July 13, 2023
8 Performance Goals For Marketing Managers
Summary
Learn how setting specific, measurable, and achievable goals can boost team productivity, drive lead generation, enhance brand awareness, and influence strategic decisions. Empower your marketing leadership with effective goal-setting strategies.
With fewer barriers to entry, competition is increasing across all sectors. Marketing can’t afford to be vague anymore. Establishing performance goals for marketing managers enables organizations to measure, manage, and improve their growth marketing.
Just because a campaign is trending doesn’t mean that it’s making any difference to the company. Every marketing initiative should be tied to an objective. That’s when marketing will be able to make maximum impact on pre-determined budgets and timelines.
In this guide to marketing KPIs, we define SMART marketing goals, explain their importance, and share suggestions for setting performance goals for marketing managers.
How to Establish SMART Marketing Goals
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. SMART goals provide an actionable framework for marketing manager goals by helping them stay focused and move in the same direction. These are the factors that make SMART effective:
- Specific: Goals should be clearly outlined and specific. There should be no room for misinterpretation. An example of a marketing objective would be “growing website visitors by 25%” instead of “increasing website visibility.”
- Measurable: Marketers should be able to track their progress toward goals. In other words, you need to quantify goals. “We have grown our Instagram followers by 15%” is a better metric than “Our Instagram presence is growing.”
- Achievable: Marketing manager goals can be challenging but achievable. Easy goals won’t inspire teams and unrealistic goals will demotivate employees. What you need is a fine balance between the two.
- Relevant: A relevant marketing goal will get support from the business leadership. It will also be in alignment with the larger business objectives. Moreover, relevant goals can make a tangible difference to an organization’s bottom line.
- Time-Bound: With a timeline, you can organize your goal into subtasks and monitor their progress. You can easily know if any task is facing delays and take appropriate measures. This helps avoid project delays.
8 Best Marketing Manager Goals Examples
If you’re wondering “What are marketing goals?” and “How can I make an objectives-based marketing plan?” this list will help you. Here are proven performance goals with examples of marketing objectives.
1. Enhance Brand Awareness
This is perhaps the most important among all performance goals for a marketing manager. Nothing you do will be effective if you can’t increase your brand awareness. That’s because people don’t buy a product or service. They buy a brand.
By conveying your brand’s unique characteristics, you will persuade them to try your product or service. You should do it on channels where your target audience spends most of their time. At this stage, it’s not about talking about product attributes but the brand values.
Example: Make your brand worth talking about. Be thoughtful and engaging on social media so your audience interacts with you, spreading your reach across their followers.
2. Create High-Quality Leads
An important goal for a marketing leader is to generate high-quality leads. These are individuals who can become potential customers based on certain criteria and information they would have provided.
A high-quality lead is looking for a specific solution but hasn’t seriously considered you. As a performance goal for marketing manager, you need to make the right move and get in front of them.
Example: Have specific landing pages with long-tail keywords that address customer queries. When they search a specific pain point on Google, you'll be there to satisfy their search.
3. Increase Brand Engagement
When you direct people to your social media pages or website, you want them to engage with you. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they will quickly leave. This calls for both technical and content-related optimization.
The website should be devoid of clutter with specific landing pages for specific queries. It should clearly explain why the visitor should consider you. They will be more tempted if you can provide exclusive or limited-time offers.
Example: Have videos that explain your product or service on the landing page.
4. Determine Your Marketing Targets By Channel
Each marketing channel that you use should have specific targets. You should match them to your customer engagement strategy and the behavioral patterns of your potential customers.
Instagram is highly helpful for providing visual content whereas Facebook prefers longer content. If you run a B2B business, you should post compelling content on LinkedIn. Remember that you can also repurpose these content pieces for other channels.
Example: A powerful email marketing strategy helps you engage with your customers at a deeper level.
5. Boost Customer Value
Persuading potential customers is difficult. Encouraging existing customers to buy more from you is easier. But it can only happen if they’re satisfied with your product or service and your customer service.
