The top 12 marketing goals

for your 2018 plan.

Peter Mahoney

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Dec 16, 2017 · 4 min read

Great marketing plans are built on a foundation of goals that

represent your most pressing business needs. But how do you
define the right goals? It turns out that there are many
common objectives across business types. In my 30 years of
building marketing plans, these are the goals that
consistently underpinned the most successful outcomes.

Increase sales. This one shouldn’t be a surprise because it

tends to be the ultimate objective for your marketing efforts.
This can be a challenging goal for some marketing
organizations with longer sales cycles  —  in that case, it is
often best to choose a leading indicator of growth. You can
measure your success in terms of revenue or bookings based
on your business model.

Generate leads (or opportunities). If you want a more

real-time measurement of marketing effectiveness, pick an
outcome that shows up earlier in the sales cycle. If you are
measuring leads, it is best to choose a high-quality lead
metric like marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales
accepted leads (SALs) to avoid declaring success based on
generating unqualified leads. Opportunities are even better
because they have been fully accepted by the sales team,
creating better alignment.

Acquire new customers. Bringing a new customer

onboard is a great objective for many types of businesses,
regardless of whether you sell to individuals or to companies.
While this one seems pretty easy to measure, some
companies have difficulty reliably counting new customers.

Reduce churn (or retain customers). If you have a SaaS

business, this can be one of the most important
measurements for your long term success. You can measure
this based on retention (I retained 95% of my customers) or
churn (we churned 5% of our customers).

Up-sell and cross-sell. If you have an established set of

customers, a great way to grow is to sell more of the same
product to existing customers (up-sell) or sell new solutions
to existing customers (cross-sell). This is another one that
can be difficult to measure for some companies based on
their systems, but it is a consistently popular goal for more
mature companies.

Improve awareness. It’s easy to say that raising your

awareness is a goal of your marketing, but it is challenging to
measure. If this is your goal, you might choose a resulting
indicator as a measurement for awareness, like inbound
leads, web traffic, or positive media mentions. The ultimate
measure is an awareness research study with a baseline, but
that data is not always available.

Increase customer satisfaction. Over the years,

marketers have been increasingly charged with raising
customer satisfaction  —  especially if the marketing team
has any product responsibility. Functions like customer
marketing or customer advocacy marketing are more
common as a result. The most common measurement for
customer satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), but
you can also choose other survey instruments.

Launch a new product or solution. Bringing new

solutions to market helps drive growth for your
company  —  and product marketing teams are often
responsible for launch management. Be careful not to
measure your success by simply launching the
product  —  instead, you should choose an indicator of
market acceptance, like inquiries, reviews, leads, or new sales
of the product depending on the length of the sales cycle.

Re-brand or re-position. Successfully re-positioning or

re-branding your company or your product can accelerate
growth in your business. This is another one that can be
tricky to measure, but you should choose metrics like
inclusion of your new positioning in media and analyst
communications (as a leading indicator), brand awareness,
or increased growth.

Increase web traffic. Sometimes your goal is pretty

simple  —  like getting more people to show up to your
website. This another area where a quality metric is really
important  —  make sure you can measure qualified traffic,
bounce rate, conversions, time on page, or similar indicators
that you got the right people to come to your site.

Refine go-to-market strategy. Whether you are in a

young company that is trying to find their right strategy to
bring products to market, or a more mature company, the
right strategy can make a break your success. Like other
project-based goals, you don’t want to measure “completion
of task”, instead you should focus on the result of your efforts,
including accelerating leads, sales, or pipeline.

Launch a new initiative. This is my “other” goal for

marketing. You may have a new account based marketing
program in the works, a CRM implementation, a new
customer program, a merger, or any other strategic initiative.
Whatever it is, make sure you have a clear way to measure the
results.