Best Goal Setting Worksheet to Help You Plan & Achieve

Accomplishing your goals is an incredibly gratifying feeling.

However, it can sometimes be challenging to get that feeling, as achieving your goals takes time, effort, and a structured process. This is why it’s important to create plans of action for meeting the goals that will help you stay motivated and ensure you’re on the right path.

In this post, we’ll go over a goal-setting worksheet created by HubSpot to help you outline your goals with the SMART framework and create a plan for achieving them. The template is broken down into relevant sections to help you through the process, and if you download it, you can follow along throughout the post.

Goal Setting Steps

1. Identify your initial goal.

The first step of the process is to simply identify what your goal is. It doesn’t have to be convoluted, just merely the objective you’re hoping to achieve. For example, if you’re hoping to grow your website, your baseline goal could be “I want to generate more site traffic.”

2.Define your SMART goals.

The second step in the process is to use the SMART framework to elaborate your goals to ensure that they’re clear, measurable and that the process will help you get there. Here are is what each of the element in the acronym stands for:

• Specific: A specific goal clearly outlines what you’re hoping to improve. If you share your specific goals with your team, it should be clear what your intention is.
• Measurable: Making your goal measurable means attaching numbers to your objective that will help you understand what you have to meet, track your progress, and see how long it will take you to reach your end goal.
• Attainable: Making sure that your goals are attainable means that they are realistic and that you have a chance of achieving them. Your goal is not too out of left field or so unrelated to your current practices that you wouldn’t be able to succeed.
• Relevant: Ensuring that your goal is relevant involves answering the question of “Why are you setting the goal that you’re setting?” Your goal should directly relate to your business’ needs and help your business grow.
• Time-Bound: The final aspect of your goal-setting process is to set a timeline. It helps you understand what your schedule should be and stay on track in terms of achieving your ultimate goal.

Goal Setting Template

It’s always helpful to have a worksheet guide you through your process, and the image below is an example.

Download Template Here

Once you've finished defining your goals, the next step is to calculate your targets so you know what your final numbers should be and so you can plan your process accordingly, so you’re able to meet those final numbers.

2. Calculate your goal outcomes.

The most challenging part of your plan might be coming up with numerical targets that coincide with achieving your goals. You can just say, “We want to increase blog leads by 25%,” but what would the 25% increase be in numerical form?

When you have these numbers, you can set milestones for yourself and monitor your progress and make changes along the way if necessary.

The image below is an example of a SMART goal calculation.

Image Source

3. Evaluate your SMART goals.

The template’s final step is to evaluate your goals, which helps you anticipate possible roadblocks and develop action plans for dealing with them. If you have multiple goals, aim to ask these questions for each one that you have:

1. What is your SMART marketing goal?
2. Do you feel that this goal is realistically attainable in the time frame you’ve set?
3. How many hours per week can you dedicate to achieving your goal/your goal process?
4. What is the biggest challenge preventing you from achieving this goal? What are possible challenges you may face in achieving this goal? What is the biggest roadblock(s) to achieving this goal?
5. What three steps can you take to reduce or remove that challenge and succeed in reaching this goal?

All in all, following this framework makes your goals explicitly clear for yourself and helps you communicate their importance to all necessary stakeholders, so everyone is on the same page. To get started, download our template for free and start achieving your goals.

Best Goal Setting Worksheet to Help You Plan & Achieve was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

Variable Cost Explained in 200 Words (& How to Calculate It)

There’s a frustrating truth that every business deals with early into its growth: More money, more problems.

It seems counterintuitive — if sales and revenue are up, isn’t that a good thing? How are bigger profits a potential problem?

Put simply, it all comes down to the fact that the more you sell, the more money you need to spend. This includes marketing and sales campaigns to reach more customers, the production costs of more goods, and the time and money required for new product development.

Known as variable cost, this sales/spend ratio is something every business owner should understand, but online advice listicles and action plans often assume readers have an intrinsic knowledge of this concept rather than providing a working definition.

In this piece, we’ll clear up variable cost confusion: Here’s what you need to know about variable costs, how to calculate them, and why they matter.

Let’s examine each of these components in more detail.

Variable Cost Per Unit

The variable cost per unit is the amount of labor, materials, and other resources required to produce your product. For example, if your company sells sets of kitchen knives for $300 but each set requires $200 to create, test, package, and market, your variable cost per unit is $200.

Number of Units Produced

The number of units produced is exactly what you might expect — it’s the total number of items produced by your company. So in our knife example above,if you’ve made and sold 100 knife sets your total number of units produced is 100, each of which carries a $200 variable cost and a $100 potential profit.

Variable costs earn the name because they can increase and decrease as you make more or less of your product. The more units you sell, the more money you’ll make, but some of this money will need to pay for the production of more units. So, you’ll need to produce more units to actually turn a profit.

And, because each unit requires a certain amount of resources, a higher number of units will raise the variable costs needed to produce them.

Variable costs aren’t a “problem,” though — they’re more of a necessary evil. They play a role in several bookkeeping tasks, and both your total variable cost and average variable cost are calculated separately.

Total Variable Cost

Your total variable cost is the sum of all variable costs associated with each individual product you’ve developed. Calculate total variable cost by multiplying the cost to make one unit of your product by the number of products you’ve developed.

For example, if it costs $60 to make one unit of your product and you’ve made 20 units, your total variable cost is $60 x 20, or $1,200.

Average Variable Cost

Your average variable cost uses your total variable cost to determine how much, on average, it costs to produce one unit of your product. You can calculate it with the formula below.

Total Variable Cost vs. Average Variable Cost

If the average variable cost of one unit is found using your total variable cost, don’t you already know how much one unit of your product costs to develop? Can’t you work backward, and simply divide your total variable cost by the number of units you have? Not necessarily.

While total variable cost shows how much you’re paying to develop every unit of your product, you might also have to account for products that have different variable costs per unit. That’s where average variable cost comes in.

For example, if you have 10 units of Product A at a variable cost of $60/unit, and 15 units of Product B at a variable cost of $30/unit, you have two different variable costs — $60 and $30. Your average variable cost crunches these two variable costs down to one manageable figure.

In the above example, you can find your average variable cost by adding the total variable cost of Product A ($60 x 10 units, or $600) and the total variable cost of Product B ($30 x 15 units, or $450), then dividing this sum by the total number of units produced (10 + 15, or 25).

Your average variable cost is ($600 + $450) ÷ 25, or $42 per unit.

Variable vs. Fixed Cost

The opposite of variable cost? Fixed cost. Fixed costs are costs that don’t change in response to the number of products you’re producing.

Some common fixed costs include renting or leasing a building, utility bills, website hosting, business loan repayments, and property taxes.

Worth noting? These costs aren’t static — meaning, your rent may increase year over year. Instead, they remain fixed only in reference to product production.

To calculate the average fixed cost, use this formula:

Both variable and fixed costs are essential to getting a complete picture of how much it costs to produce an item — and how much profit remains after each sale.

To calculate variable cost ratio, use this formula:

Let’s put it into practice. If you’re selling an item for $200 (Net Sales) but it costs $20 to produce (Variable Costs), you divide $20 by $200 to get 0.1. Multiply by 100 and your variable cost ratio is 10%. This means that for every sale of an item you’re getting a 90% return with 10% going toward variable costs.

Combining variable and fixed costs, meanwhile, can help you calculate your break-even point — the point at which producing and selling goods is zeroed out by the combination of variable and fixed costs.

Consider our example above again. If your variable costs are $20 on a $200 item and your fixed costs account for $100, your total costs now account for 60% of the item’s sale value, leaving you with 40%.

Put simply? The higher your total cost ratio, the lower your potential profit. If this number becomes negative, you’ve passed the break-even point and will start losing money on every sale.

So, what’s considered a variable cost to the business?

Some of the most common variable costs include physical materials, production equipment, sales commissions, staff wages, credit card fees, online payment partners, and packaging/shipping costs.

Let’s examine each in more detail.

Physical Materials

These can include parts, cloth, and even food ingredients required to make your final product.

Production Equipment

If you automate certain parts of your product’s development, you might need to invest in more automation equipment or software as your product line gets bigger.

Sales Commissions

The more products your company sells, the more you might pay in commission to your salespeople as they win customers.

Staff Wages

The more products you create, the more employees you might need, which means a bigger payroll, too.

Credit Card Fees

Businesses that receive credit card payments from their customers will incur higher transaction fees as they deliver more services.

Online Payment Partners

Apps like PayPal typically charge businesses per transaction so customers can check out purchases through the app. The more orders you receive, the more you'll pay to the app.

Packaging and Shipping Costs

You might pay to package and ship your product by the unit, and therefore more or fewer shipped units will cause these costs to vary.

Expect the Unexpected

While variable costs, total variable costs, average variable costs, and the variable cost ratio often seem complicated on the surface, these terms are simply ways to represent the changing nature of costs to produce new items as your business grows.

By understanding the nature of these costs and how they impact your current and projected revenue, it’s possible to better prepare for evolving market forces and reduce the impact of variable costs on your bottom line.

Variable Cost Explained in 200 Words (& How to Calculate It) was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

How to Set & Achieve Marketing Objectives in 2021

In the marketing industry, setting objectives can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, constantly raising the bar can incentivize your team to sustain your growth rate over long periods. On the other hand, it can incentivize your team to prioritize your company’s needs over your customers’ needs.

Contrary to popular belief, solely focusing on the results doesn’t actually produce results. Focusing on serving your customers is what produces results. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is famous for sparking this customer-centric movement.

In 2015, he spoke at Goldman Sach’s Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, and a reporter asked him what some of Apple’s biggest accomplishments from the past year were. He responded, “We're not focused on the numbers. We're focused on the things that produce the numbers."

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to set realistic marketing objectives that will help you craft audience-centric content, prioritize your customers' needs, and hit your numbers, all at the same time.

Read on to learn how to identify your marketing objectives’ purpose and process and why it's just as important as the numbers you aim to hit.

In his insightful blog post about setting goals, Jay Acunzo, the founder of Unthinkable Media, reveals a subtle yet potent problem that has pervaded the content marketing industry over the years — traditional goal-setting lets you measure what you do, but it doesn’t lend itself to gauging how you do it or why which is what ultimately gives your work meaning and resonates with prospects.

In marketing, you obviously need to aim for concrete targets. But, as we said earlier, only focusing on the results can sometimes incentivize you to take a course of action that prioritizes your organization’s needs over your customers’ needs.

To help you focus more on your purpose and process instead of just your results, Acunzo recommends considering two additional factors when setting a marketing objective — your hunger and your aspirational anchor.

Your hunger is your current dissatisfaction with your work today or why you want to achieve your goal. Your aspirational anchor is your vision of your work in the future or how you’ll achieve your goal.

These two factors drive your motivation and keep you on track to create work that better serves your customers. When you add your numerical goal to the equation, you’ll be able to simultaneously produce customer-centric work and create business impact.

How to Set Realistic Marketing Objectives

The first thing to understand is the subtle difference between a goal and an objective. A general goal is going to be your broader vision while your marketing objective is that more concrete specification of how that vision is achieved. In order to craft your marketing objective, you must start with vision first by defining three main things:

• Hunger - What is the driving force — or the “why” — behind what you want to achieve? What pain or problem has led you to this point, and why must it be solved?
• Aspirational Anchor - What does success look like — or “how” does the end vision solve that problem?
• Goal - What steps must be taken — or the “what” — for that aspiration to come to fruition?

Now that we understand the “why” and the “how” behind setting marketing objectives, let’s go over how you can root the "what" in reality with the SMART goal framework.

SMART goals are realistic, quantifiable, and focused targets that you can easily aim for. If you’re wondering what SMART means, it’s an acronym that helps you clearly define your goals.

Specific

In terms of marketing, you should choose the particular metric you want to improve upon, like visitors, leads, or customers. You should also determine what each team member will work on, the resources they’ll have, and their plan of action.

Measurable

If you want to gauge your team’s progress, you need to quantify your goals, like achieving an X% increase in visitors, leads, or customers.

Attainable

Make sure that X% increase is achievable in your specific situation. If your blog traffic increased by 5% last month, try to increase it by 8-10% this month, not 30%. It’s crucial to base your goals on your own analytics, not industry benchmarks, or else you might bite off more than you can chew.

Relevant

Your goal needs to relate to your company’s overall goal and account for current trends in your industry. For instance, will growing your Facebook following lead to more revenue? And is it actually possible for you to significantly boost your organic reach on Facebook after their most recent algorithm change? If you’re aware of these factors, you’ll be more likely to set goals that are realistic, achievable, and beneficial to your company.

Time-bound

Attaching deadlines to your goals puts pressure on your team to accomplish them. And this helps you make consistent and significant progress in the long term. If you don’t give yourself a deadline, you can very easily fall into the trap of procrastinating on action items, leading to a slower rate of success.

For example, which would you prefer: Increasing leads by 5% every month, leading to a 30-35% increase in half a year, or trying to increase leads by 15% with no deadline and achieving that goal in a year?

By analyzing two different goal-setting frameworks, we’ve learned how to identify the “why,” “how,” and “what” behind your marketing objectives. Now, we can blend the two frameworks to set a realistic goal that fulfills your customers’ needs and helps you hit your numbers at the same time. Check out the examples below for more detail.

Now that you know how to write a marketing objective, you can get ideas from some metaphorical samples. Below, we’ll start with one long example breaking out the above methodology step-by-step, and then we’ll provide other examples to fuel your inspiration.

1. Increase blog subscribers.

In this example, we’ll set a target of increasing blog subscribers by 25% month-over-month this year — it’s a substantive increase, but possible with the SMART framework.

• Hunger (Why) - Our blog educates our audience well but it doesn’t resonate emotionally with them enough.
• Aspirational Anchor (How) - Run a blog that consistently resonates with our audience and that people look forward to reading every time they receive our email digest.
• Goal (What) - Increase blog subscribers as an indication of our success.

With this goal-setting framework, you can see how the “why” and “how” behind a goal incentivizes behavior that better serves customers and hits numbers at the same time.

For instance, in the example above, this blog team refuses to just do whatever it takes to boost their blog subscription. They want to craft emotionally resonant stories that their audience actually values or content that’s worth subscribing to, and this is what will lead to their growth in subscribers and create long-term value for their business.

