Marketing Objectives: How to Set and Achieve Good Marketing Objectives

You or your marketing team set marketing objectives to promote products and services to buyers. Marketing objectives are strategies that help a business achieve its goals in a specific time frame.

Developing a market objective is creating a road map that dictates the planning and execution of your business marketing campaign.

Foundeck in this blog post focuses on features of practical marketing objectives and examples.

What's a Marketing Objective?

Marketing objectives are precise, quantifiable goals set within a marketing strategy. They outline specific targets to achieve within a designated period. Establishing specific, actionable marketing objectives can enhance your marketing campaigns by driving sales growth, increasing brand awareness, or boosting engagement.

Features of Effective Marketing Objectives

When crafting a marketing objective, first define your vision in three parts:

1. Hunger: what are these goals? What's the reason behind it? What kind of challenge did you face that led you to this point, and why is it crucial to solve it?
2. Aspirational anchor: Does the final vision address and resolve that issue?
3. Goal: what special measures are necessary to turn aspiration into reality?

Many marketing departments apply the SMART approach, which focuses on creating realistic marketing goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound criteria are the cornerstones of this approach.

Let's explore SMART in detail:

1. Specific

In marketing, you should identify a specific metric to improve, such as leads, visitors, or clientele. Besides, it is also essential to determine in detail what each member should do, what resources are available, and the necessary action plan.

2. Measurable

Use SMART goal setting to monitor your team's progress and make your goals tangible. For example, aim to get 10% more leads, visitors, and customers.

3. Attainable

Ensure that a 10% increase is possible in that specific circumstance. If the leads were 8% higher last month, it should grow to 9 or 10%, not 35%, this month. There is nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals, but it is better to align them with your company's metrics instead of the industrial average, as this might be misleading.

4. Relevant

Considering current market trends, your marketing objective must align with your organization's goals. For example, does posting more videos affect the number of sales, or does having more followers on Instagram increase sales? Is registering an increase in organic coverage even after algorithm changes possible? If you know these elements, you can set attainable and realistic business goals that benefit the business.

5. Time specific

Handling your marketing objectives with deadlines ensures the marketing team meets the set goals. This practice ensures that there are specific time boundaries for the goals, which helps eliminate procrastination among individuals, thus accelerating the success rate.

How to Create Marketing Objectives

Establishing effective marketing objectives can outline your company's optimal path to success.

Use these steps to develop clear marketing objectives:

1. Identify primary objective

First, pinpoint the main objective for the marketing campaign you wish to launch. Consider the campaign purpose to guide you in defining the primary objective. Ensure your main goal is specific and measurable when organizing a plan.

2. Establish benchmarks

Since you know your goals, it is advisable to set benchmarks to track your progress. Your benchmarks should explain how to achieve your main goal. To help your benchmark goal be more effective, assign deadlines; this will help your team achieve that goal.

For example, you can establish a benchmark to increase your Facebook fans by 2% monthly to generate more sales leads.

3. Create a marketing strategy

Create a well-defined marketing plan to achieve the specified benchmark and initial objectives. Evaluate the available resources and different channels to reach your goals. Hold a brainstorming session with your staff to develop a strategy. Ensure your approach centers on the marketing goal and complements the established marketing plan.

4. Modify

After implementing the marketing strategy, it is time to assess the achievement of your primary market goal. Then, think about what you want as your goals and check it with the physical result of your marketing plan. Conduct modifications to ensure ongoing progress toward your marketing objective.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Marketing Objectives

After creating marketing objectives, it is advisable to identify measures to monitor the primary objective achievements. Businesses can measure their achievements using key performance indicators, quantifiable measures that represent their performance. Once you define the KPIs, you can track the progress and assess the results of your efforts.

Here are examples of KPIs marketing objectives:

1. Social media engagement

Your business may use social media marketing to achieve results. These metrics indicate how

effectively, your new marketing strategy employs social media as a tool. You can refine your social media strategies to meet your objectives by tracking these KPIs.

Social media engagement KPIs are:

1. The number of post shares
2. Number of post comments
3. An increase in followers on specific platforms
4. Your website traffic from social media

2. Website metrics

You can use KPIs to track your site traffic. These metrics help evaluate the traffic lead ratio,

offering you valuable insights into the efficiency of your online strategies.

The website KPIs include:

1. Bounce rate
2. Average visitors' time on your website
3. Total website sessions
4. Pageviews per visit

3. Lead generation

Lead generation KPIs show whether your objectives result in new conversions and sales. Your lead generation metrics will vary based on your specific marketing goals.

The leads generation KPIs include:

1. Increase in leads
2. Sales qualified leads
3. Cost per lead
4. Number of leads
5. Conversion rate

4. Sales growth

You can use KPIs to track the total revenue or goods sold in connection with a marketing campaign. These metrics allow you to evaluate if your marketing campaigns are increasing sales.

These KPIs include:

1. Number of new customers calls
2. New contracts signed
3. Total of closing calls
4. Contract sent

5. SEO performance

An effective marketing objective increases online visibility. You need to track the KPIs that show growth in search engine optimization to achieve this.

Here are online tools available to measure these KPIs, including:

1. Total organic traffic
2. Leads from organic search
3. Keywords in the top 3 positions
4. Number of keywords your website ranks for

Marketing Objective Examples

Since you've learned how to create a marketing objective, use the following examples to inspire you. 

