Marketing has a broad scope, so it’s no surprise that a marketing manager typically wears many hats. One day, they’re dissecting website traffic after a viral moment on social; the next, they’re brainstorming how to use satisfied customers’ testimonials in an email campaign. They may also explore new marketing channels, develop a marketing strategy, generate leads, manage a budget, and coordinate with their team and other stakeholders, all to reach and convert more potential customers.

With so much happening at any given time, setting clear goals and defining key metrics to measure success are critical. This article explores the importance of goal setting with your marketing manager, as well as some of the most common objectives.

Why is it important to create goals for your marketing manager?

Marketing manager goals are specific, measurable objectives that guide a marketing manager’s priorities and help evaluate their performance. They transform broad responsibilities into focused targets that drive business growth.

Defining marketing manager goals creates clarity for both your marketing manager and their supervisor. When your marketing manager knows what’s expected of them, they can plan appropriately and have honest conversations with you about objectives and progress. This also ensures that all stakeholders share the same vision.

A common framework for outlining manager objectives is through SMART goals, which can help formulate realistic, measurable objectives. You can also define business goals by time frame—short-, mid-, or long-term—or by type, such as financial, growth-based, or operational.

7 crucial marketing manager goals

1. Raise brand awareness
2. Strengthen lead quality
3. Boost website traffic
4. Optimize marketing spend
5. Improve key conversion metrics
6. Increase social media engagement
7. Elevate email performance

These goals keep your marketing managers focused on achieving strategic brand objectives: 

1. Raise brand awareness

One of the primary goals for marketing managers is to increase brand awareness. This is vital, as it attracts new customers, builds trust with existing buyers, and develops your brand’s image and perception. Digital marketing through targeted ads, influencer relationships, and search engine optimization (SEO) might be the best method for some businesses, while others might find success with word of mouth or physical marketing techniques like direct mail, brand merchandise, and billboard advertising. 

Key metrics to track:

• Branded search volume. Tells you how many people searched for your brand name. An increase in this metric signals rising brand awareness. 

• Social media impressions. This gives you an idea of how often users see your social content.

• Social media engagement. This is an all-encompassing term for the likes, reposts, reactions, and comments your social content receives. Higher social media engagement means people recognize and interact with your brand.

• Social media account growth. This tracks your number of followers across channels. More followers indicate people are learning about and interested in your brand. 

• Direct website traffic. Typically, these are people who typed your website’s URL directly into their browser. This helps marketers quantify general brand awareness and word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are three tips to help you kickstart better brand awareness:

• Develop an SEO strategy. This means you’ll optimize your website, blog posts, videos, and social posts with the right keywords and content to match user search intent.

• Make it simple for customers to buy. This means reducing friction between finding your brand and purchasing, which could involve setting up social selling, adding one-click checkout to your store, or optimizing your checkout flow.

• Personalize your marketing. Get personal with your marketing initiatives through targeted advertising and tailored emails with product ideas, rewards, and deals that relate to a customer’s past purchases.

2. Strengthen lead quality

As in many areas of marketing, quality over quantity applies to lead generation, too. Bringing in more leads of a higher quality, rather than focusing only on volume, can result in more sales. These potential customers often have a demonstrated need for the product or service and greater intent to purchase.

Key metrics to track success include:

• Lead quality. This metric tells you how likely a lead is to purchase your product, which helps determine who is worth interacting with and marketing to.

• Lead value. This is an estimation of how much a lead will spend with you. The greater the spend, the higher their value, which is vital for finding quality leads.

• Cost per lead (CPL). CPL is how much it costs the company to acquire a lead. Usually, the goal is to lower this cost while still retaining quality leads.

To improve your lead quality, conduct deep audience research and build personas for your potential customers. This helps you better communicate with them and develop personalized, valuable content surrounding your offering. Using a lead management system can give managers a centralized platform for seeing and directly interacting with leads, and a way to measure outcomes. 

3. Boost website traffic

Another goal that marketing managers should build into their marketing strategy is increasing the volume of visits to the brand’s website. In addition to driving sales, increased web traffic can lead visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, share your website with a friend, or follow your brand on another platform.

Key web analytics to focus your reporting on:

• Page views. This tells you the traffic volume of specific pages on your website, revealing what information or products are most interesting to visitors.

• Bounce rate. A metric for understanding what percentage of visitors leave your site after visiting one page. This can help you craft better customer journeys and web pages that are more enticing to visit.

• Time on page. Captures how long visitors spend on a specific page, helping you compare various web pages and identify areas for improvement. 

• New vs. returning. This tells you who has visited your site before and who hasn’t. It can give insight into how often people return vs. how many new leads are viewing your products.

Managers should review paid and organic search traffic metrics to understand where visitors are coming from and develop channel-specific strategies to boost website traffic. Tactics might include creating an SEO-driven blog to rank on search engines, adding keyword-rich website copy, and running paid ads that drive people to the site.

4. Optimize marketing spend

Work with your marketing manager to create a marketing budget to help the department avoid over- or underspending and make the best use of available financial resources. Marketing managers need to track the budget, analyze results, and suggest more efficient ways to allocate spend. 