If this blog team didn’t identify their hunger or set an aspirational anchor, however, the only thing that would guide them toward the finish line is the finish line itself. And that could incentivize short-sighted behavior that helps them achieve their goal at the expense of prioritizing their audience’s needs over their own.

Once the aspirational vision and the general goal has been defined, now it’s time to pivot to a concrete objective using the SMART goal framework:

Specific

Our blog educates our audience well, but it doesn’t resonate emotionally with them enough. Let’s start running a blog that can consistently provide value, that people look forward to reading every time they receive our email digest, and that can attract more subscribers.

Measurable

Increase month-over-month blog subscribers by 25% this year.

Attainable

Last year, we increased month-over-month blog subscribers by 15%, so we know this is doable.

Relevant

If we can craft emotionally resonant stories that our audience actually values, we can build deeper relationships with them, attract more subscribers with whom we can also build deep relationships, and hopefully do business in the future.

Time-Bound

Monthly over the course of a year.

2. Reach more visitors with organic search traffic.

Let's say our organization's goal is to grow its online organic presence to attract more leads and reach 35,000 visitors via organic search monthly by the end of the year. These are Hunger and Aspirational anchors, so they must be translated into a SMART goal if we want to take steps to achieve it:

• Specific - Increase website visitors from organic search.
• Measurable - Reach 35,000 visitors monthly.
• Attainable - Must be sure that the number is reachable by increasing or improving variables within our control.
• Relevant - Must be the right traffic since the ultimate goal is to increase leads.
• Time-bound - By the end of the year.

3. Improve the mobile traffic conversion rate site-wide.

Traffic alone is not enough to generate leads and, ultimately, revenue. We need mechanisms in place to convert the traffic we're already getting.

Let's say we notice that our site converts a lot better on desktop than mobile. This means we could be losing a ton of lead opportunities who arrived at our site on a mobile device. That's why we decide to enhance the mobile experience and set a goal of improving mobile traffic conversion rates site-wide from 2.3% to 5% by Q3 Here's how we turn that goal into an objective:

• Specific - Improve mobile traffic conversion rate.
• Measurable - From 2.3% to 5%.
• Attainable - Must identify roadblocks to conversion and how we plan to remove them.
• Relevant - Must actually have enough mobile traffic to justify the effort.
• Time-bound - By Q3.

4. Increase MQL conversions.

With inbound marketing, it's easy to get swept up in blogging, offer creation, and lead conversions. At the same time, if we don't have mechanisms in place to move those leads closer to a purchasing decision, these efforts don't pay off the way they could. Part of our jobs as marketers is to foster relationships with our leads while qualifying them so that the sales team focuses on prospects who are ready to buy.

Let's say we have a top-of-the-funnel lead generation engine where website visitors convert on eBooks and guides. Our goal is now to bridge the gap between where they're at in their journey vs. where we want them to go and so we aim to convert 500 leads to MQLs by the end of the year. We decide to do that through an ongoing educational email drip sequence, and we start with our objective:

• Specific - Convert Leads to MQLs.
• Measurable - From the existing number to 500.
• Attainable - Must ensure we already have a large enough pool to extract those MQLs from (or a fast-enough lead generation engine to supply them).
• Relevant - Must have a clear definition of what constitutes an MQL and a plan to obtain those parameters.
• Time-bound - By the year's end.

5. Boost the average monthly open rate.

In order for us to effectively nurture leads, we want people to be reading our content... which they won't do if they don't get past the subject line of the email. Here's how we position this concept into the concrete objective of increasing the monthly open rate from 25% to 40% in one quarter:

• Specific - Increase average monthly open rate.
• Measurable - From 25% to 40%.
• Attainable - Must analyze existing email tactics to identify gaps.
• Relevant - Must only include the most relevant marketing emails in the metrics to avoid skewing data.
• Time-bound - In one quarter

6. Increase our MQL to SQL conversion rate.

Never forget the primary goal of marketing, which is to promote an organization's goods or services in the effort of generating more sales. At the same time, fewer than half of marketers consider their departments aligned with sales.

A relevant goal might be to improve the effectiveness of our marketing efforts by solidifying the marketing to sales hand-off. Specifically, we’re aiming to increase MQL to SQL conversion rate from 25% to 35% by Q2. Our concrete objective might break down like this:

• Specific - Increase the MQL to SQL conversion rate.
• Measurable - From 25% to 35%.
• Attainable - Must ensure we already have a large enough pool to extract those SQLs from (or a fast-enough lead generation engine to supply them).
• Relevant - Must have a clear agreement between the marketing and sales departments for what constitutes an SQL.
• Time-bound - By Q2.

7. Improve overall NPS score.

Marketing doesn't end once the prospect becomes a customer, and that means also working on ways to fuel the flywheel i.e. turning customers into brand advocates who purchase from us and tell their friends to do the same.

NPS is a solid measurement of customer happiness, so improving that score — from 31 to 35 within 6 month — is a solid place to start building our objective:

• Specific - Improve the NPS score.
• Measurable - From 31 to 35.
• Attainable - Must analyze existing NPS roadblocks to identify gaps.
• Relevant - Must ensure there's a mechanism for collecting and analyzing NPS input.
• Time-bound - In 6 months.

8. Enhance Facebook engagement.

One of the best ways to grow a brand’s marketing efforts exponentially is by investing in its community of customers and prospects. The goal might be to stay top of mind and energize the community by raising the bar on each social media platform. For example, we might look to improve Facebook engagement by 30% month-over-month:

• Specific - Improve engagement on Facebook.
• Measurable - By 30%.
• Attainable - Must identify the content that's engaging our existing user base and see if 30% is a reasonable number to strive for.
• Relevant - Must ensure that there's a solid definition of what metrics are being counted as engagement.
• Time-bound - On a monthly rolling basis.

9. Increase total market share.

As digital markets become more crowded, it’s critical for companies to claim as much market share as possible — pulling even a few percentage points away from the competition can have significant benefits for your bottom line.

Let’s set a reasonable goal: Increasing total market share a 5% by the end of the year:

• Specific - Improve total market share
• Measurable - By 5%
• Attainable - Must identify areas of potential loss, such as customer churn, and areas of gain such as targeted advertising
• Relevant - Must ensure there’s a reliable way to regularly measure market share
• Time-bound - By the end of the year

10. Evaluate ad impact.

Advertisements help your brand get noticed — but are your ads doing their job? Here, our marketing objective is to compare the cost-per-click and conversion rate of two different ads using A/B testing on social media over the period of a month to determine which one drives better ROI:

• Specific - Determine the highest ad impact
• Measurable - Evaluated using cost-per-click
• Attainable - Must assess the impact of each ad and how many click-throughs it generates
• Relevant - Must ensure the same metrics are used for each ad to ensure an accurate comparison
• Time-bound - In one month
• Marketing Objectives: Metrics and KPIs

Once marketing objectives have been established, companies must identify and track specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to provide both immediate insights and set the stage for long-term strategic planning. Some of the most common metrics and KPIs include:

Sales Growth

Sales growth is measured using total revenue volume, number of units sold, or both. Increasing numbers mean growing sales — for best effect, monitor sales growth as a baseline and then during new marketing campaigns to evaluate your impact.

