What’s it: Marketing objective is something a company wants to achieve through its marketing activities. Objectives are specific goals for the marketing department. They must be consistent with the goals and objectives of the entire company. The objectives also offer clear direction and provide an essential focus for the marketing team.
Why are marketing objectives important
Setting marketing goals is vital to support the goals of the company as a whole. Accordingly, management will select targets and their realization from time to time.
Objectives also provide a focus for decision making and marketing efforts. It provides guidance on what needs to be done and priorities for marketing resources and efforts. And finally, the objective becomes the evaluation material to determine the success or failure of the marketing department.
How to set smart marketing objectives + simple examples
Setting marketing objectives is not just breaking down various targets into multiple lines. You need to validate your plan and make sure it is practical, useful, sensible, and consistent with company goals.
What you have described should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Specific – clearly defined or identified. It makes it easier for the whole team to understand the goals and why they matter. For example, suppose you want to increase sales and reduce customer complaints.
Measurable – has key performance indicators, benchmarks, and if possible, you can quantify them. So, you can measure whether you have succeeded in achieving it or not. For example, suppose you want sales to increase by 24% and customer complaints to be less than 50% of their current state.
Achievable – the objectives should be within the limits of your team’s capabilities. Even though you want to set high standards, you should consider the resources and abilities you have at your disposal.
The goal of increasing sales and reducing customer complaints is within your reach. That means you can achieve both. For example, you might not target zero customer complaints because that’s impossible. Many aspects affect customer complaints, and some may be beyond your reach (for example, due to poor product quality control).
Relevant – must be in line with business targets and synergize with the goals of other departments. It also has to be realistic with the current economic and business conditions.
Say, your company adopts a differentiation strategy by charging a premium price. Hence, it doesn’t make sense for you to choose to double your sales by lowering the selling price to boost sales volume.
Additionally, your target assumes normal conditions. Hence, you can revise it if, for example, a recession hits.
Time-bound – You must determine when to reach this target, whether one year or two. Say, you will hit both targets within one year. The next task is to divide the period into shorter periods. Say, you want to increase your sales by at least 2% every month. Dividing periods is useful for determining priorities, dividing resources and tasks, and determining what you should do each month.
List of marketing objectives
You must design your marketing objectives according to the marketing audit analysis results that you have conducted. Along with company goals, this will help your company identify which products you should sell and in which markets.
From identifying marketing objectives, you can then develop a marketing strategy. Marketing objectives are usually long-term in nature and focus on areas such as:
- Position in the market – how to differentiate the company’s offerings in the target market
- Market share – increase market share or sales.
- Develop brand loyalty – seeks to increase customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
- Expanding the current product market – moving to a new segment of an existing market or entering a new market.
- Corporate image – conveying the company image and company values to the broader community
- Diversification – launching new products for new markets.
What is next
If you have previously set goals for each month, you will need to determine the tasks and resources. You need to communicate with the team.
Apart from that, intensive communication with other departments is also something you need to do. For example, to reduce customer complaints, you should talk to the production department about doing this, whether by improving quality control or other means.
Once you have set goals, how to achieve them, organize your resources, and have key performance indicators to measure marketing success, the next task is to monitor them. You can do this in simple ways, such as in an Excel worksheet. Alternatively, you can use a real-time dashboard or other more advanced software.
