Marketing objectives are other words for a brand’s perfectly defined goals. Their sole purpose is to define the aim of the marketing team, provide understandable flowchart for team members to follow, providing the right information to higher management for better development, review and support. Before working on any great marketing plan, a list of strategic and comprehensive marketing objectives is created which are then reduced to a smaller list of goals to achieve in every quarter.

Marketing objectives are thus, the most vital part for designing a marketing strategy. Without these goals defined clearly, a brand will struggle in accomplishing the plan because of the goal is undefined.  Hence, an open, transparent, and clear list of goals are required to be discussed among all the teams to know what you hope to achieve as a team and how are you planning on working on it.

Suppose you are developing a marketing strategy that has a vision but lacking on making a solid marketing objectives, you may use this guide to improve and upgrade your plan because you will be far more likely to reach your goals when they are defined, outlined, and compiled into a clear list of quantitative marketing objectives.

Make a clear list of Marketing Objectives 

As we have understood that the first step to achieve your goals is to curate a useful list of marketing objectives. There could be a numerous goal that you can list down in your marketing plans but, below are the most considered marketing objectives by brands.

Having in mind the level and rank of your brand in the market, select two or maximum three marketing objectives to focus on from below list.

Focus on New Products and Services

Suppose you have an upcoming project where new products are launching, new offerings or new products are introduced. Your marketing objectives in this case should focus on promoting the upcoming products and new services.

Increase Brand’s Digital Presence

The first aim of your marketing plans should be to been seen online by more audience, if there is a lack of large traffic on your website, start off with search engine optimization (SEO) to increase your visibility and ranking on the search engine pages ranking. You can also be very active on various Social Media Platforms to attract more traffic from there.

Increase Lead Generation

You main focus should be to get a good number of loyal customers, if you feel you have not yet reached on that number, you may focus on various lead generation tactics that may help you increase your emailing list and fulfill your client relationship management (CRM) system with efficient prospects.

Get New Customers

This objective comes in picture when you already have a decent number of loyal customers, but you would like to expand and reach out to new and larger audience to turn them into customers.

Take care of your Existing Customers

While getting new clients on board could be one thing, customer acquisition is another. Along with getting new customers make sure you take care of your existing customers; you would surely not want your loyal customers to go away to your competitors.

Brand Awareness Strategy

For a new brand or a not so famous brand, this objective is one of the basic marketing objectives where it’s main aim is to reach a larger audience and make more people learn about the brand.

Brand Loyalty

For those brands that are already well known in the market, their objective could be to focus on building not just awareness, but dive deeper into spreading about their brand, providing knowledge to customers maintain the loyalty.

Sales and Revenue Increase

If your business is related to selling products or services, focus on selling more of those products or services. This is one of the marketing objectives that have to be focused on by a brand to increase revenue and the amount of money coming in from your business.

Increase Profit

Here, you may want to increase your profit through means other than just selling in higher number. This objective includes cutting costs and overhead expenses, selling trending items along with some offers having the product size reduced, focus on selling products that have higher margins, or other changes that increase profit (this may not increase revenue but reduces costs cut, hence the income is more than expenditure).

Enter a New Market

When you know that your brand is already well-known and successful in a specific location, you next goal should be to expand out into a new location where the residents of that locality will also get to know about your brand.

Growth in In-Market Share

Instead of multiplying your stores in new locations, you can expand the number of visitors in your current location. This objective will help you get more customers residing in your brands geographic location.

Build Industry Authority Brands

Grow your visibility and increase your sales by becoming the authority in an industry. It is as simple as- be an expert in your field. Establish your brand as an authority.

After seeing the list, it may be alluring to choose five or more of the marketing strategies. But keep your list of marketing objectives relatively short and focus on two or maximum three objectives. Have in mind to reanalyze and think on other goals on a later stage or in next quarter.

Define Clear Marketing Objectives

It’s not enough to just outline the marketing goals you want to accomplish, you may need to validate your plans to make sure they are possible as in they are one among or all of these – practical, logical, useful and reasonable.

Validate if the marketing objectives that you have finalized checkbox the below list:

1. Specific: Clearly defined goals and figured out in a way where whole team understands the objective and importance of it.

2. Measurable: Each goal has a key performance indicators (KPI) attached to it which is useful to measure the percentage of goal achieved.

3. Achievable: The goals are reasonable that is they are able to be done by your company and team. 

4. Relevant: The goals and missions set by your brand should go hand in hand that is they should be very much relevant to your brand mission and follow the direction of success for your business. Having a valid reason for each of your marketing objectives is a way to build strong objectives and work towards it.

5. Time-Bound: It is necessary to have a timeline for the goals. This creates no chaos in the team as of about when the objectives should begin and when it should end.

Now, check if the marketing objectives you come under the above “SMART” standard as they work the best. 

KPI are the benchmark for your goals and without a benchmark the progress of your goals can’t be recorded. Apart from the KPI, there is no way of learning that your goals are met and if the team is working towards success.

A few examples of KPIs you should include are:

 1. Sales Growth – Keep an eye on your revenue that is the amount coming in versus the amount going out also on the number of units sold. This will help you gain insights on your sales growth.

2. Changes in Profit – Keep a track of profits and ROI’s to monitor the profit margins.

3. Market Share – Market share is nothing but to keep a track of your brand and its product visibility in the market.

4. Lead Generation – Keep a track of your leads In one of the many ways-

• Number of leads
• Increase in leads
• Cost per lead
• Conversion rate

Divide your leads into two segments – Sales qualified leads and Marketing qualified leads to get a detailed look of your leads data.

5. New Customer Acquisition – When your brand is still growing phase, keep a count on the new customers acquired.

6. Social Media Engagement – Keeping a track of how your marketing plan is working in various social media platforms might be helpful to know where your brand stands.

7. SEO Performance – Improving your visibility in search shows the improvement in your SEO status. Keep a track of all your SEO activities to make sure they are done in the right way and do not get a negative impact by any means of activity done.

Finally, create a checklist of your marketing objective and make a PDF of your work done towards executing them