Profit Variance

Profit — also called return on investment (ROI) — isn’t simply a factor of sales and revenue. Instead, it depends on the amount of money your brand makes after material costs, marketing expenses, and other spending is subtracted. If material costs increase but sales remain steady, for example, profit will decrease. Monitoring profit variance helps ensure product prices drive ROI.

Total Market Share

The bigger your market share, the better. To calculate this metric, you need the market size of your local industry and its approximate total revenue.

Multiple your brand’s revenue by 100 and divide by the market’s total revenue to get a percentage market share. Recalculate this regularly to see if your share has improved.

New Customer Volumes

More customers mean more sales and more revenue. Along with measuring the total number of new customers over a specific time frame, it’s also worth evaluating customer increases in comparison to other time frames — such as when you’re running a sales or marketing event — along with considering the cost per customer, which is the total amount of money spent to acquire a new customer.

Lifetime Customer Value

Higher lifetime customer values mean more reliable revenue streams. To calculate this metric, multiply the average number of purchases made by return customers over a specific period with the average total value of these purchases. This provides an approximation of lifetime customer value to help inform ongoing marketing strategy.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates measure the percentage of people who take action when presented with the choice to opt-in for sales notifications, email newsletters, free trials, or who ultimately decide to make a purchase. It’s worth tracking conversion rates across all aspects of your website to see which marketing tools are delivering reliable results.

SEO Impact

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your brand rank higher with popular engines such as Google, in turn making it easier for customers to find your site.

Tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner can help you identify ways to improve your SEO, and you can quickly test how you stack up by searching for your brand’s target keyword and seeing where you show up in current search rankings.

Social Media Performance

Social media marketing is now critical to generate organic engagement and customer referrals. As a result, it’s worth tracking metrics such as the increase in follower numbers on a certain platform over a specific period, the number of comments left on your posts, and the number of times your posts are shared.

Tools to Track Marketing Objectives

You’ve got the model. You’ve identified the objectives, and you’ve defined the metrics. Now you need the right tools to track marketing objective success across your organization.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

The HubSpot Marketing Hub offers all the marketing tools and data you need, and all under one roof. From SEO strategy tools to ad tracking, social media management and live chat support, and a robust content creation platform, HubSpot can help your brand reach more people more quickly and boost total ROI.

2. Real-time Dashboards

Real-time dashboard tools provide right-now, single-pane-of-glass analysis of current sales performance, KPI progress, and other key metrics. Often hosted in the cloud, real-time dashboards make it possible for everyone in the organization to view current marketing goals and ensure business operations are aligned with specific outcomes.

3. Spreadsheets

While spreadsheets are often considered relatively low-tech and legacy deployments when compared to more robust marketing tools, they nonetheless offer actionable value. Tools such as Google Sheets and Excel are easy to use, easy to view, and offer an understanding of specific metric performance at a glance that can help inform current marketing efforts.

4. Website Analytics Trackers

Tools such as Webtrends and Google Analytics provide in-depth statistics about the number and type of users that visit your web page, along with key data such as how long they stayed, what they clicked on, and which actions (if any) were taken.

While website analytics alone aren’t enough to inform marketing efforts, they’re essential to help marketing teams refine overall strategy for maximum effect.

Starting SMART

Once you understand the importance of vision, identifying broad goals, and using the SMART goal framework to make concrete marketing objectives for those goals, it’s time to identify the gaps in your marketing and begin outlining your objectives.

Once you do, it’s important to write those objectives down and commit to creating a solid plan of action to achieving them.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in [Insert original publish date] and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

How to Set & Achieve Marketing Objectives in 2021 was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

SEO vs. PPC: When to Optimize and When to Pay for Traffic

Imagine you’ve just created an excellent new product, and you're excited to share your business with the world.

Unfortunately, you have no idea how to share this revolutionary product with as many of your target users as possible.

You’re not alone. Like you, many businesses face a similar problem regarding how to get their products in front of potential customers.

Most of the time, the solution to your problem boils down to choosing between two marketing strategies: search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

But which method is suitable for you? Is it better to pursue an organic-first approach and find consumers through search engine rankings, or is it better to invest in an advertisement at the top of a keyword results page?

In this article, we've explored what you can expect to achieve from each of these two acquisition strategies. We’ve also provided some pros and cons of SEO and PPC along with descriptive statistics and real-life examples to help you decide whether your business is best suited for SEO or PPC — or both.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of enhancing your website’s visibility to make it rank and gain organic traffic from search engines.

Just as you turn to your favorite search engines, such as Google or Bing, to look up a new marketing acronym or where to get good pizza, so do your consumers. When you invest in SEO, you're increasing the likelihood of your target audience finding you when they make a Google search for keywords related to your product or service.

For example, here’s Hubspot appearing at the top of Google’s organic results page for the term “inbound marketing,” thanks to the SEO strategy we have in place.

Most SEO strategies center around Google because it holds 92.24% of the search engine market share. As such, you’ll need to learn about Google’s 200 ranking factors, technical SEO, link building, content creation, and so much more if you want to appear higher up on the search engine results page.

Pros of SEO

Here are some advantages of SEO:

1. SEO is cheaper in the long run.

Although SEO might cost time and money —to pay freelancers or agencies, and for SEO tools — it’s still cheaper than PPC in the long run.

When you create content that ranks and drives traffic to your website, you no longer have to keep spending money to make your target customers see it. And when these customers decide to click on your link, it comes at zero cost, unlike a PPC campaign where you pay per click.

In the following image, you see that according to Ahrefs, Hubspot’s traffic value is a little over $22 million. Imagine we had to pay for every click we get.

Organic traffic is also very scalable and cost-effective.

2. You can target different funnel stages with SEO.

Not all of your audience is at the same stage of the sales funnel.

Some are just getting to know your brand at the top of the funnel. And others are already at the bottom of the funnel, ready to pull out their wallets.

With SEO, you can create different content types (blog posts, guides, case studies) that meet each segment of your audience exactly where they are in the sales funnel.

3. Search traffic is more stable.

Once you rank on Google, you can be sure of free traffic to your website or web pages as long as you keep optimizing them.

There’s also no off-and-on switch with SEO, unlike PPC marketing, where your website stops appearing on search results once your marketing budget dries up.

4. Organic listings build brand authority.

Appearing consistently on search results for keywords related to your products and services helps build trust and brand authority with your target audience.

It also signifies to Google that you’re an expert on that topic or subject.

Cons of SEO

Here are some reasons why you might not love SEO:

1. Search engine algorithms change.

Search engines, especially Google, have changed their algorithm many times over the years. These changes mean that you’ll have to keep a close eye on your marketing strategy and organic results.

2. You’ll need to optimize your website regularly.

Your job doesn’t end when you get your website to rank for target keywords. Over time, you’ll have to regularly optimize your content and web pages so that it continues to rank.

Optimization might include refreshing old articles and removing old/expired links.

3. SEO takes time to show results.

If your website or domain is new, it’s unlikely that you’ll enjoy immediate results from SEO. The reason is that many factors affect how Google ranks websites.

