Marketing objectives drive the growth of your company by helping you accomplish your business goals. By setting marketing objectives, you can create and designate tasks for your marketing team to work on. If you’re a one-person marketing team, marketing objectives will help you set your own marketing schedule. Regardless of the size of your team, defining marketing objectives and goals can improve the bottom line for your business.
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Marketing Goals and Objectives
So, what is the difference between marketing goals and objectives? Well, marketing objectives consist of specific and measurable targets. Marketing goals include general statements which align with company goals.
In the case of public relations vs. marketing, PR professionals tend to focus more on marketing goals to maintain a positive brand image. Additionally, marketing professionals focus more on marketing objectives to achieve a precise target.
What is a Marketing Goal?
Simply put, a marketing goal aims to achieve a general goal for your company. Marketing goals do not have to be specific or measurable. While marketing goals do not set precise targets for you, they guide you and your team to stay on track. It is important to keep your marketing team on track to work towards overall company goals. So how do you set a marketing goal to keep moving in the right direction?
How to Set a Marketing Goal
Follow these steps to set marketing goals for your marketing team:
#1: Review Your Mission Statement
Your mission statement should incorporate your company values with your company goals. By reviewing and sticking to your mission statement, the marketing goals you set will align with anything your business aims to accomplish. If your marketing goals do not fulfill your mission statement, make sure to re-evaluate them.
#2: Define Your Targets
Once you have reviewed your mission statement, you should have a better idea of some targets you want to set in your sights. Your targets explain the overall goals your marketing team should aim to achieve.
#3: Plan and Implement a Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy outlines your future marketing efforts. Marketing strategies can include anything from a short-term, one-week social media campaign to a long-term, year-long brand shift. A marketing strategy will help you achieve your marketing goals and marketing objectives by keeping you organized. Additionally, you can look ahead to make sure your future marketing efforts align with your company goals.
Countless approaches exist to set a marketing strategy. You can generate a social media campaign, develop a content marketing strategy, or run paid advertisements. Better yet, you can incorporate numerous marketing efforts to build a well-rounded marketing strategy.
#4: Incorporate Marketing Objectives
Through your marketing strategy, you should tie your marketing objectives into your marketing goals. As previously discussed, marketing objectives set more defined targets. The specific and measurable targets can help you measure factors to help determine whether or not you achieved your goals.
#5: Analyze Your Results
Do not forget the most important step to setting marketing goals. Once you have set your goals and incorporated them into your marketing strategy, the job is not done. Analyzing the results of your campaign will help you determine the effectiveness of your efforts. When setting your strategy, make sure to include methods of measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your campaign.
So, how do you determine a good ROI for your marketing campaign? Well, a marketing campaign should serve you results like increased revenue or stronger brand awareness. Whether you look for tangible results like profit or intangible results like brand recognition, you should have methods of measuring your results. Overall, your ROI should align with the marketing objectives you set in your strategy.
What is a Marketing Objective?
Marketing objectives help you visualize your goals through specific and measurable targets. With tangible objectives, you can generate more detailed goals for you and your team to strive for. More specifically, SMART goals will help you accomplish your marketing objectives. But, what is a SMART goal?
SMART Goals
SMART goals ensure your marketing goals and objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.
Specific
When setting your marketing objectives, you want them to be clear and specific. Without specifically defined goals, you and your team will not know exactly what to work towards. A lack of clarification will cause confusion among your team. Additionally, an unclear understanding of goals will lead to a loss of motivation to achieve the goals.
How do you make sure to set specific goals? You must answer the five “W” questions: What do you want to accomplish? Why do you want to accomplish the goal? Who will help you accomplish the goal? Where will you accomplish the goal? Which resources are available and which limitations do you have?
Measurable
Measurability of your goals will help make the goals specific. By measuring your goals, you can track your progress and determine your outcomes. Measuring goals will also help you stay motivated to keep doing great work or determine if you need to make any changes to the strategy.
When setting goals and marketing objectives, you need to make sure you can measure certain aspects of your goal. These aspects are called marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). You may look to measure profits, conversions, impressions, or any other factor determining your results. Make sure not to skip this step as it is crucial to the progress of your strategy and determining your results.
Achievable
While you set your goals and marketing objectives, you want to make sure the goals are reasonable and achievable. Of course, you should aim to stretch your limits and produce the strongest results possible, but do not stretch yourself too thin.
For example, if you want to measure the engagement of a social media campaign, take a look at the results of your previous campaigns. You should aim to set your goals and marketing objectives higher than the engagement of your previous campaigns. But first, you will need to compare previous campaigns to determine what you and your team are truly capable of. If you have not run any previous campaigns, conduct research on KPIs of your industry and compare them to similar businesses.
Relevant
Relevance also makes up an extremely important factor of goal setting. When you set your goals, you need to make sure they relate to your company goals and propel your mission statement. When setting goals, make sure the goals prove worthwhile and the goals make sense given your business conditions and environment.
Also, you need to make sure you take relevant steps towards completing your objectives. Make sure you appropriately assign objectives to the right people and choose the right times to complete tasks. For example, you probably do not want a content writer on your marketing team to design graphics for social media.
Timely
SMART goals should also prove timely. When setting your goals and marketing objectives, choose target dates. Target dates should not only include dates to complete overall goals, but also dates for specific marketing objectives. This will help ensure you get both your long-term and short-term goals completed in time.
How to Set a Marketing Objective
Because marketing objectives are more detailed than goals, there are specific steps to set marketing objectives. Depending on your goals, you may either need some or all of the following steps:
- Determine target revenue: If your marketing objectives include achieving increased revenue, look at your previous revenue and determine an achievable revenue target.
- Define target sales: If your marketing objectives include achieving increased sales, look at your previous sales and determine an achievable sales target.
- Determine target traffic: If your marketing objectives include achieving increased online traffic, look at your previous traffic and determine an achievable traffic target.
- Identify benchmarks: Setting and accomplishing goals and marketing objectives does not happen quickly. Determine specific benchmarks you aim to reach by certain dates and continue to increase those benchmarks as you progress through your campaign.
Marketing Goals Examples
While marketing goals make not always prove specific and measurable, countless marketing goals examples exist. Some examples of marketing goals include but are not limited to: increasing brand awareness; growing thought leadership; and increasing customer value.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness helps put your company out there and make your business known to more people. Working towards specific marketing objectives like posting on Instagram four days a week will help increase brand awareness.
Growing Thought Leadership
Thought leadership promotes your company as a leader in the industry with a wealth of knowledge to learn from. Specific marketing objectives like publishing 3 blog posts a week will help you grow your thought leadership position.
Elevating Customer Value
Customer value helps you make the most of your customers through mutually beneficial relationships. Setting a specific marketing objective like converting ten customers a week through a referral program will help you elevate your customer value.
Marketing Objectives Examples
The marketing objectives you set should always consist of specific and measurable targets. Marketing objectives examples include but are not limited to: increasing overall sales; converting leads; and attracting new customers.
Increasing Overall Sales
Increasing overall sales will improve the bottom line of how much money your business makes. While increasing overall sales can be one of your marketing objectives, you must also look at ROI to make sure your return is greater than your input.
Converting Leads
Converting leads increases your customer base by turning potential customers into actual customers. By converting leads through one or various marketing funnels, you will continue to gain sales and increase your revenue as well.
Attracting New Customers
Attracting new customers also helps grow your customer base. When you attract new customers, you will continue to grow your business and hit those marketing goals.
FAQs:
- What are marketing objectives?
- What are key performance indicators?
- How do you set marketing objectives?
- What are SMART goals?
- Why do I need to set marketing objectives?
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