Top 12 Marketing Goals for 2023

Great marketing plans are built on a foundation of goals representing your most pressing business needs. But how do you define the right marketing goals? It turns out that there are many common objectives across business types. Here are our marketing goals for 2023 to follow to get the most successful outcomes.

Marketing Goals for 2023

Here are our twelve marketing goals to strive for in 2023:

1. Increase sales
2. Generate leads
3. Acquire new customers
4. Reduce customer churn
5. Up-sell and cross-sell
6. Improve awareness
7. Increase customer satisfaction
8. Launch a new product or solution
9. Re-brand or re-position
10. Increase web traffic
11. Refine go-to-market strategy
12. Launch a new initiative

Increase sales

This one shouldn’t be a surprise because it tends to be the ultimate objective for your marketing efforts. This can be a challenging goal for some marketing organizations with longer sales cycles – in that case, it is often best to choose a leading indicator of growth. You can measure marketing success in terms of revenue or bookings based on your business model.

Generate Leads (or Opportunities)

If you want a more real-time marketing effectiveness measurement, pick an outcome that shows up earlier in the sales cycle. If you are measuring leads, it is best to choose a high-quality lead metric like marketing qualified leads (MQLs), or sales accepted leads (SALs) to avoid declaring success based on generating unqualified leads. Opportunities are even better because they have been fully accepted by the sales team, creating better alignment.

Acquire New Customers

Bringing a new customer on board is a great marketing goal for many businesses, regardless of whether you sell to individuals or companies. While this goal seems easy to measure, some companies have difficulty reliably counting new customers.

Reduce Churn (or Retain Customers)

In 2022, another marketing goal that is great to focus on is to reduce churn. If you have a SaaS business, this can be one of the most important measurements for your long-term success. You can measure this based on retention (I retained 95% of my customers) or churn (we churned 5% of our customers).

Up-sell and Cross-sell

If you have an established set of customers, a great way to grow is to sell more of the same product to existing customers (up-sell) or sell new solutions to existing customers (cross-sell). This is another one that can be difficult to measure for some companies based on their systems, but it is a consistently popular marketing goal for more mature companies.

Improve Awareness

It’s easy to say that raising your awareness is a marketing goal of your organization, but it is challenging to measure. If this is your goal, you might choose a resulting indicator as a measurement for awareness, like inbound leads, web traffic, or positive media mentions. The ultimate measure is an awareness research study with a baseline, but that data is not always available.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Over the years, marketers have been increasingly charged with raising customer satisfaction – especially if the marketing team has any product responsibility. 2022 is no different. Functions like customer marketing or customer advocacy marketing are more common. The most common measurement for customer satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), but you can also choose other survey instruments.

Launch a New Product or Solution

Bringing new solutions to the market helps drive growth for your company – and product marketing teams are often responsible for launch management. Be careful not to measure your success by simply launching the product – instead, and you should choose an indicator of market acceptance, like inquiries, reviews, leads, or new product sales, depending on the length of the sales cycle.

Re-brand or Re-position

Consider a re-brand or re-position for your company as a marketing goal for 2022. Successfully re-positioning or re-branding your company or product can accelerate your business growth. This is another marketing goal that can be tricky to measure. Still, it would help if you chose key marketing metrics like the inclusion of your new positioning in media and analyst communications (as a leading indicator), brand awareness, or increased growth.

Increase Web Traffic

Sometimes your goal is pretty simple – like getting more people to show up on your website. This is another area where a quality metric is really important – make sure you can measure qualified traffic, bounce rate, conversions, time on page, or similar indicators that you got the right people to come to your site.

Refine Go-To-Market Strategy

Whether you are in a young company trying to find the right strategy to bring products to market or a more mature company, the right strategy can make or break your success. Like other project-based marketing goals, you don’t want to measure “completion of task”. Instead, you should focus on the result of your efforts, including accelerating leads, sales, or pipeline.

Launch a New Initiative

This is my “other” goal for marketing. You may have a new account-based marketing program, a CRM implementation, a new customer program, a merger, or any other strategic initiative. Whatever it is, ensure you have a clear way to measure the results toward your goal.

 

Did we miss any marketing goals for 2023 that were not included in the article? Probably. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you think there are others I should add to this list. We hope you succeed greatly in your marketing plans and activities for 2023!

Learn more about Planful’s marketing planning software and how it helps you track marketing goals.