If you Google "how to create a marketing strategy," the first step of every listicle on the results page is "Define your goals."
On the occasion I get a glimpse of a company's marketing strategy, it's generally just a list of goals: increase revenue by 15%, generate 150 leads a month, get 100,000 website visitors, grow to 25,000 followers.
Not only do these not constitute a marketing strategy, but the goals themselves are detrimental to your marketing efforts.
I'm not actually anti-goals — they're one of the first things I try to understand when building a client's strategy. I'm against the way these goals focus on outcomes that are either irrelevant or out of our control.
So how can we identify which of our goals are productive and which are holding us back?
The Three Types of Goals
To understand the different types of goals and how they fit together, it’s useful to have a real-world example. Let’s picture how a promising college basketball player might set goals for his career as he enters his Freshman year.
Goal: Make it to the NBA
Our imagined college basketball player has his sights set on joining the NBA. When asked what he’s trying to do with his life, the answer is easy. He wants to make it to the pros.
This type of goal is an Ambition. Ambitions are useful starting places for a strategy as they help you focus your limited resources. How you spend your time and energy looks a lot different when you’re aiming for the NBA versus playing in Europe or even becoming an accountant.
Likewise, a start-up CPG company’s efforts will look a lot different if they aspire to be on the shelves of every Walmart rather than running a line of boutique brick-and-mortars.
Ambitions are goals with a long-term perspective. They are measurable, but generally on a pass-fail spectrum — you’ve either accomplished your goal or you haven’t. Once you’ve reached that goal, you can then refocus on a new ambition. For our player it might be winning the NBA Finals or being inducted into the Hall of Fame.
It’s surprisingly rare for a department to have a defined ambition. This is likely what leads departments to falling back on the next type of goal.
Goal: Average 20 points per game
Our player wants to make sure NBA scouts can’t ignore his offensive abilities, so he sets a goal for himself of averaging 20 points per game over the season. Ambitious, though not impossible.
But this is not an effective goal.
When it comes down to it, this goal is merely a Wish. It would be great if it happened, but it’s not something that he can actually control. There are too many variables at play, none of which he has much say over: the quality of the opposition, his teammate’s ability to set him up to score, staying healthy through the season.
You do not control outcomes, you control effort.
Too many marketing departments are chasing goals dependent on outcomes that they cannot control. They’re at the mercy of their sales team, their products, and their production capacity.
At the end of the day, most of their goals have very little to do with the quality of their marketing.
The other problem with wish-based goals is that they are not strategic. They do not meaningfully change the way you approach your marketing.
Having the goal to score a bunch of points changes nothing about our player’s behavior. He was always going to try to score as many points as possible. If as the season draws to a close he’s running behind on the goal, he can’t start suddenly playing better basketball. His abilities are range-bound to his effort. Similarly, if he’s averaging 25 points per game he’s not going to take his foot off the gas.
And all of this is assuming these outcomes are even beneficial for generating revenue. Are you sure the number of followers you have or the number of visitors to your website has any relevance at all to what creates a customer?
Goal: Make 25 free throws every morning
Our player understands the importance of free throws to college basketball and is determined to increase his free throw percentage. He has set a goal for himself to head to the gym and make 25 free throws every morning.
This goal is focused on Process. Process-based goals are the workhorse of a successful marketing strategy. They’re where strategy becomes implementation.
The magic of process-based goals come from their ability to keep us focused on the actions of effective marketing. If you know that regularly sending good emails produces sales and increases your subscribers, then it’s much better to build your goals around the process of sending the emails than the outcome.
Rather than setting a goal of growing your email subscribers by 15%, you might set your goal to sending two high-quality emails every week. The outcomes of an individual email will vary, but if you keep up the consistency, the results will come with time.
It’s important to have a qualitative aspect to your process-based goals. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen social media “strategies” that boil down to “post something every day.” Keeping a consistent cadence to your social media posting is useless if you’re just throwing out tweets based on a national holiday calendar.
Give it a try
Do you have a defined ambition for where your company is heading? If not, spend some time picturing what you could accomplish in 5 years time. What does it look like? What does that picture not include?
If you have established wish-based goals, try converting them into process-based goals. If, for instance, you set a goal based on the number of leads you wish to generate, think deeply about the actions your department can take that actually generate high-quality leads and write goals based around those actions.