Goal Setting for Marketing Departments: Backwards is Best!

Setting clear and defined goals is a crucial step in any successful business strategy. At Twin Creek Media, we believe in working backwards from the finish line—understanding where you want to be and then creating a roadmap to get there. In this discussion, James and Jocelyn dive into the importance of goal setting, particularly in the context of marketing. They explore how setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound—can significantly impact your business's success and how having clear objectives not only guides your marketing strategies but also enhances team motivation and company growth.

Let’s get started!

James: Hi everybody! Today, we're talking about goal setting and how it applies to companies and businesses, as well as marketing specifically outside of goal setting. 

I'm James! 

Jocelyn: And I'm Jocelyn! 

James: Jocelyn is an account manager here at Twin Creek Media and has to do a lot of this, actually. With every client that comes in the door, we start with goal setting, when we start with the strategy piece of the project. It's really, really important. 

We like to talk about in our company how we work backwards (when it comes to goal setting) -  that might have been kind of a weird thing to learn but what do you think that means in your experience? 

Jocelyn: I think it's getting to the end goal or imagining the end goal and trying to figure out how we get there. 

James: Because you know where you want to be, right, or you should. When you're doing goal setting, you define the finish line- if you're on a journey or if you're on a race, you have a finish line, and you know where you are, and if you don't, then we figure out where you are in relation to your competitors, in relation to where your goal setting is, and then you can work backwards.  You can set these milestones. 

You plan where you want to be, you work backwards to where you are, and you set your milestones and your goals. That way, you can work backwards from the finish line, and that is the best way we found because then you can decide exactly what's needed to reach your goals; By defining what's the halfway point, what's the incremental milestones and how we are going to measure that. Because if we're not measuring, we have no idea where we are exactly and we can't improve. 

Another thing I would like to say at the very beginning would be, and I don't know if you ever heard this before, I think it was one of the basketball players that said this; 

You miss 100% of the shots you never take Wayne Gretzky

It has a little bit to do with goal setting, but really, it's about execution. Because if you're not actually risking anything, you're not moving forward at all. You don't have a chance of success or failure if you don't actually take the shot. That's not really about goal setting, but it is about there being no point in even setting goals if you're not going to take the shot. 

Let the numbers talk

James: There are some neat stats when it comes to goal setting. One of the neat ones I discovered was that 90% of studies prove that setting fixed goals, defined goals is better than setting vague ones. That's common sense, but 90% of studies proved it. Better as in there was more success to follow up, 

Jocelyn: And 90% is pretty high. 

James: There's an interesting stat related to this on how it affects employees in your company too. 

Jocelyn: That’s right, a 6.7 times increase in employees’ pride in those kind of goal-oriented companies. 

James: This also makes sense, and that's a really high multiple, almost seven times more employee pride in companies that actually have goals versus don't. So you show up to work, you don't really have any personal goals because the company hasn't given you any. Your larger group or your team doesn't really have any defined benchmarks or goals either, so you yourself are not working towards something, you're just doing your work, you're plugging in, you're spending your day at your desk or out on the floor or whatever, doing your thing. 

Jocelyn: But I want to know why (I’m doing what I’m doing) 

James: No one's telling you why, no one actually cares how much you get done or how much you have accomplished three months from now. The same goes for the whole team, and then the same goes for the company. They're just drifting along, right?

This was another quote that I originally had thought of too.

If you don't know where the finish line is or where the destination is, any direction is fine.

If I say just go, just walk, just move, you're like great! And 10 people start walking in different directions. As a team, you're not going to get anywhere together.

But if you say, Okay, here's the latitude and longitude, and you’re doing some orienteering, give you guys a compass and say this is where you're going, here's L, meet me tomorrow over the mountain on this side of the hill, everyone then moves towards that destination because they know where they're going. It's the same direction they're moving in, so they have a common goal.

Setting goals for marketing strategies

Jocelyn: Let's bring this back to marketing. How would you go about setting goals for marketing strategies?

We all know about goal setting in general, but let's relate it to marketing.

James: The framework we use all the time in our company (this is built for all business goals; it works great for personal goals as well, but for marketing, especially because we're talking about that, right?) is SMART.

S stands for Specific. You have to be specific, you have to nail it down. You have to define it. For example, “I want to get in better shape” is not a SMART goal because you haven't even come close to defining what that is. 

Let me get back to a business context, “I want to grow my business” is not a SMART goal. 