Key metrics to monitor:

• Marketing ROI. A vital metric for this goal is marketing return on investment (ROI), which shows how effective a business’s marketing efforts are at increasing revenue. 

• Return on advertising spend (ROAS). ROAS is another crucial metric that shows how much revenue the business gets from ad spending across channels. 

• Customer lifetime value (CLV). This helps marketers understand how much profit a company earns over the course of an entire customer relationship. Knowing CLV can tell you at what point it’s best to spend money on ads and marketing within a customer’s journey. 

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Informs how much additional spending is needed to acquire a target number of new customers. Marketing managers also compare their CAC to CLV to understand whether their marketing is profitable.

Because a marketing strategy encompasses so many initiatives, structure can help you stay organized. Marketers can lean on their seven Ps framework (product, price, promotion, place, people, packaging, and process) to evaluate each area of their marketing mix and identify where to spend and where to save. 

Consider having a check-in each fiscal quarter to get a rundown of how it’s going and make sure your manager has useful tools at their disposal for managing this money, such as financial accounting software and applications for reporting, like QuickBooks, Wave, or Xero.

5. Improve key conversion metrics

There are many business metrics to track, but one of the most valuable for marketing managers is conversion. Conversion tells you who is taking the actions you want them to on your site, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter list. Knowing how often people are converting signals whether your sales funnels, marketing content, and customer journeys are effective. 

When you define SMART marketing objectives with your marketing manager, conversion should be at the heart of these goals. To optimize your conversion rate, start by improving your copy across the site, from product descriptions to blog posts. Simplify the calls to action (CTAs) across your social platforms and website so they’re easier to click on and clear about what leads are buying or signing up for. Finally, share testimonials and reviews that speak to the quality and usefulness of your product and, in turn, customers’ satisfaction with it. 

Besides conversion rate, key marketing metrics to measure success include:

• Customer retention. This is the rate at which customers return to your site within a certain time period. It indicates how well the business keeps customers coming back.

• Customer churn. Captures how many customers stop purchasing or returning to your site within a certain time period. Ways to reduce churn include improving your customer experience, ensuring your products are in stock, and offering incentives to existing customers.

6. Increase social media engagement

Marketing managers may also take the helm of social media initiatives, with the goal of increasing engagement. This involves developing a content plan and strategy that speaks to your existing followers and draws new people in. A 1% to 5% engagement rate is viewed as good, but this varies based on channel and industry. It’s an important goal that helps you connect with customers, build a community, and create another way for people to interact with your brand.

Key metrics to track success include:

• Reach. Helps you better quantify your brand awareness and the impact of your marketing efforts by showing how many people are seeing your content.

• Follower count. This is the number of followers you have on any given platform. The aim is to increase this in order to gather more leads, build a community, and garner more sales.

• Likes. Shows the number of likes a post gets. It can indicate content that resonates with your audience (and posts that don’t).

• Saves. This is the number of people who have bookmarked your post to come back to. It points to content that’s particularly useful, evergreen, or important to your followers. 

• Shares. A metric that tells you how many times your content has been shared, reposted, or sent to someone within a person’s network. Like saves and likes, it can tell you what people are interested in and willing to spread the word about.

• Mentions. This is the number of times your brand name (or social media handle) is tagged or mentioned across a platform. It’s an indicator for brand awareness and helps you understand how people are talking about your brand. 

• Branded hashtags. This is the number of times that phrases or keywords related specifically to your brand show up on a social platform. Hashtags are useful for making your brand easy to discover, developing brand perception, and partaking in social listening.

To boost social engagement, start by analyzing your current performance and then select a couple of metrics to start improving first. Explore and research who your audience is, as this informs what kind of content they’re most likely to like, share, and interact with. Then, create a content plan that’s unique to each channel you post on. For instance, TikTok users look for engaging, short-form videos, whereas Pinterest users are after pleasing images or informative Pins (Pinterest posts), like how-tos or guides.

7. Elevate email performance

Email marketing presents a strong opportunity to generate leads and better reach your target audience. Developing healthy email stats (like an engaged subscriber list and a strong conversion rate) means you have a good database of engaged people who regularly interact with your brand.

Key email marketing metrics to track:

• Open rate. This is how many people open your emails. It can point to successful subject lines and content that encourage people to open and interact. 

• Click-through rate. This metric tracks how many people follow the website links you put within an email. Improving this involves creating concise or engaging CTAs and links that are relevant to readers.

• Conversion rate. Shows the percentage of people who follow through on your call to action in the context of email. A higher conversion rate means people are completing the action, and that your content is appealing to them.

• Unsubscribe rate. A stat that best shows disengagement, as this is the percentage of people who opt out of receiving your brand’s emails. You can check to see which campaigns cause the most unsubscribes and improve from there. 

• Email ROI. Specifically related to email, this tells you how much revenue you earn in return for sending out emails. Tracking this can help you determine which campaigns and flows see the biggest returns.