Save this List of Marketing Objectives to your favorites — you’ll want to keep coming back here!
Want to know the biggest predictor of profitability (making money) for your business? Having making money as a marketing objective!
The biggest complaint I hear is that small businesses are frustrated by their marketing efforts (and their marketing team) for not meeting marketing goals.
Sure, you’ve picked an overall
In this article I’m going to demystify marketing objectives, how to set smart marketing objectives and measurable marketing objectives, how to track marketing objectives, and I’m going to give you a big giant list of examples of marketing objectives.
When you’re done, you and your whole marketing team will start to see your marketing efforts pay off just by setting measurable marketing objectives.
Let’s get started.
What are Marketing Objectives?
Your marketing objectives specify what needs to be done in order to achieve your marketing goals.
A marketing objective must have the following attributes:
- Specific: Focus on a single goal.
- Measurable: Your results can be measured by your customer’s behavior and resulting sales.
- Relate to a specific time period: This can be a week, month, year or longer.
- Affect your ideal customer’s behavior: This would be what you want to see from your ideal customer such as: retaining customers, trials of a product, increased purchases, higher-value purchases, upsells, more frequent purchases, etc.
Like all objectives they are “SMART”. But what makes marketing objectives unique is the focus on your customer’s behavior. Do they actually DO what you intended them to do and to what degree.
And this is how you determine if any marketing campaign had a good Return on Investment.
What’s the difference between marketing goals and marketing objectives?
Marketing goals tend to be more general and marketing objectives are more specific.
For example, get more customers or launch a product are marketing goals. Sign Acme Widget company to a 3-year, $20,000 contract by March is an objective.
Goals are a result or a destination. Objectives are the steps and milestones toward that destination.
Now, lots of people see this differently. But after trying on dozens of definitions and distinctions in my marketing plan, I’ve found these definitions work best and make for reating very clear marketing objectives,.
Where Do Marketing Objectives Come From?
Your marketing objectives will come from two places; your sales goals (how much money you want to make) and the results of your SWOT Analysis. In that order.
How much money do you want to make?
As a small business owner or solopreneur, everything starts with how much money you want to put in your pocket at the end of the day.
Rather than pulling a number out of thin air, pull out your credit card statements, expense reports and start adding things up. This will give you the minimum revenue you need to bring in to cover your expenses.
Next, you need to add on your desired profit at the end of the period.
THAT is your goal.
How much do you need to sell?
Now you can start playing multiplication games with your offers.
- What can you sell?
- How will you price it?
- Do you need to create a new offer or offers?
Where do you see new opportunities?
The other source of your marketing objectives is your SWOT analysis. Here is a simple SWOT analysis you can do.
Rather than simply listing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, use these questions as a starting point to dig deeper for new opportunities.
What are your strengths
- What new customers have you gained this year?
- Where did you gain the most customers?
- What communication channels have been most successful for you?
- Have you beat out other competitors? Why did those customer choose you?
What are your weaknesses?
- What customers or projects did you lose this year?
- Why did those customers choose another alternative?
- What products or services are missing that your ideal customers would value?
- In what ways are your competitors stronger than you?
- What did you consider your biggest failures this year?
What opportunities do you see for the future?
- What trends do you see in your industry that others are ignoring?
- What alternatives do your customers consider over what you have to offer?
- What new technologies are available that could create new opportunities?
- What is something that your industry says will “never” happen?
What are the threats to your business?
- Are there technological factors creating threats?
- In what ways do your competitors threaten you?
- What scares you most about the future of (YOUR COMPANY)?
- Are major changes taking place in the industry?
- Is the government increasing the burden of any previous regulations?
Big Ass List of Marketing Objectives
Now, you’re ready to set marketing objectives for your own business. To help you get started, I’ve pulled together a ton of marketing objectives examples that you can use directly or use as inspiration.
I’m calling all of these marketing objectives, but you’ll notice that you can use them as overall business objectives as well.
Word to the wise — setting marketing objectives can easily get overwhelming. I’d recommend you don’t do more than three.
For each of these marketing objectives, you will need to add specific units or percentages as well as a time frame.
Here is your list of marketing goals and objectives examples.
Marketing Objectives For Existing Customers
- Retain paying customers lifetime value for X months
- Increase customer loyalty by X%
- Increase customer retention rate
- Increase sales to existing customers
- Increase customer purchase frequency
- Increase customer order value (increase customers spend)
- Increase lifetime value of customers
- Increase number of products purchased by customers
- Decrease rate of customer returns
- Decrease customer turnover
Marketing Objectives For New Customers and Lead Generation
- Create and implement X new lead generation tactics
- Target new customers from new markets
- Generate new leads from website
- Generate new leads from Facebook
- Increase lead conversions to customers
- Measure customer acquisition each month (how many new customers acquired)
- Measure lead generation metrics
Marketing Objectives for Your Brand
Try these brand objective:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build brand trust
- Increase brand engagement on social media
Marketing Objectives for Website
- Increase website traffic (website visitors)
- Increase returning visitors to website
- Increase conversion rates from website
- Increase impressions of specific product/service pages
- Increase click through rates on specific product/service pages
Marketing Objectives for Products and Services
- Increase profits from specific products
- Grow market share from specific products
- Increase market share in specific industries
- Generate X% of new business from digital marketing (social media, email marketing, webinars, etc)
- Increase free trial sign ups by ___
Marketing Objectives for Email Marketing
Try these email marketing objectives
- Grow email list
- Increase email open rates
- Increase conversion rates from emails
- Increase email click through rate
- Increase upsells and cross sells from email campaigns
- Decrease unsubscribe rate
- Choose and implement a marketing automation tool
Marketing Objectives for Customer Engagement
- Increase the number of positive reviews (on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc)
- Grow engagement from social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc)
- Increase video views
- Increase video shares
- Increase time of video views
- Choose and implement a client relationship management software by ___
Marketing Objectives for Social Media
- Increase social media following
- Increase social media engagement and conversations
- Increase shares of social media posts
- Increase shares of content (articles, infographics, etc)
- Optimize profiles on highest opportunity social media sites by ___
Conclusion
These marketing objective examples should serve as good key performance indicators. If you’re a solopreneur, you’ll want to keep these handy or forward this to your marketing department, they will thank you.
Check out these handy resources:
