This blog post was originally written in 2023. We’ve recently updated the post in November 2024 to address changes in the marketing landscape in 2025.
While the information in the original article was still valid and based on foundational best practices, we wanted to include a game changer for business owners—the addition of AI when assessing marketing performance, setting business goals for 2025, and clearly defining SMART marketing goals to drive business success. – Michelle
Your goals for marketing may not be top of mind as the year winds down, but it’s important to review them and plan for next year.
For 2025, business and marketing goals need to align from the beginning to drive business growth and success. Get ahead of goals by starting now, auditing your current marketing to see what’s working, what’s not, and where to invest the bulk of your marketing budget to show real return on investment (ROI).
The business case for an end-of-year marketing assessment
Our team at Fly Pages is big on collaboration and transparency. When we’re working with a new client, one of the first things we’ve always done is a thorough assessment of their current marketing tactics and spend. We ask our clients for their business goals so that we can compare marketing performance and offer the best solutions to help them maximize ROI and get results that directly and positively impact business revenue.
What we noticed is that our clients often come to us in a state of frustration. They’ve often been spending thousands of dollars every month on digital ads, but they don’t often know how well those ads are producing leads or getting conversions.
Because of this pattern of uncertainty, we started reaching out to CEOs and CMOs in our network to gauge their interest in a thorough digital marketing audit. The response has been astounding! Our team has just one spot left for new client audits and strategy work through the end of the year. While it’s great that these clients are getting an unbiased, dollar-for-dollar accounting of their total marketing investment and ROI, the need for this service shines a light on something concerning:
Businesses often don’t know what tactics drive revenue.
We want to empower business owners and marketing directors to expect more from their marketing investment. Here’s how you get started at the end of the year, to set realistic business goals and make your marketing produce results.[/vc_column_text]
Step 1: Audit your current year marketing
While it is exciting to look forward to your plans in 2025, it’s important not to forget to evaluate the goals for marketing that you set for 2024. Once these are understood, you can set new goals for next year.
These are the questions you and your team need to answer while conducting an honest evaluation of your 2024 marketing spend and ROI.
Question 1: Did I meet my goals for marketing this year?
Analyzing your data may not be the most exciting part of a digital marketing strategy, but it is crucial.
Reflecting on results is the only way to understand what worked and what didn’t work. So, take time to understand your data and assess how your results stack up to your goals. If you didn’t have goals for your 2024 marketing, that’s the first thing you’ll want to address while you’re planning for 2025.
Question 2: Are there any patterns present when examining the data over time?
Seasonality and implementation of tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO) are just two examples of factors that can influence the success of digital marketing strategy and tactics.
Question 3: Are there any points of interest within the data like highest high or lowest low?
Outliers can give us valuable insight into where we may want to invest more – or less – for 2025.
Questions 4 & 5: When did we introduce something new to our audience? Can we see that impact in the data?
The best-crafted go-to-market strategy that has zero impact on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that your team is tracking needs closer scrutiny. Consider your target audience, campaign channels and engagement, and ultimately conversion rates, revenue, and customer lifetime value (CLV) to assign ROI that is directly attributable to your marketing spend.
Question 6: Can we use this data to set a benchmark for next year?
If you see a spike in conversions targeting a specific ad keyword, for example, you can develop a campaign that leverages that high conversion-rate keyword within proven ad channels. Set a goal for that campaign for a reduced cost-per-conversion (CPC) that improves your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Question 7: What can we learn from this data?
Sometimes, you may learn that you need to better understand your target audience, their preferred channels and motivations, and the current market to develop high-converting digital campaigns.
Marketing that works requires constant learning and adjustment as audience and market considerations change, so be willing to pivot when tactics aren’t working as well as you’d hoped.
Question 8: What are my goals for marketing next year?
This is the question that we find needs a SMART approach that’s based on data, budget, and available resources.
Step 2: Use real data to develop SMART business, marketing goals
Once we thoroughly understand our data from the previous year, then we can work on establishing clear goals for marketing for the coming year. Not all goals are created equally, so it’s important to understand how to set strong goals for marketing.
A good way to do this is to use the SMART goal framework. This means making your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
Here are a few examples of goals for next year, based on the SMART goal-setting framework:
- Our goal is to convert 20% of all leads received during 2025.
- Our goal is to generate 50 leads within the current market each month of 2025.
- Our goal is to gain 40 new followers on Instagram within the next 6 months.
The biggest miss we’re seeing is that marketing doesn’t have a seat at the table when business goals are being set. That’s the most important time for a leadership team to review marketing audit insights and apply those to SMART business goal setting, with the full support of the marketing team to drive revenue.
The primary function of marketing is to contribute to the bottom line. If that’s not happening, an audit can shine a light on what needs to change – defining what’s working, what’s not, and how to make marketing work to build the business requires marketing involvement at the leadership level.
– Michelle Eisenhart, Fly Pages Founder and President and Marketing Team Ally
TIP: Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to start goal discussions
If you’re unsure where to start with current-year evaluations and new year goal setting, using an AI program like ChatGPT or another open-source large language model (LLM) can give you a starting point.
- Make sure you’ve removed any identifying client, customer, and business information before uploading data to AI.
- Then, ask AI the questions from Step 1.
- Use the answers to craft prompts or questions about what SMART business goals can be gleaned from the data analysis, what KPIs to measure for specific digital tactics, and what a goal progress timeline might look like for those business goals.
- Always fact-check anything generated by AI!
Step 3: Use goals and benchmarks to make every business function purposeful
Establishing strong goals for marketing, based on driving the organization’s SMART business goals, is a very powerful foundation for your marketing strategy. Goals give you something to strive for with your marketing effort, and they create something to celebrate or learn from at the end of the year.
If you need help tackling the best way to move forward with your digital marketing in 2025, call on the Fly Pages team. We would love to help you and your business with clarity on your current marketing, and help you achieve and exceed business goals and show real ROI for your total marketing investment now and in the future.
Written by Antonio Jaquez and Michelle Eisenhart. Graphic by Kenzie Akins. Updated November 2024 by Becky Dolgener.
