How to Set Marketing Objectives for Your Business: A Step-by-Step Guide

Do you ever feel like your marketing efforts are constantly spinning in circles? You come up with a brilliant new campaign idea, only to see it flop a few months later. Or you’re sure that new tactics will help boost your business and sales numbers, but they don’t. When it comes to marketing, it can be difficult – if not impossible – to know what will work and what won’t. As a business owner, you wear many different hats on any given day. It might feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to tackle everything that you need to accomplish. And that’s because there probably isn’t enough time! In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why objectives are so important for your marketing plan, explain the 3 steps of creating objectives for your brand, and give you examples of different objectives so you can see how they work in action.

What are Marketing Objectives?

Marketing objectives are the goals that you want to achieve with each of your marketing campaigns. They help you determine the focus, message, and budget of each marketing effort you make. In short, they are a way to measure your marketing efforts and make sure they are aligned with your business goals. Objectives are most often linked with marketing efforts, but they can be applied across all areas of business. Whether you’re trying to attract new customers, increase sales, or boost brand awareness, objectives can help you determine how to best achieve those goals. No matter what type of business you run, marketing objectives are essential. They help you create a plan for each of your marketing campaigns, tie everything back to your business goals, and make sure you are using your marketing efforts effectively.

Why Are Marketing Objectives Important?

We have often seen companies start with a focus on Marketing objectives that set the goals you want to achieve with each of your marketing campaigns. Where we often see gaps are in the step before this. Setting the overall objectives for the marketing team that are derived from the business goals. For example, grow the year on year sales by 5%. Marketing objectives help you determine where you want to take your business. They help you set the tone for your brand, and will help you make better decisions about how to attract new customers and increase sales. If you don’t have any direction when it comes to your marketing campaigns, you’ll just be spinning your wheels. You won’t know what is and isn’t working, and you won’t be able to measure the impact of your efforts. Without clear objectives, you will be marketing blindly, which will waste time and money. With clear objectives in place, you can measure the impact of your marketing efforts and know when you need to adjust your strategy so you can continue to see results.

Step 1: Define Your Brand’s Mission

When you are creating your marketing objectives, the first thing you should do is define your brand’s mission. Your mission statement is the who, what, where, when, and why of your business. It should be two or three sentences long, and it should tell people what your brand is all about. What does your brand represent? What is the purpose of your business? What do you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand? What makes your business different from all of the other options out there? What are your core values? What do you want the future of your brand to look like? What do you want to be known for? Your mission statement should answer all of these questions, and more.

Step 2: Determine What Success Looks Like for Your Business

Now that you’ve defined your mission, you need to determine what success looks like for your business. What numbers do you want to see at the end of the year? What do you want your customer base to look like? Essentially, what do you want your business to be when it grows up? While it might seem easy enough to say that you want more sales, more customers, and a larger budget, you will need to determine how many of each of those things you want and when you want them by. This will help form the backbone of your marketing objectives. For example, let’s say that you want to increase your sales by 10% and increase your monthly revenue from $10,000 to $12,000. You want to increase your number of monthly customers from 5,000 to 6,000. And you want to increase your monthly profit from $5,000 to $6,000. Once you know what success looks like for your business, you can start formulating ideas for how you can achieve your goals.

Step 3: Decide on the Tactics That Will Help You Achieve Your Goals

Once you’ve determined what success looks like for your business, you can start thinking about the tactics that will help you achieve your goals. You can use the numbers that you’ve determined as a benchmark to measure the success of each tactic so you can make sure that you’re making smart decisions. For example, let’s say that you want to increase your monthly sales by 10%. You’ve determined that you need to sell 15 more products per month to reach that number, and you’ve decided that your best option is to hire a digital marketing agency. You can use the following numbers to determine if this is a viable option: - In the next year, you want to sell $15,000 in products. - In the next two years, you want to sell $30,000 in products. - In the next five years, you want to sell $60,000 in products. If the marketing agency can help you reach your goal in the next year, then it is a viable option. If it takes two years or longer, however, the agency is probably not the best choice.

Final Thoughts

Marketing objectives are one of the most important parts of your brand. They help you determine the focus, message, and budget of each marketing effort you make. In short, they are a way to measure your marketing efforts and make sure they are aligned with your business goals. They help you set the tone for your brand, and will help you make better decisions about how to attract new customers and increase sales. With clear objectives in place, you can measure the impact of your marketing efforts and know when you need to adjust your strategy so you can continue to see results. These clear objectives will also allow for prioritizing opportunities. Metolius has often seen companies struggle with the volume of work they are trying to output. Often this is fixed with a review of objectives and how the work impacts or aligns with said objectives. What might appear to be the most important initiative your group is working on, after review, might show that it doesn't actually move your overall objective forward at all. With marketing objectives, you can determine where you want to take your business. They help you set the tone for your brand, and will help you make better decisions about how to attract new customers and increase sales. With clear objectives in place, you can measure the impact of your marketing efforts and know when you need to adjust your strategy so you can continue to see results.