2. It requires high-level skills and expertise.

If you’re not hiring a professional, you’ll need to be an excellent writer and SEO expert to optimize your site for search engines properly.

It’s undoubtedly time-consuming and overwhelming to run a business while taking technical SEO, writing, and link-building classes.

What is PPC?

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) where an advertiser pays a publisher (such as Google or Facebook) every time someone clicks on the ad. This model allows advertisers to pay only when consumers interact with their ads — meaning you attract people interested in your offer and ready to make a purchase.

This method is mainly associated with search engines as advertisers bid on search keywords relevant to their target markets. You may have noticed that the top search results are tagged with an "Ad" marker.

The cost of PPC ads usually depends on your industry and the search volume of the keyword you’re targeting.

PPC advertising can help your business stay competitive in a crowded market and quickly get in front of their target consumers if you don’t have the domain authority to get your site ranking organically on search engines.

Pros of PPC

1. PPC offers quick results.

While it can take months to see results from your SEO strategy, it can take a few hours to see results from your PPC campaign.

2. PPC ads appear above organic rankings.

When you run a PPC campaign for your target keyword, your website would appear first on the search engine result page. This ranking makes your audience notice you first before scrolling to see other results.

3. PPC allows you to pinpoint your target audience.

While setting up a PPC campaign, you get to choose who you want to target with your ads.

Do you want people from a specific geographic area? Or people of a particular age? Marital status? Or interest? If so, then you should use PPC.

3. You can quickly run A/B tests on a PPC ad.

With a PPC campaign, you can run two different ads simultaneously to measure the one that converts better.

All you’ll have to do is change some ad elements like the ad copy and allow them to run for a period. Depending on the performance, you can decide to either “kill” the Google ads or continue optimization to improve your results.

Cons of PPC

1. PPC ads are expensive.

Without money, you cannot run a PPC campaign.

You have to pay for every link that your audience clicks, meaning once your budget dries up, so does your traffic.

Also, a PPC ad can get even more expensive (as high as $40) when you’re in a competitive industry like legal or insurance.

2. Lower profit margins.

While a PPC campaign might bring short-term wins, it’ll usually result in lower profit margins. Because PPC is a “pay to play” system, your customer acquisition costs (CAC) would continue to get higher without a significant increase in the prices of your products and services.

3. PPC ads become stale after a while.

You have limited control over your paid ad because of the rule set by ad platforms like Google. As such, your copy might have similar wording to your competitors, which makes it easy for your audience to pass over quickly.

SEO vs. PPC

Search engine optimization (SEO) can help your content rank high on search engines, making it more likely that your audience would click and trust your content.

SEO is also more effective for local searches and can grow your online presence for longer. Pay-per-click (PPC), on the other hand, is an acquisition strategy that requires you to spend ad money to get your content in front of an audience when they search for specific keywords online.

SEO vs. PPC: Which is better?

Asking which is better between SEO and PPC is like asking whether it’s better to eat with a fork or spoon — it depends.

Serving pasta? Sure, I’d love a fork. Soup? I’d rather have a spoon.

In the same way, different situations exist where SEO is better than PPC and vice versa.

Let’s now look at some of these situations.

Use SEO if...

• Your marketing budget is low.
• You want to build your brand authority.
• You’re looking to maximize your long-term return-on-investment (ROI).
• You want to create content that reaches your audience at different stages of the sales funnel.

Use PPC if...

You’d get better results with PPC in situations where:

• You want quick results.
• Your product is novel or first-of-its-kind.
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive offer, like a holiday sale.
• You want to direct your audience to a sales or landing page.

How to Make SEO and PPC Work For You

Instead of choosing between SEO or PPC, why not combine the two strategies and make them work for you?

Here’s how you can get the best of both worlds.

1. Create retargeting ads.

Did someone visit your site, probably the pricing or check-out page, without buying?

You can easily use a retargeting ad to prompt these visitors, even after they’ve left your site, to come back and make a purchase.

2. Promote website content with social media ads.

While you want your content to rank organically, you can give it a quick boost by promoting it on social media.

Not only do these kinds of ads help with content distribution, but they could potentially help you acquire essential backlinks that’d boost your rankings.

Also, it’s going to be a shame not to promote your latest blog post, guide, report, or case study after spending hours creating it.

3. Collect data From ads to improve your SEO strategy.

PPC campaigns grant you access to a lot of data — keyword search volumes, keywords your competitors are bidding for, highest converting calls-to-action, and so on.

Aimed with all of this data, you’d be able to create better SEO strategies with less effort.

SEO vs. PPC Statistics

SEO

1. Google is responsible for over 92% of global web traffic.
2. 90.63% of online content get zero traffic from Google, with only 0.21% getting over 1000 visits per month.
3. 46.40% of browser-based Google searches resulted in an organic link click.
4. 99.2% of website pages have less than 100 backlinks.
5. Google processes over 7 billion searches per day (or 2.5 trillion searches per year.)
6. SEO drives almost 100% more traffic than paid traffic.
7. 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results (e.g., “click to call” option).
8. 64% of marketers actively invest in SEO.
9. 76% of B2B search traffic is trackable.
10. 18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, whereas only 7% of non-local searches led to a sale.

PPC

1. 390 out of 506 surveyed by Clutch say they recognize a paid search ad when they see it.
2. The Google Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users worldwide.
3. Search advertising spend is expected to exceed $170 billion in 2021.
4. More than 763 million devices use Adblock. As a consumer, Adblock is amazing. It stops all those eerily targeted ads from popping up on your Facebook feed. However, as a marketer, it can be frustrating to invest in PPC if vast numbers of your target consumers will never see your ad. Additionally, ad blocking has increased 15-30% in the last four years.
5. PPC Ads can boost awareness by 80%. Despite ad blockers, PPC is still effective in increasing your brand's reach and awareness.
6. The highest average monthly cost-per-click (CPC) in Google Ads search advertising is in the insurance industry at $18.57 per click.
7. The cheapest CPC in Google Ads search advertising is in the electronics industry at 83 cents per click.
8. The average Facebook Ads Click-Through Rate across all industries is 0.89%. The Pets and Animals industry has the highest CTR while the lowest rates come from the Science industry.
9. The average Facebook Ads cost-per-click (CPC) is $1.68 across industry. Advertisers in the Finance industry have the highest average CPC ($3.89), while Food and Drinks have the lowest average CPC ($0.42)
10. Google's algorithm updates don't affect PPC. While not a stat per se, a significant benefit of PPC is that it's immune to Google's changing SERP ranking algorithm. In 2018, Google reported that they had updated their algorithm 3,234 times! If you're using the SEO method, you have to adjust your content optimization to rank better according to the updated algorithm requirements.
11. 75% of marketers from Clutch’s survey say it's easier to find what they're looking for from paid ads. The first page of search engine results — especially the few hits — gets the vast majority of clicks due to the combination of ease of use and finding what the searcher is looking for. Bidding on target keywords through PPC accomplishes both of these needs: the paid ads are easy to find at the top of the SERP, and they answer the searcher’s question.

