Welcome to the New Year and your New Year’s resolution. You know lose weight, eat better, don’t kill anyone at work. Important goals.
So what are your goals for your material handling marketing? Do you have goals? If not, how do you know if you have done a good job this year with your marketing efforts?
I am amazed at how many companies do not have marketing goals.
But how do you set attainable goals? The first way is to look at what you did last year.
Benchmark
So your goal may be to be raise industry awareness of your material handling solution by 20%. First you have to start with what your actual brand awareness is now. The most effective way to do this may be surveys sent out to a broad cross section of the market.
Another way to start is with a metric you have tracked over the last year via your CRM.
A good place to start is by taking a look at few KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators).
How many leads did you have?
How many inbound inquiries did you have?
How many chances to present to new clients did you have?
What were your website rankings for keywords that matter to you?
How many leads did you get from trade shows?
Once you have your benchmarks you can more easily set your goals.
Goals Vs. Objectives
Goals are overarching and may be hard to quantify.
Example: Become the best material handling integrator in the southeast United States.
Objectives are precise and easy to quantify. They are measurable and a way to attain your goal.
Increase brand awareness by 20% in 2014.
Increase sales in the Southeast by 10%
The easiest way to set up your goals might be to analyze your different marketing platforms and how you can make those better.
Tactics:
Once you define your goals, you need to identify the tactics to attain them.
The tactics could range from optimizing your website for search, or pursuing more content marketing to position your company as a thought leader.
Think about what you want to obtain and what the best marketing avenue would be to achieve that.
If you need help MHM will provide a one hour marketing consultation, free of charge, to get you on track and moving in the right direction.