Goal Setting from a Performance Marketer: What, When, and How Much?

Running a business… it’s chaotic.

Between needing to hire new employees for your expanding business, the opening of a new location, a big new product launch coming up, and increasing seasonal foot traffic, it’s getting hard to stay focused on any one thing.

You decide to reach out to a local marketing company to see how they can help market your business.

Already, you are thinking about all the ways you want to push your efforts on social media, Google Ads, and potentially get some new photos and videos for your business.

Before you get to the meeting with your marketing team, let’s walk through the goals for your business to help the marketing company best understand your business goals.

While the SMART goals system provides a good outline for goal-setting, it often requires expert knowledge to know how the goal can be measured, if it is attainable in a given time frame, and if a certain activity like being active on social media is relevant and effective at reaching the goal you want to achieve.

So, let’s walk through the what, when, and how much of your goal!

What do you want to accomplish?

The first step is to know what specifically you want to achieve.

Right now your business is hiring, opening a new location, launching a product, and preparing for increasing seasonal traffic.

Questions that I would start asking you as a performance marketer are, 

• How many people do you need to hire?

• How much foot traffic are you expecting at your new location?

• What type of person would buy your new product?

The more questions you can answer about each of your goals, the more specific it becomes.

For example, when opening a new location, knowing the part of a city this business is located, the amount of expected foot traffic, the average order value of customers at the old location, and the unique aspects of the new location all help me tell a better story and reach out to the right people with our marketing efforts.

When do you want to meet this goal? 

Obviously, sooner is better when it comes to meeting your goals, but more often than not, hitting a million dollars in sales or staffing a new location won’t happen overnight.

So, when hiring employees, ask when you need to have the positions filled. 

If you are hiring to staff the new location, when are you planning on opening? Can you transition employees between locations temporarily or permanently?

Are these seasonal employees for when you are in peak season? If so, when does a business start to pick up and require these employees to be ready to work? Are there months or weeks until then?

Similarly, the more specific a deadline you can put on a project, the clearer it becomes for me as a performance marketer to know what steps to take for your business.

How much can you pay to reach this goal?

When it comes to a budget, this topic can quickly become a point of contention between you and your marketing team.

You want to know how much it costs and they want to know how much you are willing to spend.

This often comes from the expectation of what you are buying after deciding that you want someone to run ads and manage your social media accounts.

I can tell you right away, that the bigger the budget you give me as a marketer, the more that I can do for your business.

While this seems obvious, I’ll often run into situations where the client asks how much something costs and I can’t give them a number. 

For example, if you want to run ads, I could set a multi-million dollar budget to run a Superbowl-style ad on a national scale or a small, local ad for $5/day on Facebook.

Without a set budget, it makes it very difficult to give a cost because there are so many variables.

A good way to start determining how much money you could set aside for marketing is by looking at your return on investment.

If you are opening a new location and are expecting to double your gross monthly revenue with the two locations in the next six months, then use those numbers to set your marketing budget.

Say your goal would be to make one million dollars per month at this new location, then set your marketing budget at a 10x return for $100,000/mo.

Between knowing what you want to accomplish, when you want to accomplish it, and how much money you can spend to reach that goal, I can more accurately determine the best path to reach that goal and potentially find other ways to get you there faster or for even cheaper.

So when you are ready to meet with your marketing company, come prepared with the what, when, and how much. They’ll appreciate you having these answers and you’ll be ready to go!