Final Thoughts

Whether you choose to go with SEO or PPC ultimately depends on your business situation. So take your time to evaluate the pro and cons of both SEO and PPC to see which is the right fit for you. And if possible, integrate the two strategies to see even more outstanding results for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

SEO vs. PPC: When to Optimize and When to Pay for Traffic was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

Facebook Analytics is Going Away: Should Marketers Really Worry?

As marketers, we crave data.

Each day, our analytics platforms help us define who our audience is, measure how well we’re tracking them, and determine what strategies we should take on next.

And, if an analytics platform is free or affordable to use, that’s an even bigger bonus to teams in SMBs or startups.

That’s why many marketers were caught off-guard when Facebook announced that it will be sunsetting its free Facebook Analytics tool on June 30th.

But, while Facebook’s announcement might seem a bit scary, it might only impact a small number of businesses.

"Even though this tool is going away, we continue to invest in measurement products that provide insights and data analysis capabilities," the short Facebook announcement said. 

Below, we’ll explain why Facebook's removing its Analytics feature, why you might not need to panic, and alternatives you can use to get similar data about your audiences.

Why Facebook is Sunsetting Analytics

Facebook Analytics launched in 2018 as a free alternative to platforms like Google Analytics (GA). On top of tracking all your Facebook Business Page data in one place, users could also create and embed Facebook tracking pixels on their websites to see how audiences behaved and what their customer journey looked like.

Image Source

Facebook Analytics could also give brands a look at your Facebook page’s details and audience demographics to help brands better inform their strategies.

Because much of the information shown on Facebook Analytics can now be found through other competitive and affordable data platforms — as well as Facebook’s Insights, Business Suite, Ads Manager, and Events Manager — Facebook decided to discontinue Analytics in an effort to consolidate its tools.

While Facebook hasn’t said if online privacy trends were a factor in its decision, the pivot comes at a time when Google and Apple have already begun to limit data tracking through the planned phase-out of third-party cookies and Apple’s recent IOS 14.5 opt-in requirements for mobile app tracking.

Because of the ongoing moves towards data privacy, it seems that Facebook could also prevent future data concerns with the streamlining of nearly extraneous Analytics tools.

How Marketers Can Prepare

Until June 30, brands can still access Facebook Analytics and download reports of all the data they might need.

To export data into a CSV file from Facebook Analytics on your desktop, click the [share icon] in the top-right corner of each chart or table," Facebook advises. 

Aside from downloading data, brands that used the tool should also consider alternatives that can highlight similar data. Although Facebook Analytics was a helpful tool for some businesses looking for free or cheap platforms, there are affordable alternatives that can help you track your customer’s journey from social media to on-site conversion.

Below is just a quick list of Facebook Analytics alternatives to consider.

Facebook Analytics Alternatives

Free Tools

Facebook Business Suite

Once Facebook Analytics is no more, Facebook will encourage Business Page admins to use its Business Suite, which allows users to connect and track multiple Instagram and Facebook Business Pages at once.

Image Source

At the moment, Facebook Business Suite is still rolling out and might not be available for some admins just yet. However, the tools below can help you fill your data gaps as you wait.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is an analytics dashboard where you can track business page user behavior and post performance. You can also see insights like page views, post reach for paid and organic posts, and competitor page data.

If you have a Facebook Business Page, you’ve probably used Facebook Insights to gather data that can fuel your social media tactics. Luckily, Facebook says Insights won’t be impacted by the removal of Facebook Analytics.

To learn more about Facebook Insights if you’ve never used it before, check out this blog post.

Facebook Ads and Events Managers

Facebook Ads Manager and Facebook Events Manager help you launch and track ads and website conversion events attached to your Facebook Business Page.

While Ads Manager lets you view, edit, and track your Facebook campaigns, ads, and ad sets, Events Manager lets you use Facebook's pixel and Conversions API to track and report on actions visitors take on your website, app, or even in your physical store. To use Events Manager, you'll need to add the Facebook Pixel code to your website to make it trackable. Instructions for this can be found on Facebook's business knowledge base.

Paid Tools

HubSpot

HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software not only enables you to link and share posts on your Facebook account, but you can also track conversions and other engagements.

HubSpot's social media tools can help you understand which of your marketing tactics are working best among your audience, determine how your marketing efforts are impacting your bottom line, see if your campaigns result in more paid or organic social media sessions, and learn about your search engine optimization (SEO)-related ROI.

Additionally, if your website is built on HubSpot's CMS or has a HubSpot tracking code installed, you can track site conversions, traffic, and traffic sources to learn more about where your audiences are coming from and what they engage with.

Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is often seen as a high-end analytics tool, it certainly has a lot of great features that have helped marketers around the globe to transform their strategy.

While it will likely take a bit of onboarding and training for your team GA allows you to see traffic patterns, traffic sources, visitor demographics, and visitor behavior among a plethora of other helpful insights.

For a crash course on Google Analytics with photos, check out this Ultimate Guide.

Navigating Data Software Shifts

As the world evolves towards more online privacy and streamlined technology, Facebook probably isn't the only platform that will change or evolve in years to come.

As a modern marketer, it’s important to know when to invest in new analytics platforms, alternatives, or workarounds if the tools you use are no longer relevant.

For tips on developing effective data-driven strategies, download the free resource below.

Facebook Analytics is Going Away: Should Marketers Really Worry? was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

8 of the Top Marketing Challenges Faced Globally [New Data + Expert Tips]

Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.

Whatever the case may be, there's always at least one area you can improve to turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator. 

But marketing is often fast-paced, so it can be difficult to identify which areas you'll want to develop to facilitate stronger growth in 2021 and beyond. For that reason, it's important to pause for a moment and reflect on the biggest challenges marketers feel they're going to face this year.

Why? Because problems are much easier to tackle once you've correctly identified them. 

So ... what's happening in 2021?

Below, let's review the current global marketing issues impacting the industry, according to marketing experts.

Biggest Marketing Challenges [New Data]

To start, I surveyed over 120 marketers to gauge the biggest challenges affecting the industry as a whole. 

By far, "Generating traffic and leads" was marked by nearly half as the biggest challenge marketers are facing this year. 

This challenge was followed by 21% who said "providing ROI for your marketing activities" was their biggest challenge. 

"Delivering an account-based marketing strategy" (8%), "securing enough budget" (6%), and "managing your website" (5%) were the other three notable challenges marketers feel they're facing in 2021. 

It's important to note, a few other marketers marked "targeting content for an international audience", "training your team", and "hiring top talent" as their top challenge ... but these three challenges were marked by less than 3% of the respondent pool, so they're less statistically significant. 

Let's dive into these in more detail, along with expert tips to combat these challenges, next. 

1. Generating Traffic and Leads

Generating enough traffic and leads is the top global marketing challenge in 2021, according to the data mentioned above.

HubSpot's new State of Marketing report supports this — in fact, "Generating more leads" is the top priority of marketers in 2021. 

Why It's a Challenge

John Lee, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft Advertising, believes that generating leads will be a particularly big challenge for marketers in 2021. He told me, "Getting quality traffic isn't a challenge today, and likely won't be tomorrow. There has been growth in search and content marketing in 2021. New channels continue to surface and show promise, too (TikTok or audio chat rooms anyone?)."

