How To Set Marketing Goals You Actually Stick To

Everyone at the start line of a 100m sprint has the same goal: to win.

But only one wins.

Does that put any less value on the other athletes? No.

Setting the goal means nothing. Execution is everything.

If you don’t have the right systems in place to achieve a clear, measurable goal, you’re shooting yourself in the foot before you’ve even started. And it’s pretty difficult to win a 100m sprint with a hole in your foot.

Anyone can write a goal down and pretend that’s progress. That’s what most people do.

But winners build the system to achieve the goal.

Here’s how to set marketing and business goals you actually stick to.

You don’t need to overcomplicate the process, but you do need to understand that a goal of generating “more leads” is terrible.

How many leads? When is the deadline? How are you measuring your success? How are you generating leads?

These are all questions that you need to consider when setting any marketing goal. We’ll stay on the lead generation goal and build it out into one that you can work with:

1. I want to get more leads

2. I want to get 100 more leads

3. I want to get 100 more leads from my X lead magnet

4. I want to get 100 more leads from my X lead magnet by the end of October 2025

It’s not rocket science. But it’s the difference between guessing and executing. Adding a few words can have a huge impact.

Writing a goal is the easy part.

The hard part is turning it into a repeatable system. That’s where most people fail, and why habits are critical to your success.

Habits

I’m drawing a lot of inspiration from the must-read book by James Clear, Atomic Habits, and applying them as best I can to the day-to-day tasks of a marketer.

Most marketers fail because they rely on motivation. Systems don’t care how you feel. Build these habits into your workflow and watch the results compound:

1. Track everything - Leads, email replies, conversion rate. Whatever gets measured gets improved. What you don’t measure, you can’t improve.

2. Use your calendar - Time block specific marketing tasks. If it’s not scheduled, it won’t get done.

3. Research - Don’t rely on guesswork. That’s a recipe for disaster in marketing. You can’t guess what the market wants. You need to research and find out for yourself.

What Now?

Set goals, but don’t set goals that are heavily reliant on other people (vanity metrics, external, etc.) This is a recipe for failure because you can’t control the outcome to achieve the goal. The best goals are those that can be achieved by consistently doing habits and compounding over time.

• Obsess over the process, not perfection.

• Your job is to keep testing, learning, and iterating.

• The best marketers don’t know everything. They just outlearn everyone else.

Don’t aim to be the best marketer in the world. Aim to be the one who learns faster than everyone else. That’s how you win.

This is a constantly moving and evolving industry. As marketers, we get things wrong 90% of the time, but that’s part of the process.