When setting marketing goals it can be difficult to know where to start. You want it all! More customers, more traffic, better SEO, grow your email list and you want it all now. The issue is your budget doesn’t allow you to achieve all these goals at once, this is why having a goal will allow you to break down the strategy down into steps which you can achieve and by doing these steps, eventually you will reach your main goal.

Time VS Budget VS Investment

All marketing comes down to - How long does a task take? How much does it cost? How much are we willing to invest in time/money and when will we get an investment back? This means looking at short term and long term plans. Do you want a quick turn around on the marketing you are doing or are you looking at the longer plan and investing in future returns?

Short term

If you are looking to do shorter plans then PPC (pay per click) is most likely what you will be doing, but where? You now need to figure out where your target audience is and advertise there. Facebook is one of the best places to do this because the opportunities of delivering ads to targeted audiences is great. Ad words on search engines is also an effective mean as you can target specific terms that the user is looking for. So as long as you are relevant then it’s a great place to increase traffic to your site.

Long term

What if you don’t have the budget but are willing to put the time in to make future gains? Then you could do it by making content; getting a list of subjects and keywords you want to rank for and making relevant content for these. Guest blogging can also help with backlinks and pushing relevant traffic. Making improvements to your site so content is easier to scrape from bots and page load times are better (although this can be a short-term plan if you know what you are doing). Building an audience and using that audience for your business goals.

Investment

This is simply how much time and money are you willing to put in. If you have the budget but don’t want to spend a lot of time on your marketing then PPC will get you to where you want to be. If you have no budget but time is something you’re willing to invest in then looking at content creation and documentation will help you. If you have no budget and no time your marketing will be bad.

Setting Your Goal

So now understand about what you are willing to put in: Budget + Time = Investment

To start with you can now look at:

• Content marketing
• Social marketing
• Email marketing
• PPC

And see how far you are willing to dive into each area. Make sure you track how your marketing is performing to adjust and grow. With statistics, you can move forward in a more productive way.

It is important to remember that the goals can change and you should review your strategy and goals regularly.

Conclusion

All goals need to have a return. You need to figure out what investment you are willing to put in. From here it should help with which selection of marketing options to go down. If you are lucky enough that you have both a budget and time it’s important that you break down what you are doing efficiently. It may be worth focusing on certain areas and expand your marketing later.

Focus on areas of importance on what you are willing to invest.

Building good habits with your marketing will be the difference between success or failure.

Review your goals and strategies at regular intervals.

Go forth and prosper!!!!!

Achievable Steps - extra

When planning a strategy its very difficult to plan achievable steps if you don’t realise the implications of what is needed. This can be budget related or time related. Understanding how long tasks will take and the money which that task will cost is very important. Is the task going to cost more time than you are willing to give up? Is the cost of the effective reach too much?

You may want to take smaller steps to start with to help change your mindset towards the marketing you are doing and slowly build up how much you are doing. This also applies to the PPC side of your marketing.