What Is Marketing And What Are Marketing Objectives?
According to Phil Kotler, “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.“
Marketing is indeed a tricky topic for it deals a lot with human psychology to secure your own objectives in terms of sales growth!
Yet in this article, we will try to comprehend what are MARKETING OBJECTIVES to further grasp the power of MARKETING.
So, MARKETING OBJECTIVES are a set of definite and measurable goals created as a part of the overall marketing plan. Marketing objectives are set by the upper management, with high reliance on information provided by marketing teams, to assure that every marketing objective set is relevant and will actually produce a positive impact on the business.
What Purpose does Having a Marketing Objective?
Marketing plans, especially grand and long-term ones, take a long time before you can measure success from their results (IF they actually are successful at all). This may lead to the entire business being unable to have specific metrics and actual direction in the day-to-day operations.
With marketing objectives being set in place, the business has specific targets to hit within a given time frame. This allows the business to have reachable goals and specific metrics to measure success/failure on a timely basis.
Thanks to these reachable goals and timely metrics of success, businesses are able to quickly assess and improve their performance in the marketing aspect of their business. By simply setting “mini” goals, the overall “BUSINESS SUCCESS” becomes more feasible.
As the old saying goes, “One step at a time!”
Examples of Effective and Great Marketing Objectives
Listed below are marketing objective examples which are applicable to most businesses and each of them has great possible impacts if executed well!
Increase Sales
Increasing sales is one of the most common ideas you can get if you are brainstorming for good marketing objectives. After all, sales occur after the execution of good marketing strategies.
Expanding the range of a marketing campaign, adding more people to the sales team, ensuring the renewal of customer subscriptions, and all other related ideas, all lead to the intent of increasing sales!
Increase Profit
The science of accounting follows the logic of “increasing profit means either increasing sales and/or reducing expenses”. Whatever move the marketing team decides to follow, increasing profit is a good marketing objective because it allows the business to take a good look at its profitability state.
Management and the marketing teams can rely more on digital marketing to reduce the paper trail and manpower cost, set marketing benchmarks from competitors’ performance, reduce customer acquisition cost, and even reevaluate all marketing initiatives- all these can be done to adjust the profit-to-expenses ratio and ultimately increase profit!
Optimize Brand Positioning
As defined by Kotlet, brand positioning is the act of designing the company’s image and offering to be notable and distinct in the minds of the target audience,
If you think back to how McDonald’s rose to the top of the fast food business, they took pride in their “Speedy” system and the whole “family-friendly” vibe in their restaurants. This move, which was intelligently executed by Ray Kroc allowed his business to be a go-to place for millions of people FOR GENERATIONS!
Being able to optimize brand positioning not only allows you to target a certain market, but it also allows you to literally make your customers “keep coming back for more!“
Hasten Lead Generation Process
Trimming the fat in the lead generation process allows higher and faster conversion rates. The higher and faster conversion rates mean more money for the business in just a shorter duration of time.
Hastening the lead generation process can be done by, but not limited to: filtering out website traffic to be more exact about who to consider as “potential customers”, adding more marketing manpower, widening the scope of marketing efforts, and adjusting aggressiveness in outbound and inbound marketing processes.
Establish a Strong Social Media Presence
Digital marketing is the process of performing marketing functions through digital channels. One aspect of digital marketing is Social Media Marketing. This type of digital marketing is where a business focuses more on establishing a strong social media presence because most people all over the world are most active on social media nowadays.
Establishing a strong social media presence can be done by creating multiple accounts for your business on various social media platforms, creating multiple social media posts in a single day, responding to direct messages or comments frequently, getting shoutouts from social media influencers, and more!
Increase Brand Awareness
A brand is basically how a business or organization is viewed by the masses. Products and services endorsed by well-known brands are obviously more in demand than brandless products or services.
To increase brand awareness, businesses may try and tell a marketable story for the public to feast on, hold social media contests, execute acts that contribute positive effects on society, drive more website traffic through digital marketing practices, and more.
Ensure Timely and Accurate Marketing Analytics
Reporting marketing performance is a practice that good businesses do. Evaluating if the set marketing strategy is fruitful or not must be done monthly, quarterly, yearly, or whenever the management sees fit.
The reports must not only be accurate, but they must also be timely to ensure that marketing adjustments are executed effectively and efficiently. Modern tools such as Google Analytics allow businesses to have a better and faster grasp of their marketing data without sacrificing the timeliness aspect of the marketing reports!
Retain Existing Customer Base
More customers do not necessarily mean meeting new prospective customers daily and conducting new business transactions with them! More customers also mean performing practices that induce customer retention which may ensure customer loyalty and increase the customer lifetime value in the long run.
Customer retention highly focuses on constantly ensuring that your existing customers receive updates on your business endorsements/activities and ensuring high customer satisfaction in every marketing and sales process.
Marketing Efforts: What are SMART Marketing Objectives and What are Some Guidelines to Create SMART Goals?
SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. All these adjectives, if integrated properly, will assure that your marketing objectives are not only feasible but will actually produce massive positive impacts on your business as a whole.
Here are a few guidelines to be able to create and set smart marketing goals:
Ensure Every Marketing Task Contributes to The Company’s Marketing Plan
Whether the marketing tasks being enacted by the business are about the intent to increase sales, increase brand awareness, boost website traffic, conduct market research, etc., every task being performed must be relevant to the overall marketing strategy and marketing plan as a whole.
Businesses must always be able to analyze and assess every marketing task- IN EVERY MARKETING CAMPAIGNS to make sure that every resource available is being optimized to the fullest.
Imagine running five marketing campaigns that require $10,000 per month when only one of them is actually producing positive results. That’s a wasted $40,000 right there!
Should we further account for the wasted manpower in the 4 useless marketing campaigns just to prove my point?
Stick to Completion Dates
Marketing campaigns must have an actual record of the starting date, schedule of activities, and actual end-of-cycle reporting date.
This is simply because marketing reports must include measurable marketing objectives, not only in the financial resources aspect but also time!
Say for example that a certain marketing campaign was executed for only 2 months and it only resulted in 20 new customers. Another marketing campaign was launched and it led to 50 new customers but it took a full year to accrue said number. Omitting the time frame, of course, the latter marketing campaign would be “favorable”.
The example presented shows that for a business to be able to compare marketing performance accurately, setting specific metrics in time is a must! Adhering to set deadlines and schedules must be one of the priorities of the entire marketing team!
Communicate Constantly
Communication is key, not only in relationships but also marketing!
The necessity for the marketing team and the higher management to be transparent as to the status of the budget, sales and marketing team coordination, marketing performance, the feasibility of marketing objectives, and more should never be neglected.
Being transparent through communication and improving overall communication strategy not only allows smooth operations but also clears out potential bottlenecks before they can even occur.
Numerical Figures Can Help Define Marketing Objectives
Reports such as the ones you get from Google Analytics, yearly comparative marketing performance reports, key performance indicators, and all other related reports have one thing in common: NUMBERS!
Numbers are not only useful in accounting and finance, but also in the marketing department! Being able to quantify information allows a business to track marketing objectives with ease. Easier tracking of the status and results of marketing objectives leads to an easier decision-making process for the business as a whole!
Conclusion
Marketing is a vital part of the overall business objectives. Why? Well, how can people be able to purchase or avail of your goods and/or services IF THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW THAT YOUR BUSINESS EXISTS?
Good marketing objectives allow you to be more efficient and effective in your short-term performance while constantly being aligned with your long-term marketing goals. Consistent achievement of marketing objectives will ultimately lead you a whole lot closer to overall business success in the future!