1. Reach more visitors via organic search

For example, your business aims to improve its organic visibility and attract more leads to 30,000 monthly unique visitors through organic search. You can use a SMART goal to achieve it:

• Specific: Increase the number of unique visitors to the website with organic search.
• Measurable: The major aim of establishing the goal is to reach 30,000 unique visitors per month.
• Attainable: Make the target realistic by expanding the primary activities and defining controllable factors.
• Relevant: Assure that the traffic targeted is of the best quality to ensure increased leads.
• Time-bound: Achieve this within one year.

 2. Increase the overall mobile traffic conversion rate

Understanding that traffic alone cannot create leads and revenues is essential. This means that you require a mechanism that is designed to convert the traffic that is already present.

For instance, when conversion rates are much higher when viewed on a desktop rather than through a mobile device, you should know you're missing out on many leads from people who viewed your site through their mobile devices.

Hence, you should advance the mobile experience and increase the mobile traffic conversion rate from 3% to 5%. Some basic guidelines, such as goals and targets, should be set to achieve 5% by the fourth quarter.

This is how you can turn that goal into an objective:

• Specific: Improve minimum conversion rate of mobile traffic.
• Measurable: increase from 3% to 5. 5%.
• Attainable: Understand and deal with each conversion hurdle.
• Relevant: Make sure your traffic is sufficient to sell and promote on the mobile platform.
• Time-bound: This should be attained before the fourth quarter.

3. There is a need to Enhance Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

This might involve writing blog posts, converting leads, and developing offers. However, such efforts do not often lead to achieving the desired conversion objectives without proven techniques for turning those leads into clients. Any marketer would prefer to work with qualified leads to ensure that prospects willing to purchase are those the entrepreneur prioritizes.

For instance, you have positions at the top of the funnel that involve converting website visitors into guides and e-books. This should bring their consideration closer to what you want them to possess. 

To achieve this, set a goal to generate 1000 leads MQLs by the end of the year. To achieve this, opt for several informative email promotions to create brand awareness.

Here is your objective:

• Specific: Generate quality leads and convert them into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
• Measurable: Increase the number of people from the current population level to 1000.
• Attainable: Ensure you have enough leads to extract MQL from the fast-generating system for leads.
• Relevant: The organic generation of leads must adhere to defined criteria for identifying MQLs, and set an approach to achieve those objectives.
• Time-bound: This should have been attained by the end of the year.

4. Increase the number of positions in the above-average monthly open rate

For lead nurture, people need to read what you have written, and for this to happen, your emails and headlines need to entice readership. This is how you can translate this idea into a practical objective: increase the weekly mail-out rate from 20% a month to 40% in the three months of the first quarter.

• Specific: Increase open rate by month
• Measurable: An improvement from 20% – 40%
• Attainable: Evaluate today's email marketing tactics and find better opportunities.
• Relevant: Exclude contacting recent marketing emails to avoid distorting the results.
• Time-bound: In the first quarter report

5. Boost Facebook Engagement

Make possible investments for consumers and potential consumers, since they represent marketing that enables a company to reap high benefits. The objective may be to ensure one's lively and dominant position, offering increasing performance in given social networks.

This is an average of one goal per week or, if you prefer a monthly goal, one goal per month: Instead of posting messages on the company's social site, such as Facebook, you can boost by 25% monthly.

• Specific: Increases Facebook engagement.
• Measurable 25%
• Attainable: Select content your customers would want to read and then assess whether offering a 25% boost is feasible.
• Relevant: Identify specific engagement metrics.
• Time-bound: monthly basis

6. Evaluate ad impact

Advertising is a useful and efficient way to make your brand noticed in the marketplace. However, are the ads doing that? Your marketing goal is to spend a month running an A/B conversion test via social media platforms and comparing two ads' CPC and conversion rates. This will assist you in determining which ad is more effective in giving the best return on investment (ROI).

• Specific: Identify the highest advertising impact
• Measurable: Define and analyze using cost per click method
• Attainable: Review how effective is every single ad and look at whether it has been clicked on or not
• Relevant: Advertise with the same number of metrics for each one on purpose to avoid inaccuracies in a comparison.
• Time-bound: Monthly

Marketing Objectives Tracking Tools

Here are practical marketing objective tools:

1. Real-time dashboard

The real-time dashboard tools effectively provide instant generalised visualisation of the KPIs, the current state of sales, and other critical figures. These standard cloud-hosted dashboards enable everyone to achieve marketing objectives while ensuring that business operations run consistently with specific results.

2. Website analytics trackers

Analytic tracker applications and services such as Google Analytics can provide additional detailed statistical data regarding the number and type of visitors who visit your site. They will also help generate necessary information, such as the tools' duration, actions taken, and clicks made.

Although Website Analytics will never dictate the entire marketing process solely, your team must enhance the strategy in its daily practice.

3. Spreadsheets

Most people consider spreadsheets low-tech compared to other marketing tools, but they can offer practical utility. These tools are effortless to use, and if you can get a view of the metrics quickly, you can understand the metrics for the current level of marketing they are targeting.

Winding Up

The idea of smart marketing objectives directs marketing efforts that directly lead to sales, awareness, and, ultimately, engagement.

By doing so, the goals indicate that the marketing goals and objectives meet the criteria of being Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. This offers a perfect marketing plan and a clear idea of where to target marketing.