Do you know what you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts? If you’re going to reach those goals, you have to know what they are so you can plan accordingly. Otherwise, you may be using marketing strategies that aren’t appropriate for your business or your audience. 

Any productive, efficient inbound marketing strategy must start with strategic and clear marketing objectives. Your marketing objectives are specific, measurable goals for your company and your efforts. Beyond that, you may use your marketing objectives to provide your team members clear guidance.

Types of Marketing Objectives

You must think about your marketing plan or strategy from all angles. These four key marketing objectives may help you in strategically planning your goals:

1. Market Share: Market share is a metric that can be used to assess how much of a market you want to capture, and it can be calculated using consumer data and advertising spending.
   
2. Profit: Profit is the amount of projected revenue based on the promotional approach during the campaign’s lifetime and overall impact.
   
3. Promotion: A promotion campaign is designed to increase product or service awareness, whether through commercial advertising, couponing, a digital campaign, or in-store promotion. Conversions may be tracked at the start, middle, and end of a campaign.
   
4. Growth: A growth strategy is aimed at growing the size of your audience, engagement, reach, or something else entirely.

Setting Marketing Goals and Objectives

Once you know what kind of goals and objectives you need, it’s time to set those goals so you have something to aim for. It is important to ensure that the objectives to be set must be SMART, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. With this SMART approach, your organization can better monitor marketing operations and assess how effective new goals are.

S – Specific

Each goal should call out a specific metric you wish to measure, such as website visits, new customers gained, or sign-ups for an event. With a clearly stated end goal, your whole team knows the objective and why it’s essential.

M – Measurable

Each goal must be measurable. Without a way to measure it, you won’t know if you’re successful or not. For example, raising brand awareness is something to strive for, but there’s no way to measure how much awareness you’ve gained. You can, however, measure subscribers to your list or listeners to your podcast. When choosing an objective, you need to be able to quantify it.

A – Achievable

Is it possible to achieve your goal with your current team and resources? Set the bar high, but also keep in mind that if it’s unattainable your team may feel discouraged if they feel like it’s a lost cause. It is important to base your goals on your own data rather than on industry standards.

R – Realistic

Your objective must link to the overarching purpose of your firm, its mission, and vision, and reflect current industry trends. They must be realistically based on where your organization is and where the market is right now. Every marketing objective should help achieve a company’s overall goals.

T – Time-bound

Adding time limits to your objectives puts pressure on your team to achieve them and provides a good stopping point to check-in, review, and make changes to the goals. And in the long term, this will help you achieve substantial and consistent development. 

Writing an objective for a Marketing Plan

Marketing is an integral part of every business plan and requires an understanding of goods, services, and the entirety of the company. A well-thought-out marketing plan helps give direction to the organization as a whole so long as the objectives and goals are strategic and well-written. 

Following are the six steps required when writing objectives for a marketing plan.

1. Four Ps: Marketing involves the product, place, price, and promotion (the Four Ps) within an organization. This helps marketers determine what customers are looking for, how their product or service helps, how others view the product, and how their product is different from a competitor’s. 

Before writing your marketing plan or objectives, you’ll want to have a good handle on this information as it will drive all your other decisions.

2. Market Summary: Creating a summary of the current marketplace forces you to do some back-end research and really determine whether there’s a place for your product or service.  A market summary helps you determine the current size of the market as well as buying patterns, detailed demographics, competition, and more.
   
3. Setting Objectives: Set objectives, which we discussed earlier in this article, ensures that you know what your end goal is with your marketing. An objective measures sales, revenue, gross profit, unit margins, and more. You get to decide what you measure based on your business goals.
   
4. SWOT Analysis: Identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of each objective is essential in ensuring you’re moving in the right direction. Some of these factors might include distributors, retailers and wholesalers, external sales agents, internal sales staff or companies, and internet sales. Not only will you evaluate the influence of each component on the sale volume, but also the potential impact on your sales expenses, gross profit margins, and the overall picture. Set an objective to produce a list of positions to identify the optimal supply routes to operate.
   
5. Choose Price Objectives: Operational pricing always relies on marketing goals and targets. To check your present market position, review your price structure to ensure that there’s enough profit margin to keep you in the green. If your pricing trends are low, create a plan to increase prices each quarter until you’ve reached optimal profit levels.
   
6. Conclude: Now, put into a summary paragraph all of your major objectives, so you know whether they can or cannot function together. Then complete your report with a summary stating the major results of your study. And, at the end of the summary statement, state some recommendations for future marketing objectives and goals.

Conclusion

The marketing objectives of a growth-minded organization should be top-of-mind consistently over the life of the business.  Visibly stated goals provide your team with clear guidance as to how and what to achieve. These also function as motivators in the production of an achievable task for employees.

When you grasp the significance of vision, the identification of broad objectives, and the use of the SMART target framework to achieve specific marketing targets, it’s time to determine the gaps in your marketing and start out your goals. Once you have achieved these objectives, it is vital that you write down these and commit yourself to a sound action plan.