chris | arnold
Outlining the business goals (as well as the more specific digital marketing goals) and objectives before you start any campaign helps prevent wasting time and money and ensures that all your marketing efforts support the future of the business.
Planning can also help you further down the line when you're staring at a blank screen, wondering what blog to write, what guide to produce, what email to send for example. Long-term marketing has a habit of losing direction, so having goals and objectives to refer back to helps keep focus in the future.
The first place to start is to gather up as many key people from all levels of the business and go through a business SWOT analysis (there's plenty of templates and guides on the web). You'll find that people in contact with clients and customers day-to-day might have very different perceptions of the business strengths and weaknesses from those high up at executive level and it's crucial to get as much input on this as possible.
This information will highlight things you're good at which set you apart from the competition, and those sometimes painful things that are holding you back or that your competitors do better than you. SWOT analysis can also highlight future opportunities that you could take advantage of and possible threats that might cause you problems later.
This will naturally give rise to aspects of the business, service or product that should be promoted assertively, as well as making you aware of your weaker areas so that you can take steps to negate them before the potential customer starts to dwell on them. You should start to see your goals and objectives begin to flourish as you progress through the SWOT analysis.