BroadVision Marketing Blog

Achieving your marketing objectives hinges on having a solid strategy and a consistent commitment to follow through with your strategy. The problem that arises for many marketers, however, is that they tend to start the process backwards.

In other words, the tendency is to simply start with their proposed budget and use that to dictate what they can or can't do with marketing.

Planning To Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

A more strategic approach to is to start with your actual objectives. This is analogous to planning a journey. If you want to go from San Francisco to, say, the East Coast you wouldn't simply look at your bank account and say, "We can only go so far."

No, you would determine where you want to go, how you can best get there efficiently and cost-effectively, and then you would plan and create your budget to make it happen. But, without a clear objective, it could be a waste of resources and money to simply head off with no destination in mind.

Three Plans For Your Marketing Objective Success

The three key steps in achieving your marketing objectives:

1. Objective Plan. It is critical to define and establish both measurable financial and marketing objectives. Financial objectives include sales revenue and net profits. Your specific marketing objectives may change over time, some of the perennial goals include your number of leads generated, website visits, or the number of blog posts or Twitter messages published in your social media campaign.

2. Budget Plan. Your budget planning needs to include a profit and loss projection along with the marketing budget. The budget should be designed to support your marketing efforts and used to take the necessary steps to make it possible. In other words, Knowing what your projected earnings will be by successfully achieving your proposed marketing goals will allow you to assign the dollars needed to fund the plan. 

3. Action Plan. Without a clear and explicit plan for actions to be taken for each objective, it is highly unlikely these goals will be reached. You plan should have completion dates, responsibilities assigned for each action, and even contingency actions in response to feedback from your ongoing metrics tracking.
Included in this action plan step should be a production calendar with periodic progress meetings and updates, etc. One approach that is often employed with this step is what is known as S.M.A.R.T. goals. The acronym originally stands for goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related.

A generic approach to a content marketing strategy:

(Image courtesy of BrandFever)

Bringing it All Together as a Marketing Strategy

Ultimately, this can be seen as a 5-step strategy incorporating your three marketing plans. Regardless of what actual marketing tools or tactics you employ, it makes sense to start with clear objectives first. Having an budget plan in place for achieving these objectives is necessary in order to see your overall plan to completion. And, once these plans are established, you can create the action plan.

Achieving these objectives with your marketing strategy takes time. If you are engaged in content, or inbound, marketing it won't happen with a few blog posts or great ebook. People will need to consume your content for a while before they contact you. But without your content compelling them to contact you, your goals may never be met.

Content and inbound marketing work day in and day out. Once you post a blog article or upload a Slideshare piece, it is always there, working to educate and compel people to become leads. And when they do come to you, they are educated, informed, and much more likely to make the decision to buy.

Get your Free Complimentary Inbound Marketing Session to help you make an informed decision or call BroadVision Marketing at 707-799-1238.