What Are Your Marketing Goals

This is the second of a series of posts, which referred to the question, “What is the one thing aviation companies can do to improve their marketing?” What I recommend the first thing an aviation business do to improve their marketing is to develop a marketing plan and went on to discuss that an effective marketing plan really addresses in detail your basic 5 interview questions: who, what, where, why, how, and in addition, how much.

In the first post, I already dealt with “who,” as in “who is your customer?” So let’s move on to “what”. What do you want your marketing to accomplish? What are your marketing objectives? And how do they align themselves with your overall business goals?

The quick answer might be, “I just want to increase sales.” But, I would challenge you to be more specific than that. By how much do you want to increase sales? 10%? 20%? And what type of sales are you looking for? Is there a particular product that you would really want to sell more of than another? Or do you have a particular service that you would want to promote more than others?

I help my clients establish goals for their marketing, and particular I like to set SMART one, which is an acronym for:

• “S” is for specific – be very specific about the goals you want to achieve.
• “M” is for measurable. Are these goals that you can measured and quantified?
• “A” is for attainable. You want to push the envelope, but you also want to be realistic in what you can achieve.
• “R” is for relevance. Of course your  goals should be relevant to your business and your marketing objectives, or they will be of little of no value to your business.
• “T” is for time-bound. You want to be specific about when these goals are to be achieved. Set long-term deadlines as to when you want accomplish your objective. And in addition, set short-term, daily or weekly goals that are components of your larger objective so that progress is continually made over time. I’ve found that those that take action every day, however small, quickly and easily achieve what they set out to accomplish.