Having a strategic marketing plan with clear goals across different timeframes is crucial for growing brand awareness, engagement, and sales over time. Defining short, medium, and long term priorities will provide incremental progress while also keeping your team focused on the big picture. In this post, we’ll share examples of effective SMART marketing goals to set in each timeframe when launching initiatives for your brand.
Defining Your Short Term Goals
Your short term marketing goals (6-12 months) should focus on laying the foundation for brand growth by increasing reach and awareness. Setting SMART goals around the following areas provides rapid impact:
* Website traffic - Launching a new website or optimizing on-page SEO improves your brand's organic search rankings and visibility. This expands your brand's audience and credibility.
* Social reach - Posting branded content consistently grows followers and impressions on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This amplifies word-of-mouth marketing.
* Lead generation - Calls-to-action, conversions, contact form submissions generate qualified leads to nurture.
* Content creation - Blogs, videos, and newsletters establish thought leadership and attract visitors.
Track relevant metrics like click-through rates, traffic sources, impressions, and form submission rates.
Setting Medium Term Goals
Once you’ve begun generating buzz, focus your medium term marketing goals (1-2 years) on monetization and retention. Examples include:
* Customer lifecycle - Develop segmented email journeys to convert new leads into engaged customers.
* Loyalty programs - Offer promotions, rewards or exclusive access to increase repeat purchases.
* Paid advertising - Test digital ads on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google to boost conversions.
* Retention rates - Survey customers and monitor churn rate metrics to improve satisfaction.
Follow monthly recurring revenue, cost per lead, ROI, and customer retention KPIs.
Envisioning the Long Term Goals
Your longer term marketing goals (3+ years) should focus on sustaining growth by expanding your market share. Relevant objectives include:
* New products - Identify gaps in your product suite to develop additional offerings that complement existing ones.
* New markets - Research potential new customer segments that have a need your brand can fill.
* Strategic partnerships - Pursue co-marketing campaigns or channel partnerships to access new networks.
At this stage, monitor market share, relative growth vs competitors, diversified revenue sources, and brand value/equity.
Choosing Your First Key Projects
Once you map out goals across short, medium and long timeframes, identify 1-2 key projects to spearhead that will have maximum business impact given current needs and resources.
These projects should align to your highest priority goals where you need to make the most progress. They will become the main focus areas for your team. Conduct research, competitive analysis, and gather customer insights to determine which initiatives make the most strategic sense right now.
For example, an website redesign or optimization project can significantly boost organic visibility and credibility for driving new traffic. This lays the SEO foundation for lead gen and growth. Or, launching and optimizing core social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with branded content campaigns can increase awareness, engagement and word-of-mouth referrals. This amplifies your reach.
A third option may be developing a new product, service or offering that fills an immediate gap in the market and complements your existing portfolio. This expands monetization opportunities. Evaluate whether to dedicate resources towards a marquee initiative that becomes central to short term success, or spread efforts across multiple smaller projects.
Have a clear vision for the tangible business impact you expect these key projects to drive. And rigorously track KPIs to monitor that success as you execute on the broader strategic marketing plan.
Conclusion
In summary, creating a marketing strategy with short, medium and long term horizons sets your brand up for sustained, scalable growth. With a thoughtful strategic foundation and key projects identified, you can incrementally build awareness, acquire loyal customers, and expand your market share over time.
While it takes consistency and patience to realize the full benefits, brands that focus on nurturing relationships and delivering value to customers will grow exponentially. The rewards are well worth the investment.
If you need help developing an effective strategic marketing plan tailored to your business goals, let's connect for a discovery call. I've helped brands successfully build and execute short and long term plans that drive real results. I'd be happy to discuss how I can support your marketing success story.
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Header Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
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