Too often business owners focus solely on the day-to-day operations and fail to set effective marketing objectives that drive real growth.
Carving out time to sit down and think deeply about your marketing goals is tough when you have a bunch of emails to respond to and a list of urgent jobs waiting.
Yet, setting up strategic marketing goals should be a priority for any business that wants to grow, whether it’s expanding the customer base or increasing brand awareness.
Your marketing objectives help keep you on track to reach your next stage, so it pays to think carefully about them when you are writing your marketing plan.
Here are some simple tips for setting effective marketing objectives for your business:
Set measurable business goals
Establishing objectives that are measurable and quantifiable is critical to maximising your marketing activities.
It’s important to start with big picture goals focused on the objectives of your business. This can vary depending on your product, service or purpose. These are vital to identify both the right language and visuals for your brand, but also the right places to focus your marketing budget.
Examples of these kinds of goals could include obvious ones like increasing sales or awareness, along with more nuanced goals such as changing how people perceive your brand, or even influencing government policy or driving change.
With these goals in place you can then start to develop more granular objectives. Most businesses would be familiar with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals, so you know that measurable objectives are key to success.
Even if you’re not sure what is realistic, setting targets for each stage of the buying cycle will help you set a baseline and then see where you can generate improvement in your marketing activity as you collect data.
Track performance and collect data
Once you’ve set up your marketing objectives with clear, quantifiable targets, you need to keep tabs to see how your strategy is performing.
You should aim to review your goals monthly to see how your activities are tracking and compare your results to previous periods to see if there are any trends.
Regularly recording your results is a significant part of the process, so you will want to keep an updated log of your activity and results.
Your spreadsheet should feature your objective targets and results, so you have a complete data set for your future strategies.
Plan long-term but review regularly
Business owners generally have a long-term business plan, but it’s not as common for businesses to have a marketing strategy that stretches beyond 12-month cycles.
This is echoed in the book High Output Management, where Andrew S. Grove talks about the importance of focusing on the immediate future.
“At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year—and only the next year,” Grove said.
While Businesses can benefit greatly from setting medium- and long-term marketing objectives, it helps to review these objectives annually to check that your strategy is on track.
Call in the marketing experts
Setting marketing objectives can be difficult if you don’t know where to start, so why not bring in an expert to help with your goals and strategy?
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne that can assess your marketing needs and tailor marketing objectives and strategies to level up your business.
To find out more, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via our contact form below.