Have you started setting your marketing goals for 2021? Setting clear marketing goals will improve the results you see and help your marketing team stay organized. 

When we don’t set goals that are defined and measurable, it’s easy to go with the flow. While we might complete a long list of tasks, or spend long hours working on marketing, that doesn’t mean our marketing efforts are effective.

Today, we’re sharing five tips on how you can set and achieve your marketing goals. And how to use metrics and real data to track your progress.

Understand your KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the data points you measure to determine the success or failure of a campaign. These need to be quantifiable and measure what actually matters in your business.

Your KPIs will be different for each campaign. As a general rule of thumb, your KPIs should be easy to define, measurable, and ladder up to the core objectives of your business. Your KPIs will give you an idea of your overall marketing performance, and help you set and achieve goals.

Here are two examples of KPIs you can set:

1. If you send an email where you want your follower to schedule a demo, your KPIs could be the number of clicks on the demo button, and the number of demos scheduled. 
   
   
2. If you send an email telling your customers about a new software feature with a link to a video, your KPIs could be the number of link clicks and number of video views, or average watch time.

As you set more KPIs, you will establish better expectations and recognize which marketing tactics work best. 

Set benchmarks 

Benchmarks are the average stats based on your historical data or industry averages. Setting benchmarks for your email open rates and landing page clicks help track progress, success, and failures. 

If you have enough historical data, use that to set your benchmarks. If you don’t have historical data yet, use industry benchmarks. You can find the industry standards for emails on MailChimp, and other benchmarks with a few quick Google searches. 

When you use benchmarks, remember that they’re an average number. There will be campaigns that miss your benchmark, and some that are higher than the benchmark. Use them to identify opportunities for improvement. Even the smallest factors can impact the success of your marketing.

Set reasonable goals and reach goals

A SMART goal is a goal that’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. You can use your benchmarks to set reasonably attainable goals. It can be challenging to find achievable goals that still challenge your team to achieve success. Your marketing budget and other resources can determine what reasonable goals are. Shanelle Mullin, the Conversion Rate Optimization at Shopify, says that “The key to setting achievable marketing goals is to spend time evaluating your current position.”

The main reason for goal setting is to help you determine if the campaign is successful or not and inspire you to accomplish more. 

Your reach goals are ambitious goals that reflect the best-case scenarios. Reach goals will keep you motivated and help you strive to achieve more during each campaign. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t always meet your reach goals. But if you never achieve them, they might be unreachable goals, which can be discouraging instead of inspiring. 

Measure performance and optimize

As you probably already know, marketing is a never-ending journey of research, promotions, and ultimately sales. But, if you only measure your marketing efforts by the number of sales made, it’s difficult to make improvements along the way.

Once you have some more data, you can find opportunities to optimize your campaigns and refine your emails, landing pages, and content. Here are some tips and tools that help capture your marketing metrics.

1. 1. Use analytics tools to source and analyze data: Google Analytics and HubSpot Analytics can give you detailed information about your website visitor’s activity. You can use this info to measure the quantity and quality of traffic you’re getting to your website as a whole, and on a page-by-page basis. This will help you determine which website pages are doing great and which pages aren’t converting into sales.
      
      
   2. Use tracking codes on your website: You can use Google Tag Manager to manage multiple site tags and track where your visitors are coming from and going. UTMs can track clicks and webpage views from different sources. The info typically includes how long users visit a page on your site, form submissions, how they arrived on your site, which links they clicked, or even the products they removed from their cart.
      
      
   3. Measure performance at the right time: Some campaigns should be measured during the campaign, like paid ads, content campaigns, and more. You should make a plan or schedule time to gather and analyze the data. Look for opportunities to optimize and improve performance. You should measure other campaigns, like emails and A/B tests, at their end. Make sure to give these campaigns enough time before measuring and determining the success of the campaign

Reporting your progress

By now you might feel overwhelmed by the information you have. There are different ways to keep your KPIs, analytics, and goals in one place.

Software like databox can help you share and visualize data from multiple sources. Reporting software can help organize your data from Google Analytics, Facebook ads, and email data. You can transform your KPIs and HubSpot data into a dashboard that’s easy to look at, share with your team, which helps you make marketing improvements. 

It’s also important to report your marketing stats regularly. You can set up a weekly, monthly, and quarterly marketing report. A weekly summary can give you helpful insights that help you make smart marketing decisions in the future. A bigger quarterly or annual marketing report will give you big picture insights that help you track progress towards your big goals. 

If you want help determining your 2021 marketing budget, use our free Marketing Budget Calculator.