2026 Marketing Goals
It’s a new year, so it’s time for new goals! And with POP being a local marketing company, it only makes sense for me to make the first blog of the year about 2026 marketing goals.
But before we jump into 2026 marketing goals, let’s figure out where your marketing and your business are and where you’d like to be. A map to a destination does you no good if you don’t know your starting point! And you can make your best decisions with your marketing plan once you understand those things first.
Define Your Marketing Stage
What are you currently doing for your marketing?
I don’t just mean, “what’s your budget?” but also how are you spending it?
You have two marketing budgets, time and money, and even if you have lots of both (which so few business owners do), you still need to invest them in the right place to be effective.
A great example of this is ad spend. Even if you have more money than you know what to do with, it doesn’t mean you should blindly put it into ad spend. In fact, even though people think of ads as providing quick leads, I don’t recommend spending any money on them until you’ve completed your earlier marketing stages.
Your marketing first job is to give you credibility, then recognizability, then ubiquity, then leads.
Why?
Your leads don’t do you any good if no one trusts you.
That’s why I also recommend beginning with a website. Tell your story in web form and use good SEO to ensure it shows up when people who want what you do are looking for you.
You should do the same thing on your socials. But again, where you spend time on social media matters because while LinkedIn is perfect for some businesses, for others, it might be Instagram. It all depends.
Once you’ve got your base, you can start climbing the marketing pyramid to move to the next levels.
Define Your 2026 Business Goals
Ok, so we’ve spent a couple of hundred words explaining the basics of something very complex. All set? No? That’s ok. You don’t need to understand everything yet, just know that you shouldn’t put the cart before the horse, and don’t trust someone who asks you to spend money on ads before you have the rest of your marketing house in order.
So before you decide what to do with your marketing, you should decide what your 2026 business goals are. Your marketing should support meeting those business goals.
Do you want to grow your business? Do you want to be a household name? Do you want to get to the point where you can quit your day job?