"Through the 2nd half of 2021 and beyond, the challenges will lie elsewhere – maintain and growing leads or sales, tracking and scaling, etc."

Lee adds, "'Sea change' is the phrase that comes to mind for the state of digital marketing today. Change in the realm of privacy, identity, and changes to cookies. Change in the form of lost data clarity (will cookie-based conversion tracking continue to work, GA4, access to search queries, etc.). And all of this sits within the context of change to how and where we work and economies in flux as the world continues to move through the pandemic."

Fortunately, privacy changes doesn't mean the end of generating leads — it simply means learning how to re-think strategy. As Lee told me, "To weather this storm of change, marketers need to be vigilant in monitoring and understanding industry-wide acceptance of privacy protocols and updates to search, social, and display/native platforms (consumer-side and marketing/advertising-side). And last, but not least — lean into the power of peer support and networking for sharing best practices and learning."

Additionally, marketers are struggling with producing enough demand for their content. And as the years progress and competition stiffens, this will only become truer. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it's hard to know where to focus your efforts.

What Can You Do?

When it comes to creating content that produces enough traffic and leads, marketers should ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of content people would pay for? And, do you know the type of content your audience actually wants?

For instance, when asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service in 2021, 69% said they’d prefer to watch a short video over a text-based article, infographic, or ebook. This means, if most of your product-related content is in ebook format, you could be missing out on the majority of consumers who prefer video.

Additionally, the length of videos produced by businesses is increasing. In fact, the number of videos in the 30-60 minute category grew 140% in 2021, compared to 2019 — suggesting that long-form video content is becoming a more popular option for companies. 

To ensure you're creating content that resonates best with your audience, you'll want to refer to analytics often. Use effective tools to properly track the types of content that performs best with your audience to generate more leads in 2021. 

Additionally, once you know you're creating the type of content your audience wants, the focus shifts to promoting it in a way that makes your audience take notice.

More than ever before, people are being flooded with content. Consumers don't have to use a search engine to find answers. Instead, articles fill their news feed or buzz in their pocket via mobile notifications. To keep up, consider exploring alternate distribution methods — like social media or podcasting — to increase brand awareness. 

2. Providing the ROI of Your Marketing Activities

Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a top marketing challenge globally year-over-year.

In fact, when asked how confident marketers are when making budgeting decisions to invest in programs that influence revenue, roughly half (48%) said they were only somewhat confident.

It continues to be a vital way for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign or piece of content.

Plus, proving ROI often goes hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.

Why It's a Challenge

Although return on investment is a crucial stat that shows your campaigns success or progress, tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn't always easy, especially if you don't have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.

What Can You Do?

Providing ROI often comes down to using effective analytics measurement tools. For instance, Beautiful.ai Director of Marketing Kim Giroux told me, "Marketers are constantly challenged to illustrate the ROI of their efforts and 2021 is no exception. Proving ROI doesn't always have to mean extra work or effort though. In fact, certain technologies bake ROI into existing work processes."

Giroux adds, "Take presentation software, for instance. Savvy marketers today can create and use pitch decks with built-in presentation analytics that offer real-time data — such as how much time was spent viewing individual slides. Armed with these insights, marketers can better gauge stakeholder interest, inform their strategies, and adjust their campaigns."

Christina Mautz, CMO of Moz, believes measuring ROI comes down to redefining the marketing process as a whole. She told me, "My biggest challenge, and one all marketers face in providing ROI, is the prospect of meeting traditional KPIs in the modern workspace."

Mautz says, "Instead of leads and trade show success, marketing wins are now largely digital: engaging prospects and generating more clicks, downloads, and page visits."

CMO of Moz Christina Mautz says, "To better measure marketing progress, we have to redefine the marketing process, encouraging collaboration with sales and reaching KPIs together."

"For example, statistics such as page visits per sale or rising higher in the search engine results page (SERP) give marketers and SEOs tangible evidence as to how their work is meeting their ROI. New buying patterns and a customer-centric world require a divergence from the old, but measuring ROI will look far different than it did before and some leaders may not understand how or why."

When it comes to providing ROI, there's a strong case to be made for dedicating time and resources to establishing links between marketing activities and sales results. This means using both marketing software (like HubSpot) and a CRM solution (like HubSpot's free CRM), and then tying them together to close the loop between your marketing and sales efforts with a service-level agreement (SLA). That way, you can directly see how many leads and customers are generated through your marketing activities.

3. Securing Enough Budget

How can you create a winning marketing campaign without a budget? The truth is, it's pretty hard. But, even when you have a great, revenue-generating idea, you still usually need to get your budget approved by a higher-up.

Particularly in the aftermath of the global pandemic, some companies don't have the means to increase marketing budgets in 2021. As a result, marketers are faced with the challenge of achieving high levels of growth with minimal financial support. 

Why It's a Challenge

Securing more budget is a pressing challenge for marketing globally. And often, getting more budget is easier said than done — especially for smaller organizations that aren't working with sizable or flexible marketing spend.

But the key to securing more money for your team might not be that complex. Here's what you can do.

What Can You Do?

The key to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. According to our report, organizations that can calculate ROI are more likely to receive higher budgets.

Again, success with inbound marketing also plays a large role in driving higher budgets. Effective strategies obviously produce results and make a strong case for increasing budget. But remember, inbound marketing is a long game. If you get off to a slow start, you shouldn’t back off — in fact, you might consider doubling down.

To learn more about how to understand and leverage marketing ROI, check out this simple guide.

4. Managing Your Website

In 2021, 64% of companies are investing in website upgrades. 

Although managing a website is consistently a challenge to marketers, it seems to be growing less threatening. In the data mentioned above, only 5% of marketers listed "managing your website" as a top challenge. 

Why It's Still a Challenge

Chances are, your website's performance is high on your list of priorities — particularly since website speed and performance plays a major role in your website's SEO ranking. It's an asset that works around the clock to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you hit your goals.

Issues with website management include a variety of different factors, from writing and optimizing the content to designing beautiful webpages. Here are a few things marketers can do to deal with this challenge.

What Can You Do?

First, try HubSpot's free website grader to determine how your website stacks up on key metrics including SEO, mobile, and security performance — and how you can improve it. 

If your primary challenge with managing a website has to do with the skills and resources you have available, you aren't alone. This is especially true for small companies who don't have all the talent in-house required to cover content, optimization, design, and back-end website management.

One solution? Hire freelancers and agency partners. To find freelancers, we recommend:

• Tapping into your personal and professional network by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks with a description of what you're looking for.
• Browsing freelance writers and designers based on their portfolios and areas of interest. For writers, check out Zerys and Contently. For designers, check out Behance & Elance.
• Browsing HubSpot's Services Marketplace, which lists a wide variety of designers from partner companies and agencies we've deemed credible.

Overall, you can make website management easier on your team by hosting your website on a platform that integrates all your marketing channels like HubSpot's COS.

Finally, for the projects you want to keep in-house, here is a list of ebooks and guides that might be helpful to your team:

• Run a Website Grader report
• Ebook: Website Redesign Guide
• Ebook: 77 Brilliant Homepage Design Examples
• Ebook: How to Design and Optimize Landing Pages
• Blog: 27 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
• Ebook: The Ultimate Workbook for Redesigning Your Website
• Ebook: The Marketer's Guide to Mobile

5. Targeting Content for an International Audience

Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing.

