I am a sports fan, or maybe I should qualify that. I am a sports fan of sports where there is a clear goal that is defined. Transversely, I am not a fan of sports that are open to the judgment of some expert to give a score. If you are carrying a ball across a line, swimming from a starting point to a wall, hitting a ball over a net and within the designated boundary lines, shooting a ball into a hoop before time runs out – I am all about watching your sport. If you twist and turn in the air before splashing into a pool of water, dance on ice, jump over an obstacle, flip and land on your feet – all of that to be judged by someone who gives you a score – you are in a sport that is too arbitrary to hold my attention. It is not that I don’t admire the athleticism and dedication it takes to perform at the highest levels in those sports, I just don’t like sports that are subjective. I like objective, clear-cut goals.

What is the goal of marketing? The goal is to help you achieve your goals. Most of the time in business, that involves reaching sales goals, but not always. Another goal may be to expand your influence in a particular industry, garner more support for your brand, or increase the awareness of your brand with a particular group of people. Now wait a minute! Achieving sales goals sounds like crossing a finish line, but expanding influence and increasing awareness sound more like random judging. Did you stick the landing? Well then you scored a 10.0! …or was it a 3.5? How do you know when you have crossed the line with your marketing in these more nebulous areas?

Establishing goals

I cannot stress how important it is for you to establish hard number goals in order for marketing to work, especially in areas where there is not revenue to measure. For instance, if you are expanding brand awareness, you need to figure out just how you are going to measure this and put some metrics to it. One way would be to see how your awareness campaigns impact your conversion rates on your analytics. So let’s say I sent out an e-blast with a link to a landing page that had information about my brand and a next-step-point-of-action link for people wanting more information, I control the number of people I sent the e-blast to, I can see who opened it, who clicked through to the landing page, and who clicked the "more info” link. For each of those steps, it is important to establish goals. I could say, I want 10 percent of the people to whom I send the e-blast to, to open it. That is the first step of awareness. I also want 80 percent of those who open it to click through to the landing page. Of those who browse to the landing page, I want 25 percent to seek out more information from me. So, if you are following the math, if I sent this to 1,000 people, marketing success would look like this:

• 100 people opened my email and became aware of the brand
• 80 people clicked through to my landing page and learned more about the brand
• 20 people wanted more information from me to further engage with the brand

Any action that is taken after opening the initial email is measured for awareness. Even someone who opens the email and immediately deletes it is more aware of the brand than they were if it had never been sent to them. The point here is this: for marketing to be successful, you have to establish hard number goals where the line can be crossed.

Three common problems in marketing goals

There are three common problems that creep up when dealing with marketing goals. I have already implicated the first one, which is marketing with no goals in mind. If you are disappointed with your marketing, but you have never established any goals to measure success or failure, what did you expect? If I could use another sports analogy, marketing towards a goalless pursuit is much like putting runners on a track and expecting them to sprint until you decide they have gone far enough. Would you expect any world records to be set? How would you know? You didn’t set an end line to measure. It seems rather pointless.

The second problem is unrealistic expectations of your marketing mediums and your target. Let’s go back to the illustration I used above. If I were to send out an e-blast to a list of 1,000 people and I expected 100 percent of them to open it, I have set an unrealistic goal. However, I have had my share of business managers who think it can be achieved. First of all, mass email is never going to give you 100 percent results. The medium will never support that kind of goal. But neither will your target market. They have a choice: to open your email or not. You cannot control that. You need to be realistic about your results and adjust your goals accordingly. Using the above illustration again, if I wanted more then 20 people to inquire about my brand, I need to send the e-blast to more than 1,000 people who are in my target market.

The third problem has to do with business infrastructure inadequacies, such as no follow through. So if 20 people ask for information about your brand and no one gets back to them, the campaign becomes a failure. Was that the fault of marketing? No, the marketing did its work and achieved its goals. The final goal – that of getting engaged prospects into a conversation about buying the brand – was never achieved because the internal structure was either not there or didn’t do their job. One more sports analogy: I can put running shoes on your feet, but I cannot make you run. Too often, I find people believe that marketing, especially that tied to technology, will do all the work and they can sit back and let the money roll in the door. This also is unrealistic. Marketing is there to help you get to the goals, not to do all your work for you.

The goal of marketing is to help you achieve your business goals. Make sure you are using it correctly and measuring your success.