1. You will get lots of negative feedback if you don’t have some kind of plan.

2. You will never know how well your plan is working—or how much it should be adjusted—because you won’t know how many people are following your strategy.

3. You will never know what new ideas, products, and channels to pursue.

4. Your competitors will always be one step ahead of you because they’ve already thought about these issues you haven’t even considered.

5. Your customers will always be complaining about some unfixable problem that’s only going to get worse over time and make them less likely to buy from you in the future.

So setting marketing goals is absolutely necessary for your business’ survival, profit, and growth.

1- It keeps you on track.

Setting marketing goals helps you stay on track when the going gets tough. When you are just starting out, marketing goals make it possible for you to know where you are headed. When you have a marketing goal in mind, the next step becomes obvious: work toward that goal. And the more marketing goals you set, the easier it is to stay on track.

2- It makes sense of your successes and failures.

If your business is growing steadily and your customers come to expect specific things from you, then as long as your marketing strategy is working well, some customers may be disappointed by what they get and some will be delighted by what they get. But if you want to keep growing, one thing is certain: You won’t get any more disappointed or delighted customers than your current ones are—and if they don’t seem satisfied those customers won’t buy from you in the future. So even though there may be room for improvement in the way you do things, at least from your point of view—and from your customers’ point of view—your strategy is sound.

3- It makes sense of your time investment.

Every minute that goes by without a marketing goal being set amounts to lost revenue for your business

The map and the territory are two different things. The marketing space is vast, but it’s not infinite. It’s not even really big. If you want to stay in business, you have to stay in that space. And the problem isn’t so much staying in the space as getting into it.

If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you haven’t been able to get your marketing goals straightened out, and you’re starting to worry about this problem. But marketing goals are hard enough without being vague. They need something more than just a general idea of where you want to go and some ideas about how to get there. You need a few specific targets, because that’s what they say they are: targets.

The trouble is that the targets themselves can be so vague. The point is not to tell you how many customers you want next year or how much money you want to make next quarter, but to help you work out where you want your company to be in three years, or five years, or ten years from now. This can be harder than it looks at first glance.

Most people don’t know what marketing goals are, and those that do don’t know how to set them. Traditional marketing is about focusing your resources on the customers you want the most; the particular terms of the famous Harvard Business School case study, for example, focus on supplying the best product at the best price.

A marketing goal can be more specific or more general, but it should be goal-oriented. It should say something like this: “I want to sell X million widgets by Y year.” You can call it a revenue goal if you’re in business. If you’re selling a service, it’s a customer churn rate goal; if you’re selling a good or a service whose objective is different from making money, it’s an acquisition rate goal.

Marketing goals are important for several reasons.

First and most obvious, they help you get the outcome you want. In order to get a new product or service to market, you have to have marketing goals in mind. If you don’t have marketing goals, it is hard for anyone to tell whether you are actually doing what you say you’re going to do.

Second, marketing goals help you measure how well things are going. These two ideas are related: Goals help make sure that your actions are consistent with your communication, and consistent actions make things go better.

Third, marketing goals help keep your business focused on the thing that really matters. The most effective companies don’t just do things; they do them at the right time, in the right way, at the right scale. They use their limited resources to produce something their customers want and then stop. They leave behind no more than they take away.

A successful marketing plan starts with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and why.

Here are five ways to help you understand your marketing plan, so that it can be successful.

1. Have a clear goal. What do you want the result of your marketing activity to be? For example, do you want more people to try your product? Do you want more people to buy your product? Do you want more people to talk about your product? Do you want more people to recommend it to others? Do you have a particular way of measuring your success? Does this depend on whether they actually buy some of your stuff or not, or how much they like it? Is there a particular time period in mind for achieving this success?

2. Don’t just plan for the short term. People forget about long term goals very quickly, and get caught up in day-to-day activities. In an ideal world, planning for longer term success would be done by the marketing department and wouldn’t overlap with the project being planned by the engineers and designers. But if it’s done badly (and most people who are going to be doing it badly also aren’t very good at IT), then any short-term successes will be undermined by lack of long-term

The only way to deal effectively with a crisis is to face it. And the only way to do that is to know what’s happening.

You can’t solve a problem until you can measure it. You can’t improve anything until you know where you stand. Every business has a goal, and every business set goals before they had customers who were willing to pay for their goods or services. Without customers, there’s no point in having goals.

It’s time for all business to have goals again. It’s time for all websites to have goals. Because without targets, there is no point in writing these essays.