007. How to Come Up with 2021 Marketing Goals

Hi everyone, Emilio Garcia from Boundify. Welcome to another episode of Boundify Live. Today we are going to talk about 2021 marketing goals. It's a very interesting topic. Usually around this time of the year, a lot of marketers are starting to work on what are going to be their goals for the next year. So, and that's usually common. It's at the end of the fourth quarter. This year obviously is going to be particularly different because there are going to be all these kind of situations that happened with the Pandemic and Covid. So things are going to be different. However, the questions remain the same. How do you go about creating those goals? What makes sense and what not? What I have seen with a lot of companies that I have the opportunity to talk about is that usually marketing departments, especially in those where there's not such good communication with sales, will focus on metrics that while relevant, they are not the final outcomes, they're just the means to an end. And some examples that I can share about that are, for example, focusing just on traffic or rankings on search engines or number of followers or just engagement like likes and comments. Those are great indicators for marketing activities when you want to have, when you want to have like a proxy for your performance. If you are starting an effort on search engines, rankings are great because at least give you an idea. If the content that you're creating is being found useful by Google and by users. And if you are doing any efforts on social media, definitely you want to know that you are creating an impact in number of followers that your account have and the number of engagement or the number of the engagement that you create on the page in the form of comments, likes. That means that you are having some relevance with the audience that is following you. So those metrics are great, but they are not the whole reason that you're doing all that. You are not doing marketing only for branding, which is always important, but you also are doing some of it to a greater degree for performance. And that's usually what I found lacks some of those plans. One is a specificity like just saying I want more visits, I want more engagement. Well, usually that's the overall goal, growing and increasing the numbers. But if you don't have a specific metric in mind and if you have a specific number, then creating a plan will be difficult. And again, the second part is that those metrics are just part of an overall scheme. So I will usually recommend any marketer or manager or CMO to work or tie those marketing efforts to some business outcomes. Now marketing is not sales. We are not in the shorter kind of effort that sales drives. And it's obviously the bloodline of the company. Marketing is on the long run building brand, building trust and educating and elevating the brand across the different channels. However, there still needs to be an alignment between those goals because if not, you go into situations where marketing metrics are great, but they are not impacting the revenue numbers for the company, which ultimately will be something of relevance. So it's really, really important that you start the conversation with what portion of all the marketing efforts will contribute to the business goals of the company next year. And from that you scale back. One quick example is imagine that for 2021, obviously maybe the goal will not be just to increase revenue, maybe it's just retaining or for some businesses, just get back on track on the probability of the metrics that they have for this year. So it can be revenue, but it can be also just retention. It can be increasing the percentage of business that you get from some of your clients. It can be increasing the contribution of a product or service on the product line. So you can have different variations on the idea of revenue. And the first question that you have to ask is to what degree marketing will contribute to that? So it can be a percentage of the revenue because you will have other efforts that will come from different areas like sales and customer success, and those will be different and marketing will have a share and then you will work out your numbers. And in working those numbers out is really important. If you don't have in place to set up CRM, there's a lot of offering out there. Obviously we work with HubSpot, so that's one that I would recommend and it's free. But there are plenty of options depending on your business and whatever system you have. What matters is not the tool, but the process. What matters about the CRM is having the information to answer questions like if I want X amount of revenue, which will translate in X amount of clients, how many opportunities do I need to detonate to get those numbers? So you work out your opportunities where it can be the percentage of opportunities you want to close, you want to increase those numbers, and then again you scale back and ask the question, well, in order to have those opportunities through the year, how many qualified leads do I need? It can be marketing qualified leads, it can be sales qualified lead, it can be just qualified leads. In some companies, there's not such a clear distinction between the two of those. But what matters is how many people do you need that raise their hand? That has commercial intent to get those opportunity numbers. And again you scale back and then now you go into the more the marketing realm. That amount of leads or qualified leads will come from some source of of digital marketing if obviously your overall marketing strategy includes it. So you might have some coming from SEO efforts and therefore it's going to be translating to traffic and therefore rankings, or they might come from social media or from paid advertising and that will translate into clicks and impressions and reach. And with those numbers you can finally lay out