Goals are crucial whether it’s personal life or business. When it comes to creating a marketing strategy, it’s important to have some goals in place. These goals reflect your marketing objectives that give a direction to the entire strategy.
Why does any business owner need marketing objectives?
Because marketing objectives predefine the main focus on a business concept. And the business representatives want to be with this concept in tune for all costs.
So, how to set marketing objectives correctly?
In this guide, you will get familiar with everything you need to know about marketing objectives.
Let’s cut to the chase!
The Basics of Marketing Objectives
Marketing objectives can be completely different. They can be general, like “increase MRR to $2K” or more detailed – “build 20 backlinks per week to promote a landing page X.”
It depends on your overall marketing strategy. However, when you are going to set marketing objectives, you should make sure they align with so-called “SMART” criteria.
What does it mean?
Let’s break it down for more explanation.
- Specific – this brick of the SMART concept stands for getting a certain result and answers the “who, when, what, how much, etc” questions
- Measurable – it implies tracking the progress using KPIs
- Achievable – you must achieve your goals
- Relevant – make sure your objectives go in line with your overall marketing strategy
- Timely – it is quite important to set up a time frame to achieve the goals
If your marketing objectives follow this SMART concept, you will see progress in your activity.
The majority of digital marketing courses suggest this SMART concept as the basis of marketing strategy. For example, a Digital Marketing Institute suggests it in their digital marketing course.
Now, let’s see how to choose marketing objectives correctly.
It has been already mentioned that you can come up with marketing objectives according to your business needs specifically. However, there are two general rules that you should absolutely follow.
- Don’t create multiple objectives
There is no point in setting many marketing objectives in a row. First of all, it will be difficult to track the progress. Secondly, the effectiveness of your marketing strategy will suffer because of multiple objectives.
- Your priority is short and long term KPIs
All marketing objectives should work in two directions – more profit (short-term KPIs) and making your brand stronger (long-term KPIs) in 40:60 proportion.
What are the marketing objectives you should take into account in developing your business?
Keep on reading and you will find out.
- Work on increasing brand awareness
Brand awareness plays a crucial role in your product recognition. For example, if you think about electric guitars, one of the first companies that comes to your mind will be Ibanez.
The more people know your brand, the more potential customers you will have.
There are two things you need to keep your eyes on – brand positioning and brand saliency. When you analyze brand positioning, find out whether your audience resonates with your brand or not. And ask yourself – what percentage of the market within the niche knows about your product.
How to Calculate Brand Awareness?
First and foremost, you need to run market research using the best free market research tools. It will help you understand the current situation of your brand’s popularity. Besides, you will have to analyze the positions of your competitors. It requires lots of time. Likely, you can work with market research agencies or hire a freelancer with a background in this area.
- Boost up a product demand
People may know your brand. But it doesn’t mean they will buy from you. Therefore, you must work on increasing product demand. It helps you push potential customers down the funnel. Especially, if they get stuck between two stages – awareness and consideration. You may order research from TrustMyPaper that will assist you in determining what customers are seeking when choosing a specific type of product.
How to Measure this Objective?
Go to Google Search Console and check trends for branded organic traffic. The more people search for your brand, the more they want to know about your product. Pay attention to the local SEO in օrder to appear in the local listings. Analyze data for the last three months of each year.
- Measure a Share of Voice metric
Share of Voice (SOV) is the metric that measures an advertising share compared to your competitors. Plus, it shows how your brand is visible in the market.
You should include this objective in your marketing arsenal because there is a correlation between market share and SOV.
Keep in mind that SOV should go in line with market share. Otherwise, if your SOV is higher than the market share, there will be an excess of SOV(eSOV).
It is pretty difficult to track this metric across all channels you have. Thus, you need to choose the most important ones and start tracking SOV accordingly.
For example:
- Increase the number of followers on Twitter from 2K to 3K by the end of the first quarter of 2021
- Boost organic search visibility in the UK from 10% to 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2021
How to Measure SOV?
It depends on the channels you have chosen. If you want to analyze SOV from organic search, you need to track the target keywords using an SEO tool like Rank Tracker from Ahrefs.
Draw your attention to the percentage of visibility compared to the main players in the market – your competitors. The “visibility” metric reveals the number of clicks that get tracking keywords by you and your competitors.
Mandala AI can let you measure your SOV on all social media platforms or choose the one your business heavily relies on. You can also calculate it in relation to any competitor you’re trying to outrun.
- Growth the number of customers
If you observe a steady growth of your user base, it isn’t supposed that you will have more customers. Despite this fact, this objective can help you use a user base and spread the word about your product updates.
The best way to measure this objective is to analyze the numbers from your CRM.
- Sales growth as an objective
Obviously, you can’t forget about increasing your revenue. This is a short-term objective that should be tightly connected to your business specifically.
You should think about measuring this sales growth objective in the most accurate way. Hence, make sure that your financial dashboard (CRM as an example) suggests accurate data only.
- Customer lifetime value
For your information, a metric called “customer lifetime value” stands for analyzing the average sum of money an individual customer will spend buying your product.
If you work on increasing CLV, you will improve your financial metrics and will be able to attract new potential customers.
There is a formula you can use to measure this metric:
Avg. Order Value x Avg. Annual Purchase Frequency x Avg. Customer Lifespan
For example, your AOV is $50. Customers tend to buy the product 5 times per year. And they show loyalty to your brand twice a year. Consequently, the CVL will be 50 x 5 x 3 = $750.
Use this formula and count the level of CVL without any problems.
- Quality & quantity of leads
No doubts, you must work on acquiring new quality leads. The question here is how to do this, right?
You can get information about the number of leads from your recruitment CRM. However, if you want to be able to track the lead quality, you will need to use a lead scoring system.
What does this system imply?
The lead scoring system infers scoring your leads by taking certain information about them. And here is a few data suggestions you should draw your attention to:
- The communication history between users and your sales team
- Whatever data you collected from a user registration process
- User behavior on the site
- If the users were happy with the trial version of the service
Collect this data and use a reports generator in order to analyze it with an analytics expert. You might notice that some CRM services suggest a lead-scoring system. Unlikely, you can’t count on this option as the data this system suggests is not a hundred percent accurate.
- Don’t forget to improve an overall marketing funnel flow
Doesn’t matter what business you run as the final outcome depends on how well your marketing funnel works. If you are aware of what a marketing funnel is, you know that each stage of it might suffer from leakage.
Why?
Because not every lead has seen your ad. If the lead has seen the ad, it doesn’t mean that the user clicks your ad. Plus, there is no guarantee that users who click the ads will download your eBook (as an example).
As you can see, each stage of the funnel can be the last one for the particular lead. Your task is to figure out at what stage there is the highest volume of drop-offs.
How to track this objective?
Each stage has its own metrics that you will have to measure. Let’s review them:
- Awareness stage (brand awareness, SOV, traffic)
- Interest stage (the number of newsletter subscribers, return visitors)
- Consideration stage (the quality of traffic)
- Conversion stage (revenue, AOV, conversions)
- Retention stage (customer lifespan, churn rate)
Once you identify the stage with the leakage, you can start tracking metrics accordingly.
To Sum Up
You can’t choose marketing objectives for your business once-for-all-time. The way your business progression grows, the more new marketing objectives appear.
Therefore, start small and move to big objectives watching your business evolving.
Take into account the suggested marketing objectives in this guide and improve your business.
If you think this post lacks other objectives, feel free to share them in the comments.
