Setting Your Marketing Goals and Budgets for the New Year
As we head into 2025, now is the perfect time to get strategic about your marketing goals for the year, and set budgets that align with them. Whether your goal is more visibility, more leads, or more sales, starting with clear goals and a realistic budget is the best way to achieve it. Here are Hero Agency’s tips for how to get started—and a little info on why having an expert on your side makes all the difference.
Step 1: Define Your Marketing Goals
Before you put a single dollar toward marketing, determine what you want your marketing efforts to accomplish. Your goals should be as specific and measurable as possible. Common goals often include:
- Increasing Brand Awareness: If you’re a new business or are scaling up a small business and want more people to recognize your brand, this might be your focus.
- Generating More Leads: Want to connect with potential customers? Set a lead target and develop strategies to meet it. Lead targets include contact form submissions, phone calls, newsletter signups, RFPs, etc.
- Improving Customer Retention: Keeping your existing clients happy is often more cost-effective than finding new ones. Solid and long-lasting business relationships are invaluable. If you’re out of sight, you’re probably out of mind.
Each of these goals requires different strategies, so clearly defining your goals at the onset will save you a lot of guesswork and money down the line.
(NOTE: If you’re reading this, we’ve successfully reached you with our marketing strategy. Go Hero!)
Step 2: Set a Realistic Marketing Budget
Now that you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to talk numbers. Setting a realistic budget for marketing requires looking at what aligns with your goals and is feasible for your business . A budget isn’t just about putting a dollar amount on your plans; it’s about understanding what kind of impact that investment can make. In some cases this means you also need to know what your competitor’s marketing efforts look like (more on that later).
Here are some strategies you may consider allocating your funds towards:
- Content Creation: Quality content (blogs, videos, social media posts) is a long-term asset for your brand. It helps build authority and keeps customers engaged.
- Paid Advertising (PPC): If you want to generate leads or increase your visibility, you might want to invest in Google Ads, social media ads, or retargeting ads.
- SEO and Website Optimization: Your website might be the only storefront your customers ever see for your business, so ensuring it’s optimized for both users and search engines is absolutely worth the investment.
- Email Marketing: We all loathe spam, but don’t underestimate the power of email. With a good email strategy and a solid list, you can reach new customers and keep existing ones engaged with your brand.
Setting a budget can be challenging when you’re not familiar with the costs and expected ROIs involved with marketing, but working with an expert can help you prioritize where to invest and maximize your returns. And guess what? We're experts at doing exactly that.
Step 3: Partner with an Expert Who Gets Results
Here’s the thing: marketing is complex, and staying on top of trends, tech, and tactics is a full-time job. That’s why having a professional who does this—and is always just a call or email away—makes your life easier.
When you work with Hero Agency, you have a team that sets clear goals and budgets and also follows through on what they say they will do. You may be familiar with the empty promises that a typical website agency's sales team will make just to get you to sign a contract. We’re the antithesis of those villains. Hero Agency is about real, tangible results. We prefer to under-promise and over-deliver. Our clients know they can reach us when they need us, and we take pride in being a team made exclusively of industry experts - there are no inexperienced salespeople at Hero. Working with us is like having your own Chief Marketing Officer and digital marketing team (just without the massive overhead).
Let’s Get Started!
While it's possible to tackle this alone, having a dedicated, accessible team like us in your corner makes a world of difference.
Let's chat if you’re serious about taking charge of your website and online marketing efforts! Our entire team is in Nashville, so if you’re local, let's grab a coffee and get to know each other. If you’re elsewhere in the world, we love video calls
