Developing Effective Marketing Objectives for IT Consulting Firms

Like many IT consultancies, you don’t just serve small and medium-sized businesses; you are one yourself. Small and medium-sized businesses require a healthy flow of new customers. However, many IT consulting firms heavily rely on word-of-mouth alone.

Suppose you want to expand your IT consulting firm with predictable and repeatable marketing results. In that case, it is essential to have clear marketing objectives in place. Marketing objectives are actionable targets specifically designed to provide overall direction and clear specific actions. Often referred to as SMART goals, these goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

Regardless of the size of your business, marketing objectives are necessary. From lead generation, product awareness, and increasing customer lifetime value, clear and direct marketing objectives will help you work towards your goals. Here is how to develop effective marketing objectives for your IT consulting firm.

Conducting Research

Research is the first step to developing a range of marketing objectives that are effective and necessary to the firm.

Research is conducted to ensure the suggested goals align with the firm’s needs and expected growth. However, suppose you are unsure about the current status of the firm and the direction it is heading. In that case, deciding which goals must be developed can be challenging.

Understanding the firm’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will create an initial guideline outlining the objectives to be put in place. Then, an analysis of the growth opportunities and significant obstacles shape the objectives and how the firm will achieve them.

This stage builds the question: Why are customers choosing other IT consultancy firms over mine? Why has social media engagement decreased? Why is consumer loyalty poor?

Analysis of Metrics

After identifying the main issues and growth opportunities, it’s time to see where your firm currently stands. An analysis of key metrics can determine the number of conversions, reach and engagement levels, conversion rates per channel, return on investment, and more.

This stage helps develop the marketing objectives on a numerical level. An example of analyzing metrics can be considering the reach and level of engagement on social media. By analyzing each digital marketing metric, such as Facebook Insights and YouTube analytics, your firm can identify the current status of reach and engagement. From this, you can start setting goals such as ‘we aim to grow our Facebook followers by 30%’ or ‘we aim to reach 1K subscribers on YouTube‘.

From here, your marketing objectives are starting to form into achievable goals.

Make the Objectives Achievable

After researching and analyzing the key trends and predicated outcomes, the next stage is finalizing your marketing objectives. When finalizing your marketing objectives, you must remember that you are developing achievable goals.

This is where the SMART goals come in. Here is a rundown of what they stand for and how to use them.

Specific – We must remember that broad goals sometimes just turn into wishes. For a goal to be achieved, it must be specific. This helps everyone in the teamwork towards the same results and have a clear and focused perspective on the expectations.

Measurable – The outcome of the goal must be measurable. Refer back to the analysis stage, where we took the time to create a numerical plan. This sets criteria by which you can identify if the objectives progressing in the right direction. These outcomes provide a clear indication of the progress that has been made.

Achievable – These objectives must be achievable and attainable. Creating goals that are unachievable can contribute to a lack of motivation. Start with small goals and build your way up.

Realistic – You need to look at your new objectives in relationship with previously achieved goals. Develop goals that you believe you can accomplish with the trends of previous goals. Be committed to achieving the objectives that have been set and once you’ve achieved it, set a new bigger goal.

Timely – Deadlines can be stressful, yet they are essential to developing an effective marketing objective. Without a deadline, there will be a lack of energy and focus on achieving that objective. A loss of urgency and motivation will overtake the progress towards meeting your goals.

Effective marketing objectives are essential for any industry. If you’re leading a team of IT consultancies that you know are experts in the field yet have identified an issue in maintaining clients or acquiring new clients, maybe the problem lies in your marketing tactics. Developing clear and concise marketing objectives can help invite new clients and bring back old ones. If you want to discover more ways to improve your IT consulting firm’s marketing, click here to read more about creating a marketing strategy with limited knowledge

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