Marketing is often referred to as the face of the business. As such, a well-established team that shares a commitment to being the best it can be has the ability to outshine and outperform the competition. To maximize performance, here are 12 vital goals all marketing departments should strive to achieve.

Goals for Marketing Departments

1. Establish a plan. As Stephen Covey said, “Begin with the end in mind.” The marketing team needs to develop a plan that incorporates mission, vision, strategies, tactics, budget and assignment of responsibilities. Once created, the goal is to execute the plan, monitoring performance, measuring success and making course corrections where necessary.
2. Define and manage company brand. A company brand is more than just a color scheme or logo. It encompasses the totality of a company as a whole through its image, reputation and values. All communications—both internal and external—represent a company’s brand and ensuring their alignment with the organization’s brand is part the marketing team’s job.
3. Align marketing with sales and customer service. It is an essential role of the marketing team to communicate with prospects and customers consistently. It is equally important to make sure marketing goals, tactics, programs and promotions are communicated throughout the organization. When teams are united, it ensures consistency both inside and outside the organization.
4. Create engaging content. When done well, marketing content can reach and engage new audiences, nurture leads through the sales funnel and support a reputation of expertise and excellence. It is vital for the marketing team to continually churn fresh and meaningful content to the company’s target audiences. To put your best foot forward, it’s important for marketers to have an internal review and quality-control process. When you create content for your website, blog and social media outlets, make sure content is clean of grammar, spelling and other errors.
5. Discover and distribute content across the right channels. Good content is useless if it doesn’t reach the right audiences. Through data analytics and other informal means, marketers need to determine which outreach methods are the most effective, including social media, blogs, podcasts, trade magazines, digital publications and others.
6. Conduct market research. Staying on top of trends, news and changes in the market are pivotal to successful marketing growth. There are different methods to conduct market research and different challenges, but the key is to utilize the information gathered to assess progress, make course corrections and formulate better marketing decisions.
7. Define buyer personas. Savvy marketers strive to understand the known (and unknown) needs and challenges of their target markets. By using market research and communicating often with prospects and customers, marketers can create defined buyer personas and hone in on the best ways to interact with them.
8. Stay current. Marketers need to stay abreast of what’s happening in the marketplace. What are the emerging trends, technologies, marketplace conditions, environmental factors and other issues that can impact the growth of the industry and your position in it?
9. Develop strategic marketing campaigns. Strategic campaigns take into consideration not only the type of marketing channels used and the frequency of communication required, but also the sharpness and accuracy of the messages. Marketers need to understand prospect and customer pain points and challenges in order to create compelling solutions that resonate meaningfully.
10. Produce internal communications. Just as important as external communications, regular internal communications need to support alignment between departments and reinforce shared goals. Internal communications can be in the form of newsletters, email, social media, meetings and events.
11. Serve as press and media liaison. When you produce content for external publications, radio, TV and podcasts, you need to know how to communicate with publishers and producers and know what they expect from you. Reach out to relevant online, print and broadcast media to promote thought leadership and generate editorial or media coverage.
12. Oversee outsourced vendors. Whether you’re working with a printer, SEO professional, graphic designer, lead-generation resource, packaging specialist or a host of other types of business partners, it’s important to establish guidelines, policies and performance expectations. Because marketers wear so many hats, some will decide to outsource services to lighten the load.

Every Company is Different

With so many roles to play and goals to achieve, it’s easy for marketing departments to become overloaded. If your team is juggling too many balls and doesn’t have the tools and resources it needs to achieve these 12 goals, marketing results and organizational success will suffer. When this happens, conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Figure out what you can do more of and what you can do less of separate yourself from the pack.