This is another reason to continuously engage with your customers across channels. Inform them about new products, offers, or discounts. Use retargeting campaigns to get them interested in what you have to offer. Provide incentives for satisfied customers to refer you and earn exclusive privileges.
Example: Offer bundled deals on new products to your customers through a limited-time sale.
6. Increase Traffic
For your customers to consider your product, they need to find you. For that, you need to direct them to your website. That’s the reason increasing traffic is one of the top performance goals for marketing managers.
The right SEO strategy coupled with timely paid campaigns should get you enough visibility. But once visitors come to your website, they should be able to find what they’re looking for. To make it effective, think from their point of view and answer their questions.
Example: Routinely scan for new keywords aligned with your category and optimize your landing pages with those.
7. Stabilize and Improve Brand Authority
People like to listen to authority figures and buy from experts. Even with the best product or service, your potential customers will only consider you if they trust your expertise. As a performance goal for marketing managers, building and improving brand authority is a long-term initiative.
Use all digital avenues to establish your expertise. You can do it through blog posts, webinars, tutorials, email marketing, case studies, infographics, and positive testimonials. Regularly share social proof on social media channels and publish thought leadership pieces.
Example: Be the first to report and analyze industry trends, especially through blogs and emails.
8. Increase Revenue
All marketing goals build up to this. Increasing revenue is the foundational objective of all marketing campaigns. To effectively do this, you need SMART revenue goals along with a plan to allocate resources on various channels. You should also track their progress and invest more in tactics that bear fruit.
After that, connect with leads through chats, emails, calls, social media, etc. Always customize your approach after understanding their specific problems. Moreover, understand the buyer stage they’re at and share compelling content.
Example: Provide video testimonials from existing clients who are similar to the lead.
How to Measure Marketing Goals
KPIs tell you whether you’re making any progress and if you’re moving in the right direction. You will be able to measure performance goals for marketing managers if you use important KPIs such as these:
- Lead Generation: This includes the total number of leads, leads from specific channels, cost per lead, and the increase in leads.
- Website Metrics: New website visitors, time spent on specific landing pages, page views per visit, and bounce rate are some website metrics you can use.
- Market Share: This is your brand’s share of the total market or specific markets that you define by certain parameters.
- New Customers: This metric includes the number of new customers, percentage increase in new customers, conversion rate, and cost per customer.
- Lifetime Value of a Customer: This shows you how much someone spends on your product or service over the lifetime of their relationship with your company.
- SEO Performance: Track your total organic traffic, the number of keywords your website ranks for, and your search engine results page position with this KPI.
- Conversion Rate: Know how many users perform the desired action with this metric, from signing up for your emails to buying from your online store.
- Growth in Sales: Discover the growth of your customers and revenue with this KPI.
Improve Your Marketing Management Skills
With the SMART framework, you can optimize your performance goals for marketing manager. You can spend on more effective channels, reach more people, generate and convert more leads, increase sales, and grow your revenue.
Maven has a range of marketing courses to help you achieve your marketing manager goals. These help you better understand your customers and offer strategies for enhancing professional relationships. Some of the most popular courses are:
- Building B2B Marketing by Emily Kramer to learn how to create effective marketing strategies, lead effective teams, and drive results.
- AI-Powered Sales by Matt Almassian for how to use AI to influence customers and achieve unprecedented sales.
- Power Writing by Shaan Puri for how to write compelling blog posts, emails, and landing pages.
- StorySelling - Storytelling To Stand Out And Boost Sales by Philipp Humm for how to use storytelling to influence and win over clients.
- Zero to 10k Audience Accelerator by Rob Lennon for quickly creating online communities.
- Brand Marketing in 2023 Crash Course by Amanda Goetz will teach you the best practices in brand marketing.
Discover more expert-led, peer-driven courses at Maven that will help you achieve all your marketing goals.
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