How to set and measure marketing and business goals

Business goals are an integral part of developing and implementing a marketing strategy. They set the direction of the business, emphasize important tasks over secondary ones.

Many entrepreneurs, especially beginners, do not understand how to set business goals, how to distinguish business planning goals from marketing goals, and what they generally affect.

In this article, we explain in detail what business goals are, how to measure them, and how to achieve them.

Marketing levels

According to the Projektor online institute, there are three levels of task performance: strategic, operational, and implementation. If you imagine a building's master plan, you can see that it has its own levels — the stages of performing certain work:
The strategic level is planning. This is where the building is designed, its sketch, and a general idea of the business in the future is formed. The general plan is drawn up for a long time.

The operational level is the transition from design to execution. We take our big plan and break it down into more detailed tasks: who will be responsible for a certain type of work, how long it will take, and what methods will be used to build the building.

The implementation level is the actual decoration of the house and the arrangement of rooms. At this stage, we do specific things that will put our plan into action, such as creating advertising campaigns, researching the market, and looking for tools that would help to recognize our home, i.e., our business.

What are the goals?

In terms of business, there are purely business goals and marketing goals.

Business goals are usually long-term objectives that are set as part of business planning.

Marketing objectives are mostly short-term goals that are related to the implementation of the marketing plan, including the use of marketing tools. There can be several of them within a marketing plan for one big business goal.

In turn, marketing goals can be as follows:

1. Increase brand awareness. To make your brand or product known to as many potential customers as possible, use various channels and methods of promotion, such as social media, offline events, contextual advertising, publishing native or commercial articles in the media, blogging, etc.

2. Driving traffic to the website. A website or online store is the main platform from which customers learn about a company's products and services. 

Online marketing should direct potential customers to your website — this is its main function and goal. Set up SEO (search engine optimization), contextual, banner, and display advertising to attract visitors and deepen their knowledge of your brand.

3. Lead generation. A lead is a potential customer who has interacted with a brand and shared personal information, such as an email address. The process of increasing the number of such contacts by stimulating interest in a business is called lead generation. In simple terms, it is an increase in the customer base.

Internet marketing tools are perfect for such purposes, such as: content marketing (publishing interesting and useful content, UGC content created by users); email marketing (sending emails with questionnaires); encouraging customers with gifts, discounts, or other bonuses to share their opinions to collect contact information; adding buttons in emails, etc. 

4. Conversion of visitors into customers. The next logical step in the chain of marketing goals is to convert the traffic you've attracted to your website into real sales. To do this, optimize pages, forms, and other sales channels for an easy ordering process. Offer users an intuitive interface. Make sure the description of the product on the website matches its actual appearance, photo, and price. 

Focus on the development of website usability and easy navigation, monitor how quickly the site loads and how it opens on mobile devices. Any flaw in its operation can drive away the most loyal customer.

5. Maintaining customer loyalty. Online marketing does not end with the sale. It's important to work on retaining your existing customer base, encouraging repeat purchases and spreading positive feedback. 

Email marketing tools are best suited for the loyalty stage. In particular, you can create personalized commercial newsletters for selected customers and regular newsletters that will inform customers about new products and updates, as well as special offers.

Each of these goals requires careful planning and execution, as well as regular analysis of the results to optimize the overall marketing strategy.

What are the criteria for setting goals?

There is a SMART methodology that can be used to determine the effectiveness of a goal. It contains 5 criteria:

✅Specific (concretely) — what it is you want to achieve?

✅Measurable (measurable) — what success indicators will determine whether the goals are achieved?

✅Achievable (as far as) — is this a realistic goal?

✅Relevant (relevant) — is it consistent with the company's overall goals and vision?

✅Time-bound (limited in time) — what is a realistic timeframe for achieving the goal?

Metrics for measuring goals

Regularly analyze the results of your marketing campaign to understand what works and what doesn't. There are many metrics and tools that can help you determine the success of your chosen goal or campaign.

Metrics are quantitative values that help you determine, for example, audience reach, number of sessions, pages viewed per session, or number of conversions. Let's take a closer look at some of the most important and popular marketing metrics. 

We can distinguish between profitability indicators (profit from each campaign) and cost indicators (or marketing costs).

Cost metrics include return on investment (ROI), return on marketing investment (ROMI), return on advertising spend (ROAS), cost per win, cost per lead, cost per customer acquisition, customer lifetime value, cost per action (CPA), cost per click (CPC — contextual advertising metric), and many others.

Profit indicators are the number of leads and the conversion rate. These metrics calculate how much money or customers a business will receive from marketing campaigns to achieve certain goals.

Examples of goal measurement

For example, let's define return on marketing investment (ROMI). It can be used to estimate the profit from a specific marketing program or a set of marketing campaigns. 

To determine the return on investment of the amount a company spends on marketing, use the formula:

ROMI = ((marketing revenue — cost of goods — marketing expenses) ÷ marketing expenses) × 100.

For example, the revenue from targeted advertising for the sale of cases totaled UAH 1000. The cost of 1 case is 20 UAH. The cost of the advertising campaign was 300 UAH. A total of 20 conversions were detected. Thus, the return on investment for this campaign was UAH 300:

ROMI = ((1000 — 400 — 300) ÷300) × 100 = 100%.

This metric is a better indicator of the effectiveness of the chosen goal and campaign than ROI or ROAS, as it takes into account net profit, i.e. expenses, in addition to revenue. A ROMI of 100% shows that the company did not bring profit to the business. 

Or another scenario of using ROMI:

You need to understand the effectiveness of your retargeting campaign. The monthly cost of the campaign was $2400, and the campaign sales were $31,200. Given that the cost of goods sold is $24,960, the effectiveness of the campaign is:

ROMI = ((31 200 – 24 960 – 2 400) / 2 400) * 100 = 160%.

A ROMI of 160% means that the campaign is profitable: it generated $1.60 in revenue for every dollar spent on marketing.

Let's look at another example: determining the cost per lead (CPL). The formula looks like this:

CPL = advertising costs ÷ number of attracted potential customers

For example, in the case of covers, if we managed to attract 40 potential customers (who registered on the form or clicked on the advertisement we launched), the average cost per customer from this campaign will cost in:

300 ÷ 40 = 7,5 грн.

If we want to find out the CPA (cost per action) — the cost of a customer who completed a targeted action, i.e. a purchase — we need to divide the advertising costs by the number of completed targeted actions. According to Facebook Ads, 20 customers made purchases from our ad campaign.

300 ÷ 20 = 15 грн.

Thus, we can see that different metrics define the same value in different ways, depending on the variable chosen.

Tools to help measure goals

To speed up the process of determining the effectiveness of your campaigns and marketing goals, we recommend using special services and web tools:

• Google Analytics,

• Amplitude is a product analytics resource,

• SimilarWeb is a comprehensive website analysis,

• Serpstat is a multifunctional SEO platform for website audit,

• SemRush and Ahrefs are multifunctional platforms that are alternatives to Serpstat.

There are many ways and methods to achieve your business and marketing goals. There is a wide variety of them, so you should focus on specific metrics that will help you plan the future of your business, divide your plans into concrete steps, and bring them closer to real life.