5 Goals to Consider When Developing Your Marketing Strategy

They say life is full of big decisions. And you rarely want to face them unprepared — you’d rather approach them with a clear plan and a calm mind. If you’re a marketer, the same logic applies to your business and its marketing activities. Knight often reminds marketers: don’t market for the sake of marketing (always keep your Call to Action in mind). Marketing without a clear purpose will leave you scrambling to justify your spend, rather than thinking clearly about what return you actually want from your efforts.

An industry survey of more than 3,000 marketers found that those who set marketing goals in advance are 376% more likely to succeed than those who don’t.

Goals exist to provide a clear, purposeful beacon — something to orient your direction and vision. Whether personal or organizational, they should be the cornerstone of success for you, your department, and the company as a whole. Every accountable marketer wants to know that when the company hits its marketing goals, they had a hand in it. (Knight reminds you: distinguish between “goals” and “metrics.” For example, losing weight is a metric; being healthy is the goal. MQL/SQL are metrics; revenue generation is the goal.)

What are the goals of marketing?

Generally speaking, marketing goals fall into five main areas: increasing brand awareness, generating high-quality leads, developing and maintaining thought leadership, growing customer value, and empowering employees to become brand ambassadors.

These key areas typically define where marketers focus their energy, and they ultimately determine a company’s ability to capture and retain customers. Because every business is different, your marketing goals must be tightly aligned with your actual business reality.

Let’s explore the five core goals you should consider when developing and executing your marketing strategy.

The 5 Goals of Marketing Management:

Increase Brand Awareness

Whether your company is entering a new market, launching a product, or simply looking to strengthen your presence, your primary goal is likely to build brand awareness — so that when people search for a solution to a specific problem, your company is the first name that comes to mind.

Every business or brand should have its own distinct voice, shaped by your website, the platforms you use, and the topics you discuss. If building brand awareness is your goal, getting clear on what that voice sounds like and making sure it comes through consistently is a strong place to start.

When building a strategy around this goal, think about where your target audience spends the most time — in other words, where the traffic that matches your ideal customer profile actually lives. You’ll likely want to explore whether a social media strategy makes sense, since it gives you a platform to engage and share with your target audience. You can connect with them by sharing relevant industry articles, posting about your company culture or products, or running polls and surveys. To go a step further, consider creating free content marketing resources for your audience — things like product samples, e-books, guides, checklists, templates, and educational videos.

Engaging with your audience on social media makes your brand feel more approachable — less like a company simply selling a product or service, and more like a genuine partner. And because you’re delivering real value, people are more likely to become advocates for your brand, sharing your content and spreading that positive signal to their friends, family, and colleagues.

A tip on brand communication: don’t make it all about you. Communication is a two-way street. Beyond telling people what you can do, never forget to listen to what people are telling you when they reach out.

How do you measure brand awareness?

While brand awareness is notoriously difficult to track and quantify, you can assess campaign effectiveness by monitoring measurable indicators such as social engagement, organic traffic, blog traffic, and overall website traffic. Although different channels surface different dimensions of data, you’ll typically see positive shifts as your brand-building efforts gain traction — for instance, an uptick in overall traffic as your awareness strategy takes hold, or a lower bounce rate as your site content becomes richer and more relevant to your audience. Direct traffic in particular reflects the number of people actively seeking out your brand and content — a signal that your messaging is resonating with their pain points and may be helping them solve real problems. (Knight users can track and monitor content performance with ease, giving you deeper insight into your customers.)

Generate High-Quality Leads

Sales teams typically depend on a steady stream of leads to nurture and convert into new customers. While marketing-sourced leads aren’t their only pipeline, it’s safe to say that sales colleagues still expect marketing to hand off high-quality prospects worth pursuing.

In practice, there are many ways to capture contact information from platform visitors — from time-tested methods like registration forms to more innovative approaches like chatbots. But one of the biggest ongoing challenges for marketers remains the same: how to generate leads that truly match the company’s ideal customer profile.

Part of this process involves tracking your MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), but more importantly, it means keeping a close record of the leads your sales team considers unqualified. Knight recommends that enterprise marketers maintain a comprehensive lead log, identify who doesn’t fit the ideal profile — and, critically, understand why they don’t fit. This helps you refine your marketing process and continuously improve lead quality.