With 65% of marketers currently marketing internationally, and at least one-third of marketers planning to initiate an international strategy in 2021, it's important to have an international strategy.

To be more effective at targeting, one of the first things any marketer needs do is identify their buyer personas to determine to whom they should be marketing.

Why It's a Challenge

If you're expanding internationally, it can be a big challenge not only to figure out the best ways to market to an international audience, but also how to to organize and optimize your site for different countries.

Here are a few other top challenges when marketing internationally: 

Image Source

What Can You Do?

Download our free ebook, The Global Marketing Playbook. There are some really helpful tips in there that'll help give you some direction on global marketing, including how to identify your top three growth markets, how to explore local trends, and tips on choosing the best localization providers.

Additionally, when marketing to a new region, the most common tactic marketers use is to shift their product offering.

Remember, your website visitors might speak a plethora of different languages and live in totally different time zones.

To make your content appealing to a wide audience, you'll need to keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of seasonal references, translating units of measure and monetary references, and giving translators the tools and permissions to customize and adapt content for a specific audience when they need to.

When in doubt, solve for local or cultural challenges by hiring locally. With a newly hybrid workforce, physical location is no longer a limit to who you can hire. 

Finally, be sure you're optimizing your website for international visitors, too. For more SEO-related tips and resources on global marketing expansion, take a look at How SEO is Different Around the World, According to HubSpot Content Strategists.

6. Training Your Team

As companies scale and technologies continue to evolve, training your team will become a greater challenge for marketers.

Why It's a Challenge

Whether it's training them on the concepts and tools they'll be using every day or making sure they're achieving their full potential, the struggle is real across the board.

To combat this, I’ll share some tips I’ve used during my trainings to make sure the concepts and tool tips stick and have a lasting effect on your team and your marketing.

What Can You Do?

To get an overall idea of where your team stands, take a few minutes to assess each of your team members' marketing strengths and weaknesses, levels of expertise, and passion/commitment to your company.

Then, objectively rate the priority (or level of importance) of their expertise and their contribution to bottom line objectives (ROI) to date. Here's a simple assessment tool from Lean Labs to help you evaluate your team so you can figure out who needs recognition and who needs coaching.

You also might consider requiring your team members to rack up some online marketing certification. HubSpot Academy, for example, offers certifications, documentation, and training programs to help people master the basics of inbound marketing. Google also offers training and certifications on analytics with their online Analytics Academy.

What about new hire training, specifically? We recommend creating a training plan for new team members. Here at HubSpot, each new marketer is given a document to lay out specific goals and help new hires demonstrate their effectiveness. To create your own 30, 60, or 90 day plan for new hires, take a look at The 30-60-90 Day Plan: Your Guide for Mastering a New Job [Template + Example]. 

7. Hiring Top Talent

Hiring top talent is another challenge marketers commonly report experiencing.

Why It's a Challenge

Many companies are shifting more resources to inbound marketing, which means higher and higher demand for top marketing talent. But supply simply isn't keeping up. From sourcing the right candidates to evaluating for the right skills, finding the perfect person could take months ... or more.

What's more, the type of marketing talent companies are looking for is changing, too. According to a 2020 report from LinkedIn, employers are seeking marketers with soft creative skill sets as well as hard technical skills. And the quick rate at which the demand for these jobs are rising has caused a marketing skills gap, "making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing."

What Can You Do?

Stefanie Grieser, co-founder of Shine Bootcamp, a professional speaker accelerator for women, understands the challenge of hiring top talent.

She told me, "When I talk to high-growth companies or marketing agencies (and the marketers running those teams), I've found that hiring not only top talent, but diverse top talent is extremely challenging. In fact, I was just having a conversation with an agency owner who hires SEO and paid marketers, and he told me, 'Hiring is still the biggest challenge we face.'"

In 2021, hiring talent can be incredibly difficult — particularly as more companies become competitive with 4-day work weeks, transparent salaries on job descriptions, and the adoption of remote work, which enables companies to hire anywhere.

Fortunately, Grieser provided me with a few tips for employers to stand out from the crowd. She told me, "My suggestion here is for marketers to invest heavily in their employer brand for the long-term. Just like you need to market your product, you also need to dedicate resources, time and energy into marketing your company as an employer."

Grieser adds, "I would suggest Diversity Tech Co, Tech Ladies, and Girlboss as go-to resources to post jobs. These organizations are run by incredible individuals who really care about diversity, equity, inclusion and intersectionality. I'm also seeing niche communities and job boards pop up. For marketers specifically, I would post your open roles here: Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group, Hey Marketers, and Superpath (which is focused on content marketers specifically)."

While it might seem random to discuss employer branding in a post about marketing challenges, it isn't — since it's often the marketing team that cultivates a strong employer brand.

As Grieser points out, "Airbnb has an Engineering and Data Science blog, Intercom has an Instagram dedicated to their design team, and Dooly posts short, LinkedIn posts (see an example here) interviewing their fun team with a few fun hashtags #doolydreamteam and #meetadooligan."

"Guess who leads this initiative? The marketing team. Think about how you and your team can showcase your work and your team's work. I won't try to assume that employer brand falls solely in your court, but as a marketer, you have natural skills that will lend themselves to marketing the company as whole."

LinkedIn data from 2020 shows that 87% of active and passive job candidates will consider new job opportunities. Additionally, the number one reason candidates will consider or accept a job is career growth. This means that job listings and a company culture that offers employees a plan for growth will see the most interest from talent.

8. Delivering an Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a new trend, which is a growth strategy in which marketing and sales collaborate to create a personalized buying experience for an identified set of accounts.

However, interestingly, the most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience.

Why It's a Challenge

Currently, there isn't a lot of software that's focused on account-based marketing. Many companies that are implementing ABM strategies are using manual methods, which means some accounts are getting lost in the cracks.

However, marketers strongly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data management (43%) are keys to ABM's success.

What Can You Do?

To deliver a more personalized experience, you should use a software that helps you combine your sales and marketing information.

For example, HubSpot's ABM software help unite your marketing and sales teams with collaborative, intuitive ABM tools that create seamless buying experiences for your highest-value accounts.

This software can enable collaboration among teams and personalize content.

Additionally, HubSpot's software has account-level targeting added to the LinkedIn Ads integration, giving you the ability to target companies by target account status or tier, and contacts or subsets of contacts at target accounts.

The account overview sidebar, the ABM playbook for sales reps, and a native integration to link your HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts, help further deepen your relationships with people over time, helping build more authentic connections with stakeholders within each account.

Does your company face any of these marketing issues?

A thorough analysis of your marketing strategy and its current performance will help you discover where your biggest marketing opportunity lies. This will allow you to focus on improving the areas that need the most attention, so you can start making your marketing far more effective.

If you're faced with a challenge and want ideas on how to best tackle it, you can always consider getting some help by any of the various types of marketing training that are available.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated for freshness and comprehensiveness.

8 of the Top Marketing Challenges Faced Globally [New Data + Expert Tips] was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns