Marketing goals and objectives

Do you have a good marketing plan as part of your business plan for your small business? All large corporations and companies do or believe they do. It seems quite strange that many small businesses fail to achieve the goals and objectives they want to achieve by investing in their marketing dollars.

Many small businesses don’t plan their marketing very well and have a mixed customer message and worse, a patchwork of marketing techniques that are hard to track and deliver a messy message to the public. If you want to achieve results in marketing you must establish goals and objectives of what you want to achieve; that makes sense right? Why would you do otherwise?

When we talk about marketing goals and objectives, small business owners will often say that they want to beat the competition. In fact, as the founder of a franchise company, many of my franchisees made this their main objective; to crush the competition. I must admit that I have a lot of fun beating up the competition and crushing them into submission.

But after a while I found out that the competition was not doing anything very well and it really wasn’t competition. Sometimes it is best to set your own marketing goals and objectives and exceed the best you can. In other words, set the bar high and reach for the stars. Once you capture the moon, it will be much further ahead and then you can continue.

The simple fact of wanting to beat the competition should not be considered the only objective. Now, sometimes it is easy to form a team by choosing an enemy. The competition could be considered enemy to form a team. But your competition shouldn’t be set as a yardstick for your marketing goals and objectives. You must shoot higher than the competition and make them eat the dust. That’s what I’ve always done and you should do it. Consider all of this in 2006.