It would seem that setting goals and objectives would be as basic to doing business as profit and loss. Yet, I am constantly discovering companies who don’t have a clue about who they are or where they are going. The one thing I have learned from the last 20 plus years in marketing is that if you don’t know where you are going, you are never going to get there.

Goals and objectives are the most basic tool of successful marketing. They define where you are going. Goals must be concrete and measurable. For example, sales levels in dollars, or number of units sold. If you want to grow, you must set your goals at a level that is challenging, but not impossible to reach. Make your goals hard to reach, just beyond your grasp. You just might surprise yourself. Reaching a tough goal is so much more rewarding. But, don’t make it so hard that you get frustrated. Dividing goals into smaller units, monthly or quarterly goals, keeps them from becoming overwhelming.

Set a timetable for measuring your goals and check it periodically. A timetable keeps you on track, and lets you know how you are doing throughout the year. If you find yourself way behind, or ahead, you may need to adjust your strategy or goals. Don’t wait until the year is over to fix a problem.

The more specific you can be in defining your goals, the better chance you have of reaching them. Divide goals into segments by product, markets or geography. Be sure to look at your product or service from all angles. Growth can come from more that just increasing sales or market share of existing products. It can come from expanding markets, finding new ways to sell your product or new markets. Or growth can come from product development. Before you set goals, make sure you have looked at all possibilities.

There are several ways to set goals. One method is to look at total industry sales over the past five years for your product category. From that information, estimate total industry sales for the next three years for your product. From that number, figure your market share and extrapolate your annual sales estimates for those years. Or you can go through the same procedure only using your own product’s sales figures instead of the total product category for the market.

In order to set workable goals, you must first understand your market and the potential for your product or service. Some questions you need to answer before setting goals are: how big is the potential market? What are the trends and outside influences that can affect the market such as governmental regulations or weather? How might technology affect your market?

There are countless ways to research market potential. The library has government statistics and projections on almost everything. You can also find that information on line. There is a trade association for almost everything. Either the association or trade publications have market projections. If you can’t find the answers you are looking for in secondary research, you can conduct your own research. Primary research can be expensive, but it is the most efficient way to find the specific answers you need to make sound marketing decisions.

Before you set your goals, you should also make a complete and thorough overview of your competition’s market. Cover not only the directly competing companies, but also product variations you may be competing with. For example, if you’re selling herbal teas, are you also competing with regular teas? Instant teas? Canned teas? The entire drink market? Ask yourself what are your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses? How does their pricing structure compare with yours? Where and how have they positioned themselves in the market? Where do they have a weakness you can exploit?

OK, so you know where you want to go, now you just have to figure out how to get there. If goals tell you where you are going, marketing strategies tell you how to get there. Marketing strategies are a road map to reaching your goals. They include the combination of elements that make up the entire marketing process and “position” your product in the market. Positioning is the perception your target audience has of your product as it relates to your competition. To plan your product’s position, you must know your competition, your target market, and how your target market views your product. You need to ask, what are your target market’s needs and desires? Is there a hole your product fills that no one else can fill? This information will give you your product’s Unique Selling Proposition – which is that position in the market place that nobody else can take. By using all this information, you can develop a marketing and creative strategy that is the message you tell your target market and the graphic elements you use to tell that message. And, knowing your target market, you can put that message where they are most likely to see it.

To use an example of good and bad goals and strategies, let’s look at one of the biggest retail successes and one of the biggest failures in past five years, Wal-Mart and K-Mart. Which stock do you think you would rather own? They both have Mart in their name. They both sell basically the same thing to the same audience. So why is one bankrupt and one making millions. It is simple goal setting and a market strategy based on fundamental sound market intelligence.

K-Mart’s goals were always foggy. They just wanted to sell stuff cheap. They put stores in the wrong markets; they didn’t have a clue how they were perceived by their target market, or who their target market was. But, for a long time they were the clear leader in the discount dry goods market. What happened?

Wal-Mart always knew exactly where they wanted to go. They set clear goals, market by market, and had a very specific strategy for how to reach their goals. While K-Mart was putting up stores anywhere, Wal-Mart first moved into more rural markets where their low prices and marginal quality was well received and very competitive. Through market intelligence, they found K-Mart’s weakness. The biggest complaint customers had of K-Mart is poor service, and they never had advertised stock on hand. K-Mart/s employees were unhappy and it was obvious to everyone. So what was Wal-Mart’s strategy? They developed an excellent relationship with their employees, added retired people as greeters, trained their people to understand the importance of being friendly, and built an excellent system of warehousing and distribution to always have stock in place. They built their whole strategy around K-Mart’s weaknesses. Basically, they found the chink in K-Marts armor and used it to blow them away. Even the invincible Martha Stewart couldn’t save them.

But even Wal-Mart has a weakness. Target found their weakness and has used it to build their success. They discovered an untapped market of young “trendies” who perceive Wal-Mart as very un-hip. Target re-invented themselves to be as hip as they can be with the cutest, and trendiest of everything from clothes to hairpins to furniture. Target obviously had their hand on the pulse of young America. They found a niche that none of their competitors could fill and made a success of it.

If you still think doing your marketing homework isn’t important, watch the news. Businesses are collapsing every day from making basic marketing mistakes. Setting goals and making business decisions without the proper market knowledge and research, or simply ignoring the research can destroy any business. And if you continue to ignore or cover up your failures in the market place, you could be heading for a big collapse. Case in point, Enron.

Set your goals based on sound research, have a system that checks your progress against those goals, and build marketing strategies to execute the goals. If you do this well, you too can be a Wal-Mart, or at least, successfully compete with the best.