Marketing Goals the Board Can Respect
Read the marketing goals in most annual plans and you’ll find the same phrases: grow brand awareness, increase engagement, strengthen our presence. These aren’t goals. They’re alibis — commitments phrased so that nobody can ever be held to them, because nobody can say what hitting or missing them looks like. A marketing function that sets goals this way isn’t being lazy; it’s negotiating, in advance, for a year without accountability.
The alternative isn’t complicated. It’s the discipline of making every marketing goal answer to the same standard the rest of the business already lives by.
Start from the business objective, not the marketing idea
The sequence matters. A real marketing goal is derived — it starts with what the business needs (a revenue number, a new market, a retention target) and works backwards into what marketing must produce for that to happen. “Generate 500 qualified leads from mid-sized SaaS companies this quarter” is a marketing goal because it traces to a revenue objective through actual conversion math. “Do more content” traces to nothing, which is why it can never fail.
This derivation is also where relevance gets enforced. If the company’s priority this year is expanding into healthcare, a goal that generates leads anywhere else — however impressive the volume — is off-strategy by definition. Marketing goals that don’t reference the company’s current priorities are marketing’s priorities, and those are not always the same thing.
The five tests
The SMART framework is old enough to be unfashionable and still the fastest audit available. Specific: does the goal say what, why, and how — or does it leave room to declare victory regardless? Measurable: is there a number, and is it a number connected to money — leads, conversion, acquisition cost — rather than applause? Achievable: if the team generated 300 leads a month all year, a 500 target is a stretch; 5,000 is a resignation letter with extra steps. Relevant: does it serve what the business is actually trying to do this year? Time-bound: is there a date, or does the goal live in the eternal “ongoing”?
The reason to be strict isn’t bureaucratic tidiness. Modern marketing produces enough data that guesswork is a choice — the conversion rates, costs, and funnel math needed to set honest targets already exist in your own historical numbers. A team that won’t commit to specifics despite having that data is telling you something.
What ownership should do with this
You don’t need to write the goals — you need to refuse the vague ones. When the annual plan arrives, apply one filter: for each goal, can I tell, on a specific future date, whether we hit it, and will hitting it visibly matter to revenue? Send back anything that fails. And expect the derivation shown: this revenue target, at these conversion rates, requires this pipeline, which requires these goals. When that math is on one page, marketing stops being the department that’s hard to evaluate — and starts being the one whose plan reads like it was written by someone who expects to be measured.
Baron Belalov is a fractional CMO working with growth-stage and established companies globally.