The Importance of Knowing Your Business Goals Before Starting Your Marketing Strategy
It sounds obvious doesn’t it? That a business should have established business goals in place before it even starts thinking about its marketing strategy, but you’d be surprised how often businesses do not clearly define and articulate what their business goals are and yet are prepared to start advertising and promoting their products and services.
Usually business goals are something along the lines of achieve X percentage growth in revenue, improve product Y to suit an evolving target market and increase profitability by Z per cent.
From these business goals and once an understanding of the market has been established, marketing objectives can be generated as part of the overall marketing strategy. For example, marketing objectives may be to increase revenue by introducing new products to the market, improve product Y by investing in product development and increase profitability by conducting regular price analysis to identify where price adjustments can be made.
But imagine a business that is looking to improve brand value for example, but it has a marketing plan that is focused purely on revenue growth. The expectations are out of alignment and although the various marketing activities already in place may well keep sales moving forward, they may not ultimately deliver on providing greater brand value, if it is not incorporated as a specific objective from the start.
The advantages of having clear business goals to your marketing strategy
By defining the business goals clearly and articulating them to the Marketers of the business, these Marketers can then formulate a marketing strategy and a set of marketing objectives that incorporates all of the relevant goals of a business. They can go out and gather the market information they need and conduct market research in a much more targeted way. From there it becomes easier to assess whether a current branding strategy still suits where a business is heading or if it needs to be reviewed and refreshed to help improve brand value.
There are many different types of advertising and promotional activities that could be drawn upon from traditional, digital or social media marketing, but when you are clear on what you are trying to achieve, it becomes easier to identify what will suit the target market and achieve the marketing objectives according to the nature and the scale of the goal.
When the advertising and promotional activities have been honed in upon to create a marketing activity plan, collectively the activities are more likely to be successful, plus deliver budget and time savings when the objectives are clear.
And when it comes to analysis, its much easier to understand if the promotional activities have been successful in achieving the marketing objectives and ultimately the business goals, when there is a complete and current set of goals to analyse against.
Final Thoughts
Although it is fundamentally a very important thing to do, setting business goals shouldn’t take long, but setting them and communicating them clearly to your Marketers, can save a company significant amounts of time and money down the track and position them well for success.
Setting business goals is step one of six key steps in developing a Marketing Plan, read more about our strategic services here: Strategy, Marketing Plans, Branding