Lots of people have written about SMART inbound marketing goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) and this are a great format for setting goals that actually work to help to achieve your marketing goals. I wanted to spend some time on why many fail to hit their marketing goals.
1. You didn't even set them.
Pretty obvious that you can't reach goals if you do not set them. It is common for many of the clients we start to work with that marketing does not have goals. Sales does but marketing does not.
2. Your goals weren't specific enough to a particular persona.
Unless you tie your goals to your ideal target personas then you run the large risk of achieving your marketing goals but not the follow on sales goals. You could generate lots of marketing qualified leads that never turn into sales qualified leads for example. Random goals like 'generate 1,000 new leads this year' fall into this category.
3. Your goals were based on task completion and not on results.
Things like 'attend a trade show' or 'write three blog posts a week' or 'create a case study' are not goals. They are tasks but I see them regularly confused by marketing people. Maybe they do it on purpose so they do not have to be accountable for results and can tie their results to the tasks themselves and not to the effectiveness of those tasks (or whether they should have even been doing them in the first place).
4. No one is held accountable to reach the goals.
Marketing management by committee with lots of meetings to take up the day with no one ever being accountable to the CEO/President/Owner for actual marketing results is not a good way to reach goals. Blame the sales guys is usually the tactic favored by this group. This group is also known to chase the shiny thing.
True story, actually had a client ask me to make a viral video for them. No ideas, no value, nothing to say to the world, just make something that will go viral. That is chasing the shiny thing.
5. The goals were based on a large end result with no way to measure progress.
Goals need to be broken down into groups of manageable tasks and task groupings that lead to the larger goal. Eating the elephant one bite at a time is apt cliche.
Any other reasons you can think of that companies fail to reach their marketing goals?
Topics: Marketing
