Before we get down to work with the inbound marketing strategy that we are going to carry out for our brand, it is important to set some goals, right? Just like for anything else we want to achieve in any area of our lives, it is also important that these goals are established and defined in a marketing plan to know the steps we must follow.
It is also important that these objectives are established and defined within a marketing plan to know the steps we must follow. Therefore, in this post we are going to talk about what a marketing plan is and how we can define the objectives for such a plan. Shall we start?
Although it may seem so, a marketing plan is not only where the objectives of the company are collected, but it also includes other important aspects. In short, a marketing plan is a document or a report where the market studies that our company has carried out are collected as well as the analysis of the competition to know what our strengths and weaknesses are.
the marketing plan also includes the objectives, the strategies that we are going to carry out to achieve them and the planning to follow. We are going to focus our post on this part of the plan, as one of the fundamental aspects to achieve the success of our company is to define objectives.
When making our marketing plan it is important to carry out a study of how our company is seen both internally and externally to know what our strengths and weaknesses really are.
Therefore, it is very important to see where our company is in order to know where we want to take it. Therefore, it is not only necessary to make an internal analysis, but also to make an external analysis and thus know the market situation, how our competition is acting and how users are seeing us.
Once we have carried out this analysis, we will have a report that will lead us to a conclusion: what objectives we should define. To define objectives, it is very important that we have previously defined what we want to achieve with them. It is also important to know what results the objectives we had previously established (in previous marketing plans, for example) have given us, to know if there are any that we can maintain and, above all, to know which ones we should change.
However, although setting objectives is one of the main points of our marketing plan and the purpose of our company, it is sometimes difficult to know where to start defining them.
Whensetting objectives, we can make them SMART, i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, see our post on SMART objectives and how they work here.
Similarly, it is important to pay attention when defining the marketing objectives of our company as these will be the ones that will take us to the point where we want to position ourselves both internally and externally. Therefore, it is equally important for our plan to work that the objectives are realistic. For example, we cannot define objectives that we will not be able to achieve because we do not have the means or resources to do so. We must be consistent with our objectives and know how to define them consistently and appropriate to the situation of our company at the time we start to draw them.
To start defining objectives, it is important to follow a series of steps that will guide us and help us in the process. Let's take a look at them!
Now that we have seen how we can define them, we need to know the importance of them in our marketing strategy. Anthony Robbins, an American motivational speaker, said in a conference: "Setting goals is the first step to turn the invisible into the visible". It is, without a doubt, one of the best phrases that summarises the importance of defining goals.
Sometimes, we may believe that to achieve the success of our brand we must work tirelessly to achieve it. It is true that we must work for it, but if we do not set goals, a route to follow, we are not really doing anything and it can lead us to waste time. We must be aware of the market situation in which we are going to position ourselves, study our competition and know our company to know where we want to get to.
Only in this way will we start to see how the invisible (success, visibility, reputation) starts to become visible while we are tracing a path that helps us to fulfil our marketing plan and, above all, to get to where we want to go as long as we do it step by step.