How to Plan (and Achieve) Your Marketing Goals This Year

Marketing is crucial to sustainable success for your business, but too often marketing goals look like “I want to get more followers” or “I want to be more consistent.” If you have big plans for your business and want to actually achieve those marketing goals, you’ve got to get clear about what you want, know why you want to achieve those goals, and get smart about how you set them.

Psstt… I’ve also got a handy goal planning cheatsheet ready to help you out below!

Table of Contents

• Get Clear About What You Want
• Plan Your Overarching Marketing Goal
• How to Set a Marketing Goal and Take Action
• The Biggest Mistakes People Make
• Download the Free Goal Cheatsheet

Get Clear About What You Want

When you’re setting marketing goals, clarity is paramount, but we’re not talking about just finding a sense of clarity and feeling great about it.

Because that’s temporary.

Clarity without action and follow-through is pretty useless. It’s a guaranteed way to fill yourself up with this amazing feeling and then watch it fade away, leaving you feeling like the failure—like filling your hands with sand and watching it slowly slip through the cracks.

When you’re setting marketing goals, you want to get massive clarity around exactly what you want to achieve in your business… and then immediately hone your focus into that. Think about where you want your business to go, not all the shiny objects floating around ready to distract you.

What’s your core mission?

What opportunities in your life do you want your business to give you?

What tasks and to do’s in your business fill you up?

What do you want to do more of in your business?

As you’re answering those questions, I always recommend to my students and clients to find a few mentors they really resonate with, tune into their message, and tune out the rest.

The online space is loud, and there are any number of knowledgable (and not so knowledgable) gurus and specialists and coaches and mentors ready to share their experience and methods. It’s so easy to try to listen to ALL the advice that’s out there and find yourself getting absolutely nowhere.

The truth is ANY strategy that aligns with your business will work. ANY of them! The key is to stick with it, to find something that you vibe with and tune into that. Work that strategy, work that method, be consistent and dedicated long term.

Plan Your Overarching Marketing Goal

• It’s okay to have more than one goal, but I recommend keeping them all under the same umbrella.
• Focusing on too many different goals at one time can cause confusion, frustration, and lack of progress.
• Keep it simple and meaningful; meaningful goals are those that actively influence your business growth or revenue and are very actionable.

How to Set a Marketing Goal and Take Action

Your Marketing Goal Action Plan Should Include a…

• S.M.A.R.T. goal
• Failsafe for the days when it’s hard or the motivation isn’t there
• Deadlines and metrics to keep you on track and moving forward
• List of roadblocks and challenges so you can manage your expectations and prepare for the road ahead
• Milestones to break your big goal into actionable steps

Create SMART Goals

My favorite way to set new goals is by creating S.M.A.R.T. goals. It’s like a built-in system to make goals that are designed from the ground up to be effective and attainable.

Here’s how it breaks down:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Attainable

R – Relevant

T – Time-bound

The best goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals—they’re specific instead of overly broad, your progress can be measured, they’re attainable and relevant to your business, and a deadline is built in.

Build In Your Failsafe

Staying focused is hard.

Staying clear of all the distracting shiny objects is hard.

Keeping your motivation going strong is hard.

But your goal is important, and achieving it means big things for your business, so build in a failsafe for when the going gets tough. Think about why achieving this goal is so important, and get specific.

How will it affect your business in a positive way? How will you benefit from that? What is your motivation for making this goal a priority?

It’s easy to get distracted by all the shiny objects, by other goals, by other voices that sneak into your head. This is especially true when it comes to marketing when there is so much advice and tips and tricks competing for your attention.

Your failsafes, these motivating factors, are key to helping you stay focused on the goal that really matters and why.

How to Stay on Track

Consistently staying on track is one of the hardest aspects of achieving your goals. It’s easy to set the goal, spend all this time creating milestones, and dream about life once you’ve achieved it. It’s much harder to consistently take action.

This is where deadlines and KPI’s (key performance indicators) come into play!

When you’re creating a goal, set a start date and a deadline for completion. Bonus—find an accountability partner or community to help you stay on track.

In the Skyrocket to Profit program, we create monthly thread to announce, track, and celebrate goals every month! It’s a great way to get support when you need it and share your triumphs when things are going great.

Aside from deadlines and accountability, tracking the right metrics is key. Make sure to keep an eye on the metrics that move the needle on your goals. For example, more followers might not be the best metric to track if your marketing goal is to get more clients from social media. Instead, your engagement rate, DM response rate, and even link clicks from your bio definitely would be great metrics to track.

Identify the essential numbers to watch, and these become your KPI’s. Track them over time to see how you’re doing!

Set Yourself Up for Success (with Better Expectations)

Challenges are going to happen, and there will be times when you’re going to hit a roadblock. Set yourself up for success by making a list of the roadblocks and challenges you expect to encounter. Then make a plan for how you’ll deal with them.

Some may require some mindset work and to keep moving.

Others may require a strategic shift, delegation, etc.

Not only are you helping to better prepare for these potential issues, but you’re also managing your expectations around them. That way when you do encounter a barrier, it becomes a barrier to overcome rather than a barrier to your success.

You’ll also want to make sure to log any resources or investments that might be needed. Everything costs something, whether that’s time or money.

Make a list of the time, money, and energy that you’ll need to invest into your business to achieve this marketing goal. The free download I’ve included at the bottom of this post is ideal for this!

What resources will you need? Should you hire a coach or strategist? Should you invest in a program to increase the likelihood of your success?

Take It One Step at a Time

One big looming deadline for a goal that’s just as big is a recipe for failure. Instead of creating a situation where it’s all too easy to procrastinate until it’s too late, plan out milestones that will help you stay on track.

Create a list of smaller steps that need to be taken in order to achieve that big overarching marketing goal you’ve set. This keeps that self-sabotaging urge to procrastinate in check, and it helps with preventing overwhelm.

The Biggest Mistakes People Make

I’ve been in marketing and entrepreneurship in some form or fashion for over 10 years.

This biggest mistakes I see people make when they’re setting goals are:

1. They don’t set realistic or tangible goals. Goals are often so outrageous that they’re never going to make them, or the goals are vague and unclear.
2. They focus on the big overarching goal but miss the milestones. This all too often leads to the motivation to achieve the goal simply fizzling out.
3. They don’t set themselves up for success and go it alone. Your chances of success increase from the single digits to over 90% when you join a program like Skyrocket to Profit or get involved with a networking group or a community.

Download the Free Goal Cheatsheet

Skip the hassle of creating your own goal planner and download this free cheatsheet now! Fill in your answers and create the ultimate action plan to achieve even your biggest marketing goal.