“I want to have more free time”, It's getting a little better, but you haven't defined the rest of it - how you're going to accomplish that. 

“I want to make more money” is also not a SMART goal. 

“I want to have five more Google reviews for my company by July 1st” 

Now, we're Specific, we're Measurable because you have that number in place, Attainable is that it’s Realistic (only five more reviews in a few months from now), and it's Time-bound because I put a date on it. 

The smart goals are our favourite. We try to create goals, and they have to be all those. Other types of goals that businesses typically have are expansion-related, but not tied to dollars, so they could be things like opening up a new office in a different city or expanding their territory, their online company or a service business, and they say we want to break out and we want to go to the next province or across Canada… We started in our corner of the country, and now we want to offer our stuff across the country. Number of employees (is another business goal), we have 25 people, and we need to look to hire 10 more people or something like that. 

Funnily enough, we do a lot of recruitment, and there's a neat similarity between recruiting and generating new customers for our companies because we use many of the same tactics.

The marketing funnel

James: There's a kind of a neat thing we want to show, and it's to do with setting those goals, and putting them into a funnel, putting them into an order. So this would be an example of a marketing funnel; This is related to goal setting, where at each stage of the marketing funnel - at the awareness stage, the website visit stage, lead generation and sales stage, we would have goals set up and as people move down the funnel, we see if they're meeting the goals that we expected. 

This all comes back to you needing to be measuring this stuff. Otherwise, you have no idea if you're winning or not. An example of a marketing funnel would be, people seeing very, very top is about awareness.

In this funnel, we have almost 70 million views of all ads that are out there on the internet - mostly digital but some traditional as well. 

Jocelyn: The next step of the funnel goes down to “website visitors,” so in this case, we have just over 70,000 website visitors.

James: Then once we're measuring what's happening on the website, we have a lot of activity, so we have “Web Form Completions”, “Calls,” “Emails,” and “Live chats” -  in this case, it was almost 8,000 different actions over the year. It was really impressive 

Jocelyn: And then from there, the funnel goes down another step to 1501 new clients. So that's pretty neat.

James: And then you're measuring what the dollar value of that would be, so almost $4.5 million. This is just an example of a funnel. Every business is going to have its own numbers, and it doesn't always have to be net new customers or new clients. It could be e-commerce sales, orders or signups, depending on your business. Charities, for example, are not talking about these. They're talking about new donors signing up for something and the dollars raised.

But the idea is that you have goals, and you know your benchmarks, and you can measure against them. So you always know if you're on track or not. It's just an example of how goals actually turn into something in the marketing department. 

Goals in Action

James: We have some companies we worked with for a long time, and we've set goals, and we've met those. A handful of those companies would be a sporting goods outlet here in our city called Fresh Air. They've done some really cool stuff online as well as offline. 

We also work with a construction company called Metal Structural Concepts. They build big warehouses and Industrial buildings all over Canada. Their goals are more lead generation-focused, so we have a funnel set up for them, much like the one we just showed, and that's pretty neat.

We know our targets each year, and then we can see if we're moving towards them. If we're not, we make adjustments. We constantly try to improve so we're hitting our goals, but goal setting needs to happen at the very beginning.

Another one completely unrelated to that would be Scouts Canada, and this is a neat one where we had goals for summer camp. They have 300 spots or they have goals for their new Scouts intake. Each year they have a recruitment season where they're trying to fill up spots in various zones across Canada. It's kind of a defined thing, they have more or less a set number of spots open for the kids so turning on a campaign and doing stuff, and it launches out to Canada. We have to keep a really close eye on what the goals were and how we're tracking towards those goals, how close we are, and it was kind of a neat one.

We discussed earlier how you can save money as long as you're watching the right things

Jocelyn: and have those goals.

James: So we have those goals, we hit them earlier than we thought, and then we didn't need to spend all of the advertising budgets because we can turn things off because we know that we've done a good job, and we hit them early. When something's sold out, there’s no need to market; you can save your dollars for something else.

I hope that's helpful - we do a lot of goal setting here. We're very focused on that.

We'll see you next time!

Check out our previous episode: SEO Unleashed: Strategies for Dominating Google Rankings

“Between Two Creeks” is Twin Creek Media’s weekly podcast series. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify. If you enjoy listening to the latest and wonkiest in marketing every week, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button! If you want us to amp up your marketing, click here to contact us and let’s chat!