Marketing objectives serve as the cornerstone of digital strategy, helping your team work cohesively towards one common goal and having a dramatic effect on whether your campaign succeeds or fails.
Marketing teams frequently view increasing sales as their top objective, which makes sense since sales are the lifeblood of every business.
Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is one of the primary objectives a business should set as part of their marketing goals. This goal typically involves increasing brand visibility through various means such as SEO efforts, holding promotional events and using social media to reach new audiences. Raising brand awareness can help achieve sales targets while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty.
Marketing objectives provide companies with a clear definition of their desired goals and how they plan to accomplish them; without this plan, businesses could easily miss their mark and become unfocused in their approach to reaching customers.
Goals represent the endpoint, while marketing objectives provide the roadmap to get there. While goals often only outline where they want to go without providing specific guidelines on how they’ll get there, marketing objectives provide concrete milestones that outline exactly where and when an objective should be accomplished. A good marketing objective should be SMART – meaning it should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
Some marketing objectives focus on increasing overall sales while others target specific metrics, like customer acquisition or traffic increases. Metrics that serve as KPIs (key performance indicators) can then be tracked over a set period, such as monthly website visitors or SEO impressions.
Increased lead generation is another popular marketing goal. This can be accomplished via various strategies such as email marketing, social media marketing or webinars. Attracting potential clients who may otherwise have gone unnoticed by your company and converting them to paying clients should be the goal. Measure the goal by counting leads generated within a particular time period and comparing this number with your total client count at that moment in time. Companies can use this approach to evaluate whether their marketing campaigns are successful and determine how best to adjust their approach in the future – an approach far superior to running campaigns for a set period and hoping it results in increased business.
Increase Sales
Reaching higher sales is one of the primary marketing objectives, serving as an easy way to measure team efforts. But to set realistic objectives when targeting sales growth, use the SMART approach – create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based – rather than saying you want “increase sales,” create goals such as: “increase sales by 25% in six months”.
Brand awareness marketing objectives typically revolve around creating an engaged and familiar audience for your brand. While these audiences may provide leads that convert into paying customers over time, you must remain mindful of not prioritizing this goal at the expense of more important goals such as customer retention.
Attracting new customers may be one of the fastest ways to grow revenue. Generating quality leads will help ensure a higher conversion rate; plus a steady influx of new customers will provide your company with enough funds for smooth operations and future investment in growth.
By setting marketing objectives that focus on building loyal customer bases, your average customer lifetime value (CLV) can increase dramatically. CLV can be calculated by multiplying average transaction amounts by number of transactions each year and then dividing that figure by how long a customer stays a customer. Achieve this type of objective through various means such as social media promotion or referral programs; but for optimal effectiveness this objective should be tracked and assessed regularly as it may affect many metrics related to business performance.
Increase Lead Generation
Marketing teams strive to increase lead generation as an essential goal, as this allows businesses to attract prospective customers and cultivate relationships with them. Furthermore, lead generation also enables the establishment of an excellent brand image and strengthen customer loyalty; satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to recommend your business to others.
Lead generation can be achieved via various marketing channels, including content creation and promotion, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising and email campaigns. To generate leads effectively, the key lies in creating engaging and pertinent content that compels leads to enter their contact info via forms on websites or landing pages; once captured, these leads are passed along to sales departments for follow up.
One of the most effective ways to generate leads is via webinars, as studies conducted by ReadyTalk show that 30%-40% of attendees at webinars become leads. Webinars offer businesses an ideal way to attract attention and nurture leads along their sales funnel, providing an opportunity for thought leadership within an industry and building trust among potential customers. Furthermore, webinars help bolster reputation as reliable resources.
Gated content can also help boost lead generation. For example, a company that builds backyard decks could create a PDF guide on deck maintenance that requires readers to provide their name and email address before being allowed access. Social media posts could then promote this content to drive more visitors directly.
Companies looking to increase leads can implement contests on their website or blog as a means to do just that, while simultaneously promoting products and services and encouraging visitors to sign up for newsletters or download free ebooks and other content. A successful campaign should feature a call-to-action (CTA) that corresponds with the topic of each post and leads readers directly to an optimized landing page.
Increase Customer Loyalty
Building loyal customer relationships can be invaluable to any business. Loyal customers will likely buy more from your product or service and refer it to others. Customer loyalty also helps increase your customer lifetime value (CLTV), or the total sum spent over their relationship with your company.
To increase customer loyalty, it’s essential that you fully comprehend your customers. This means understanding their needs, desires and pain points so you can create a tailored experience for them – showing your care while setting yourself apart from competitors who may try and capture their business.
There are various strategies you can employ to increase customer loyalty, such as offering referral programs or discounts on future purchases; providing personalized content; or developing an interactive community where customers can come together and share experiences.
As a result, you’ll be able to assess which marketing campaigns are working and which are not, allowing you to tailor them more effectively and get them back on track if necessary. Plus, measuring their success allows you to ascertain their Return on Investment.
Marketing objectives are tangible goals that outline the outcomes of your marketing strategy. They should adhere to the SMART criteria: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. In order for them to be truly effective, marketing objectives must also align with overall business goals.
Marketing objectives can help your business define what its goals are and create an action plan to meet them. Establishing clear marketing objectives will also allow you to measure whether or not your marketing campaigns are having any positive effect on the business.