How do you measure lead quality?

Analyze the trends among leads that ultimately convert to closed deals. Build goal-oriented, business-specific custom reports — for example: a report on search keyword traffic driving visitors to your website; a report on website traffic to form completions; a report on multi-channel touchpoint contributions to revenue, and so on. (Knight has already connected the full chain of your marketing and sales workflow — all you need to do is draw the insights.)

Develop and Maintain Thought Leadership

Whatever industry you’re in, being recognized as an expert in your field is a critical foundation for demonstrating your company’s credibility and authority. According to LinkedIn research, 60% of business decision-makers say that thought leadership is a key factor in persuading them to consider a product or service they hadn’t previously thought about. Importantly, genuine thought leadership originates from within the organization and is expressed through substance — not just surface-level form. (For instance, many domestic software companies in China claim to be SaaS products, yet project implementation fees account for more than 50% — sometimes much more — of their annual revenue. That’s pseudo-SaaS.)

Developing and sustaining thought leadership can take many forms. One effective approach is to publish and share content that speaks directly to your audience’s business pain points. At the same time, leverage partner networks to ensure your ideas reach a wider audience. Consistently publishing and distributing content is essential to maintaining your position as a forward-thinking industry leader.

How do you measure thought leadership?

Like brand awareness, thought leadership is difficult to measure and may take a very long time to validate — or may ultimately defy easy quantification. (For example, the debate over whether enterprises prefer SaaS or on-premise software took Salesforce 21 years to settle: in 2020, its market cap surpassed Oracle’s for the first time. Whether that definitively proves SaaS “won” is still open to debate — though the trend strongly suggests it has.)

That said, measuring the impact of individual thought leadership content is more straightforward. If you publish a piece on social media or a distribution channel, you can gauge its effectiveness through audience engagement and the traffic it drives back to your platform. Alternatively, you can attach a CTA at the end of an event — such as “click this link and fill out a short survey to win a prize” — to measure engagement and audience response.

Grow Customer Value

Today, the value that marketing delivers to a business extends far beyond generating new opportunities. Keeping existing customers satisfied, delighting everyone in your business ecosystem — upstream and downstream — and encouraging them to advocate for you has never been more important. Customers who have a great experience don’t just come back and buy again; they refer you to their friends and colleagues.

If retaining and growing your existing customer base is your goal, it takes sustained effort to get there. Start by making sure you have a thorough understanding of each customer — what they’ve purchased, what they need — and that all contact data in your CRM is current and accurate. Beyond that, it’s equally important to keep customers informed about the new value you can bring them.

Finally, consider whether industry best practices or product usage insights can serve as touchpoints to deepen customer relationships. And when you launch new products, services, or early-access features, consider giving existing customers first access or exclusive discounts.

How do you know if customer value is growing?

Set upsell and retention targets to assess whether customer value and loyalty are increasing over time. Pay close attention to which content you share with customers has the greatest influence on transactions — and note which pieces of content customers interact with last before a deal closes. This information will help you visualize which content is most valuable for both existing and prospective customers.

Empower Your Colleagues to Become Brand Ambassadors

Do your colleagues have a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile — who your product or service is built for, and what customers need at each stage of the buying journey?

Increasingly, modern marketing teams are taking on greater responsibility for internal communications and business-related employee training — equipping more team members with the skills, tools, and resources they need to close deals successfully and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Most importantly, make sure that every employee who interacts with customers has the business knowledge and industry awareness they need to speak confidently with prospects and clients — so they can become true ambassadors for your brand.

How do you know if you’ve successfully empowered your colleagues?

If you’ve distributed an internal document about your business, check its performance data. See whether your colleagues actually opened it and clicked on the resources inside. Or design a fun marketing automation workflow to identify who’s putting the learning into practice and embodying the ideal brand ambassador profile.

Knight reminds you: whatever goals you set for yourself and your team, they must ultimately benefit the company as a whole. Whether it’s generating high-quality leads or elevating your brand awareness, every effort should point toward “revenue growth” — because that’s what enables your business to thrive, no matter what comes next.