a plan. You can finally say, well, I need to generate this amount of content in the form of blog content, video, if you have that strategy in place. Or you can say, well now my budget on this X platform has to be of this size to match the intention that I have in terms of traffic to get those numbers. And obviously any other strategy that you have in place, you can quantify and get the the amount of effort you have to do. Now some word of advice here is really, really important that you use your plan as a way of defining a path to follow, but be open and flexible to change it as the year goes by. Because obviously the first thing that you will figure out or you will discover right away is that if you think that you need X amount of content or you need X amount of dollars to implement your efforts, you will discover that the numbers in real life, in real time will be different. You will discover that you will need to faster, slower, increase quality or just repurpose more of the content that you already have instead of creating new one or shift the strategy from past opportunities into new opportunities to it will vary, you will figure out in real time, just remain clear on the goal, on the outcome. It still has to match whatever the business had planned for the year. And that will be like the important thing to remember when you have those plans. So that's one reference that I have there. And hopefully if you have any questions about this topic, please, this video is going to be published on YouTube and we are really happy that we'll be launching soon enough, sorry our podcast. So it will be available in that format too. And you can follow up later. And if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm very active nowadays on LinkedIn, so that will be the best place to reach out to me and have a conversation. Now moving into the next topic that I have prepared for today. There's one metric talking about metrics that are relevant and not. There's one metric on Google Ads that is usually talked about a lot, especially for Accounts that we have that we explore in performance. And that metric is quality score. And so quality score is something very peculiar because even while Google share what it's made of and the numbers, sometimes marketers struggle to understand what they can do to impact it. Right? So in essence it's a number that reflects the performance of, in this case the keywords and the combination of the ads that you have for a given campaign, it reflects past performance. So it's kind of like indication of how your current adwords, your current keyword will perform in, in real time. The real time auction and is basically composed of three key elements. It has a CTR component, expected CTR actually, which is an estimation of what will be the percentage of people that will click on your ad based on your past performance. And it's kind of like comparison against the rest of the competition for the keywords that you are bidding. It has an ad relevance portion that reflects more the match that exists between your ad and what the user intent, what they are trying to accomplish. And finally you have a landing page component that judges the experience that the user have on the landing page itself where they go after they click the ad. And so from at least from the documentation that's out there, we know that from the three components the ones that really matter the most are the expected CTR and the relevance of the ad. I find that really interesting because it reflects something that Google really wants to accomplish on advertising, which is even when obviously they are incentivized to open as much as possible the platform to advertisers that brings them money, they are also aware of the fact that the users need to find what's relevant for them. I make this joke sometimes of if you are selling black dress shoes and you have an ad about it and you send the person to a page that just have red shoe dress, red tennis shoes, that will be completely irrelevant to the user, that will be a very bad experience. So it doesn't matter how much are you willing to pay. Google might decide that your ad will not show up because doesn't answer the query, it's not effective. So in that sense that what you have to worry about that number sometimes I have seen that. So some especially brand new markers focus a lot on the number itself. But forget that we are not building ads for machines, we are building them for humans. So what matters is that you match the intention of the user. And there are even some cases where your quality score might be low, but your intention is still there. Like when some people try competing for keywords from the competition, for example. And in those cases, you know that you are not the most relevant result because if you were, then you will be bidding for your own brand instead of the competition. But in those cases, if you are exploring those ideas, your quality scores are usually going to be low. But if you are getting, for example, enough exposure to justify it or enough lead to justify that, it might be a good strategy. And in those cases, you will not ignore the quality score, but at least you will know that even if it's a low number, it's aligned with your efforts. So use it as a metric to better understand what you can improve. But it's not the goal out of itself, usually the real goal on those campaigns. It's either a certain amount of page views or engagement. And for most of the time, just. Just leads and sales. That is the number that you should usually try to optimize for, right? The purchase themselves and the quality score you will use as a way to gauge where you can do better. And so those are the two topics that I have for today. It's going to be a short session and I look forward to seeing you all next week. And if for whatever reason you want to look at other episodes, they will be available on YouTube. And thank you for being here today. Bye Bye.