I measure whether any of this is working? Marketing goals are the foundation of a good plan and understanding what success looks like. In this episode, co-host Kevin Ring and I discuss common marketing goals, how they relate to your company’s strategic initiatives, and what makes a bad marketing goal. Enjoy! 


How can a company set intentional growth goals for the year after simply making it through the year 2020? Achieving the desired growth in your company means evaluating how each aspect of the business operates to contribute to those goals. That means including intentional, well-planned marketing goals that your department, team, or marketing partner can execute on.

In this episode, Jessica Scanlon and Kevin Ring dive into marketing goals. Many business leaders have overall business goals, but they often don’t see how those can translate into marketing goals. Marketing goals shouldn’t be set without a clear picture of how they add value to the overall business.

Know Where You Want Your Business to go this Year

When Kevin talks with a potential client, he starts the conversation by asking what their business goals are for the year. Most business leaders have these goals in mind and know where they want to go, but they don’t know how marketing applies to those goals. Even more so, they often aren’t aware of the marketing tactics available to achieve those goals.

Without an understanding of marketing tactics, business leaders can’t see how to take action when it comes to marketing. This dissonance is typically remediated with a conversation between the business leader, where they communicate the business goals, and the marketing leader, where they identify the tools to employ to achieve the goals.

Preparing the Business and the Leader

Along with putting together the marketing machine that drives growth, we help our business leader clients level up their marketing knowledge and skills. Often, we spend time educating and preparing our clients on the marketing strategies we’re using and how they’re working. This helps the business leader understand what the marketing efforts are accomplishing and know how it fits in to drive value to the rest of the company.

However, marketing alone doesn’t achieve the target. It’s simply one piece of the overall growth strategy for the business. It should be implemented along with tactics for improving operations, sales, production, and the other pieces that are involved in the business.

Favorite Business Goals We See

At Hot Dog Marketing, we get to see all sorts of business goals. Our favorite ones are the big, audacious, and specific goals.
• Grow by $10MM in 7 years
• Diversify channels where leads come from – for companies that get all their sales leads through one channel
• Diversify client base – for companies that get the majority of their revenue from one or two clients
• Move to a higher-value client base – for companies that want to increase revenue but don’t want to increase their resources
There is much more a business can shoot for than simply revenue goals. For those companies that want to gain a higher-value client base, simply creating a narrow digital ads strategy won’t get them there. Their obstacle isn’t an ads problem, it’s a brand problem.

Those companies need to think holistically about how their brand appeals to a higher-value audience. That means assessing how their messaging speaks to the values of that specific audience and works in tandem with their website and digital content to gain their trust.

Having conversations with marketing strategists can help discover these elements and develop a plan of action.

Examples of Good Marketing Goals

Good marketing goals don’t simply give a business somewhere to spend money, they drive business growth. Whether that business growth is lead generation, brand awareness, or whatever, the high-level targets must provide the direction.
Building brand equity
• Increasing the value of leads
• Increasing the quality of leads
• Diversifying leads
• Account growth

Examples of Bad Marketing Goals

• Ranking #1 on Google
• 10k Instagram followers

Bottom Line for Setting Marketing Goals

Metrics like ranking and followers are vanity metrics that don’t necessarily translate into revenue for the business. Social media and SEO can certainly be a part of the strategy, but they are just tools to use to help a business achieve its true, underlying goals.
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Are you ready to get strategic marketing the helps your business reach its goals? Don’t wait, contact Hot Dog Marketing to get started.