Setting short term and long term goals for your marketing programs

Goals are important in every walk of life, then is Marketing different ? In fact it is all the more important that there are measurable, realistic and specific goals (both short term and long term) for your marketing efforts.

This makes sure that marketing efforts are measurable and you can attribute success or failure to an assortment of marketing efforts.Short term Goals also make sure that you can tune long term goals and expectations based on initial responses.

Some examples of short term goals
1) Spurt in website traffic, number of downloads at the website
2) Number of inquiries for targeted campaigns (print/digital/social)

Some examples of long term goals
1) Website rankings and search engine ratings - should rate among the top few
2) Sales conversion rate - predictability should improve with sustained marketing efforts
3) Trusted source of reliable information - Sustained marketing should start projecting you as a thought leader in your segment and over a period of time, people should accept you as a trusted source of reliable information

Many business owners find it difficult to set realistic goals and even more difficult to give an honest evaluation of their business’ performance against those goals. It is essential that you do both of these things to succeed.
 Set your goals, measure your success against those goals and you will be way ahead of the game. More on this later.

Marketing outsourcing - some debates

Marketing & Sales are core functions of an organization. How can you ever think of outsourcing these functions?  Isn't this a common argument that you hear time and time again? . Even while saying so, companies will go about appointing channel networks, business associates, commission partners, who will sell on behalf of the company and help meet sales targets. Also on the marketing side, several elements of the investor relations, marketing communication, design and branding operations will continue to be outsourced to specialist companies in the domain.

Marketing strategy certainly is a core element of the business strategy and you would certainly not want your competitors to know what you are upto. But more important than laying down the strategy is to execute it to perfection to be able to realize the results. My feelings are that companies can take external help from marketing experts in both the strategy formulation as well as the operations rollout, thereby reducing the load on internal staff and resources (budgets, time etc.)

So what exactly can be outsourced and how can it be done. Lots to be thinking about. More about it in upcoming blogs

Marketing Outsourcing - a viable option

The economy seems to be getting back to normalcy, slowly and surely. Amidst all the mayhem that companies unleashed during the lean period, all the major cost centers and support operations suffered. Marketing, which is still considered as a cost center by many, though it is an important growth engine was one among them. With companies beginning to figure their way forward to get back to growing ways, the focus shifts back to marketing in a big way.


What's a better option, hire and re-train a new marketing team all over or hire specialists in their own function and start outsourcing marketing operations. The answers are varied in different business circumstances. I was studying the merits and de-merits of both the options, . I will share more during the coming blogs.