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Setting Up and Maintaining Meaningful Marketing Goals

More traffic, more revenue, and lower cost are common places where our marketing plans begin. This is not a bad start. However, setting a meaningful goal or set of goals for engagement is essential for both the agency being contracted and the business hiring the agency.

When goal-setting goes right, both parties are aligned with a north star to point to as they work in order to meet mapped out expectations. When that central point of focus is absent or misaligned, you can bet that one side of the relationship will be left unfulfilled.

Both the agency and the brand must commit to meaningful goal setting for their work together. This should happen before any work begins and should be continuously refined over the entire course of a brand-agency engagement.

Here’s how to get it right:

1. Identify Your Most Important Outcome

There are three important marketing outcomes that marketers should use as options when beginning to map out a plan:

• Volume-based (ex: site visitors or revenue changes)
• Efficiency-based (ex: conversion rate or CPA changes)
• Functionality-based (ex: if you are migrating a site or focusing on usability)

It is imperative that you identify the most important outcome of your plan and make sure that it is relevant, measurable and realistic.

2. Identify Secondary Metrics

Secondary metrics can act as indicators of the highest level outcome of your plan.

Looking higher in the marketing funnel, as primary desired outcomes tend to be conversion-based, is a good place to search for potential secondary metrics for your plan. Timelines as milestones serve as solid checkpoints for project-based work.

These are the trigger points where marketers can see how their smaller wins level up to impact the larger picture. Similar to your core desired outcome, they must be relevant, realistic, and measurable.

3. Set a Timeline

Assign a timeline to your top-level desired outcome. Just like the outcome identified, your timeline needs to be relevant, realistic, and measurable.

The relevance and measurability is pretty straightforward here, but the timeline for the work needs to be realistic. And there must be alignment between the agency and brand on what’s realistic. Budget and turnaround times are the usual culprits that impinge on realistic expectations.

4. Get Buy-in From the Top

At this point, the brand-agency partnership should be aligned with a nice, neat, top-level desired outcome, a handful of secondary checkpoints, a clear tracking plan, and a timeline for the outcome to be achieved.

It always works nicely and neatly like that, right?

Getting buy-in from top-level decision-makers is the last step before your work should kick-off. And that buy-in should come from leaders on both the agency and brand side. Priorities will always shift during the course of an engagement. But if true buy-in comes from an executive level, you’ll start your engagement in a better place.

Get sign-off on your desired outcome, timeline, and budget before any work begins.

Once that’s done, it’s time to jump in.

5. Report and Course-Correct

Over the course of an engagement, factors always change. Budgets, technology for measurement, timelines, and buy-in constantly push and pull on each other. Through that, those leading the brand and agency engagement have to stay aligned on a clear outcome. When that happens, strong brand-agency engagements can establish meaningful marketing goals, refine strategy into actionable tactics, maintain the agility to course-correct, and set themselves up in the best way to hit desired outcomes.