After our previous blog, we discussed how a great marketing plan includes goals and intentions. There are several different types of marketing, and each one should have an associated outcome. At Spotlight Branding, the blogs, email newsletters, and social media we write for our clients help them stay in touch with their existing network. Not many measurables are associated with that tell the whole story.
If you are a law firm creating a marketing plan and have blogs and social media under different categories, you won’t have a quantifiable goal. That isn’t to say it is pointless by any means. Its purpose is to stay in touch and build your reputation. Again, if it becomes measurable, that’s great.
Quantifiable & Non-Quantifiable Goals
Content marketing differs from advertising through Google or Facebook; you create ads as part of a lead-generation activity. Attaching a numerical goal to these kinds of endeavors makes more sense. Conversely, a written sentence is just as much of a goal as a quantifiable amount, and each is equally necessary. The overarching theme is that you are identifying the goal or intent of each marketing form.
We don’t think organic social media’s purpose is to generate leads and clients. Does that mean that it can’t get you new clients? They can. However, in a marketing plan, in the sense that it applies to your goals, you do not identify everything that something could accomplish. What does it need to do? If organic social media’s primary function is to stay in touch with your network (for law firms), everything it does beyond that is icing. Only focus/work on the primary purpose, but be grateful for the secondary rewards.
You may have little to nothing in categories like referrals—but you still need to have a projection. Even if you do nothing proactively to generate referrals, you still expect a certain amount to come in every quarter or year. Firms will create referrals naturally if they are good at their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they have maxed out their referral potential.
The Purpose of Having Goals
Identifying a goal or outcome is critical because it is a prerequisite for tracking and monitoring each activity on your plan against your goals. So, for example, if you decide to do no active referral marketing and need to get X number of referrals once a quarter (or whatever you choose), you can check in on that. If you’re hitting that result, you’re comfortable. Conversely, if you fall short, leverage marketing that generates referrals. Other people may hit the goal and realize it was too small. Through a newsletter or organic social media, they may be able to increase their referrals.
For the non-quantifiable goals like brand and reputation, you’ll still be able to talk with your vendor or team about where you feel you are. Advertising and print marketing lend themselves to tracking, so this is self-explanatory.
Creating and having some sort of goal allows you to track your marketing against those goals. When something is off track, it means one of two things:
- Your goals or projections were too high. This may lead to the conclusion that the marketing plan you’re investing in isn’t worth it, or you may need more marketing.
- The marketing is underperforming, but you know your goal is reasonable. In this case, you need to change something. Even if you don’t know what to change, it would be better to change something rather than run it back as it is.
Marketing is an adventure or an experiment. You can’t know if something is working if you don’t expect what you want to happen.
Spotlight Branding
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