Your Marketing Plan for 2010: Setting Goals

"Good," as I tell my writing students, is one of those words that has so many possible meanings that it becomes almost meaningless. Just so, when you plan your marketing strategy for 2010, you can't be satisfied with saying that you want to get more out of your website, and leaving it at that.

Your goals need to be SMART:

• Specific: If you decide to do as well as possible, you have no goal. You have to define success for yourself and your website. Some of the specific elements of online marketing success can be increased online visibility, increased sales, higher traffic, increased conversions, increased interaction with customers, higher PageRank, or more high quality links.
  
• Measurable: This can be the hardest part. How will you measure something like "increased online visibility"? Determine how you'll measure the improvement you want, and quantify it as much as possible. A 30% increase in sales, or doubled traffic, or 100 more quality links -- all these are goals that allow you to recognize when you've succeeded. If you don't know how te measure some factor that you want to track, let me know and I'll be happy to help.
  
• Achievable: I have to confess that I tend to have rather lame business goals. I would achieve them within a few weeks, and have to set new ones. I also have clients who plan to increase their sales a thousandfold. Somewhere between these two extremes might be the best plan. When I sat down with our project manager, Rosie, she was able to look at previous performance and future needs and extrapolate some reasonable numbers to shoot for.
  
• Realistic or Relevant: Some people choose "realistic" for this part of the acronym, and some choose "relevant." Either way, it means that you need to have marketing goals that fit with your overall business plan and capacity. I have a client whose goal is to increase monthly traffic from 3,000 to 10,000 visits. I'm planning to help him achieve this. But for me, 10,000 visits a month wouldn't necessarily be good news. He sells a product, whereas I have a service. He has a staff and is willing to add to it. I have a small family business with a plan for small, gradual growth. The old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for." In this case, you're planning rather than wishing, so just make sure that your marketing plan is in sync with the rest of your plans.
  
• Time-defined: While we're quoting old sayings, let's remember that "A goal is a dream with a deadline." Put deadlines on all your goals. Some may be goals for the full year. Some may be things that need to be accomplished on some particular date, and some may be milestones on the way to a larger future goal.

Write it all down. Many people advise writing this as though it were in the present. "Here it is, December 31, 2010," they'd have you write, "and I have increased my monthly traffic to an average of 10,000 visitors, reached my sales goal of $150,000, and doubled my opt-in email list. What a great year!"

In some of the examples I've shared with you here, you'll notice that people got help. This is not only what actually happened in the examples, but it's something you might want to do. An objective viewpoint, other skills and ways of looking at things, and additional information can make your goals better and therefore more useful.