Marketing Objectives

Marketing objectives are often called SMART goals and tied to the overall success of the company. They create a guideline and goal for the company to reach towards through its mission, values, and legal and ethical implications. However, there are differences between goals and marketing objectives.

What are Goals?

Goals consist of the endpoint in a business. While objectives represent how a marketing team will reach that goal. It was found that when a marketer plans objectives in their company, they were 313% likely to have success (Smith, 2020).

What are Marketing Objectives?

Marketing objectives provide the steps to growing not only the company, but also the brand. It provides a standing point in reaching the mission of the business and brings the mission to life - by achieving the brand goals. Each step in the objectives allows for the company to find areas of opportunity and growth. This also provides a foundation for SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and tracking the growth effectively to the end goal.

How do Marketing Objectives work?

Marketing objectives are a strategy to creating a successful and effective marketing strategy. Marketing strategies should be considered as the root steps to reach the company goals in place. As an example, think of this as a birthday cake. To get the greatest outcome for the birthday person, it all starts with a design and creation.

Marketing Objectives:

First you needs the right materials to make the cake. These materials are the research and creativity that will be combined to create the marketing objective - a deliciously baked cake layer. This stands as your marketing objectives needed for each marketing strategy. This could be a marketing campaign on Facebook advertising your services to promote bookings. Or this could be the marketing strategy to boost sales and grow awareness.

Goals:

In the next steps you begin to assemble the marketing objectives into the layered cake by reaching the goal(s) that you have set in your business. These icing layers decorate your business with success and aid to your brand positioning (what consumer think of your brand/business). A goal set could be to growing your sales by 10% that year. each layer (marketing objective) led you closer and closer to assembling and reaching your goals.

Mission

Which finally leads you to the final piece. The birthday cake, isn't a cake without a candle. This candle is your brands mission. What is the reason your business exists? What purpose are you doing to help your community or others? For example, by reaching your 10% sales increase, have you contributed to the duty of your business?

In layered cake strategy image, more than just the candle represents the mission. But why? Because in each layer and step to reaching the marketing objectives and goals, a business should ensure that they use Integrated Marketing Communications to keep the brand message consistent in all strategies and areas of the brand.

How can Marketing Objectives be used?

Companies can use marketing objectives in different ways. They can consist of broad objectives like increasing brand awareness or increasing revenue. While these can be a wide room of opportunity companies can also narrow these down to more specific objectives.

A Marketing Objective Example

For instance, while increasing brand awareness a company's objective may be to increase their social media presence and create a digital footprint, based on their target audience desires. This would mean that the company is also researching and reaching deeper into the psychographics and behaviors of the target market in order to grow their brand awareness through enhanced marketing. The business would then utilize the information from their research to create a step by step action plan on reach the marketing objective.

Aligning the data and creating steps to a marketing objective

In finding the objectives through various marketing activities it’s crucial to ensure that the marketing activities, objective, goal, and mission all align. To do so you start at the marketing activity and work your way back to ensure they are all tied together.

For example, creating a campaign with a branded or marketing hashtag posted directly on the company’s social media platform can relate to the marketing objective of building brand awareness, to the goal of being a top 25 company recognized online, and finally to the mission of the company in regard to the consumer.

Marketing Objectives lead to reaching brand Goals while aligning with the business's Mission.

Don't forget the legal and ethical issues to avoid!

Lastly, in the development of objectives, it’s vital that possible legal and ethical issues be researched and analyzed within each marketing activity. This will ensure and avoid possible financial setbacks, damage to the brand, and other legal implications. Possible issues can stem from simply wording a campaign incorrectly, even with good intentions, down to false advertising, and many more. It will be important in understanding not only the law but the viewpoint of the consumer and understanding the company’s product appropriately.

References:

Smith, B. (June 15, 2020). Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Objectives Retrieved from Word Stream: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/06/15/marketing-objectives