What exactly are marketing objectives? How can you create definitions for your target markets so that you know what marketing efforts the marketing team needs to prioritize? The objectives for a company’s marketing strategy should be in line with the company’s overall goals. The marketing department of every company supports the company’s goals, whether it be for the quarter, year, or even ten years.
If you want to expand your athletic apparel business into new markets, here are four marketing objectives to consider. To establish a presence in a new city or country, translate all marketing materials into the local language, launch a brand awareness campaign to introduce the brand in the new market, and generate a certain amount of online sales by a certain date.
One of the company’s goals is to enter a new market. The marketing department’s objectives need to support that.
These objectives work together to help your company achieve its goals.
How to Set Marketing Objectives?
We often see companies set marketing objectives that don’t help the company achieve its overall goals. Some possible objectives for a digital marketing campaign might be to increase website traffic by 100% over the course of a year, or to launch social media ads in order to increase the number of followers on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
The goals of marketing should be relevant to the company as a whole, and other departments should back these goals up for marketing to be viewed as important. There is often a lot of tension between sales and marketing departments. The sales department wants more sales-qualified leads, and marketing says they are providing them.
Marketing and development teams often have conflicting priorities. Marketing may want the development team to prioritize their website update requests or other marketing items that need development, but development may not do so because other issues are deemed more critical.
A marketing department can set marketing objectives that are prioritized and seen as necessary by the rest of the company by preparing a marketing budget that justify the objectives.
A SMART Approach to Setting Marketing Objectives
This means that your objectives should be: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound When creating objectives, you should make sure that they meet all 5 of the criteria above. This will make it more likely that you will be able to successfully complete your objective. The characteristics you want your goals to have are: being specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Specific:
The goals are clearly defined and outlined. The whole team understands the objective and why it’s important.
Measurable:
Key performance indicators (KPI) and benchmarks are important for setting and achieving marketing goals. These KPIs (key performance indicators) help you monitor your progress toward your goals and easily see if you’re on track to reach those objectives.
Achievable:
The goals you have set for your company are achievable. It is important to have high standards, but it is also important to make sure that the goals set are achievable.
Relevant:
Your marketing objectives are in line with your brand mission and the overall direction of your business. Each marketing objective contributes to reaching a company goal.
Time-Bound:
Your objective needs to have a timeline that shows when it starts and finishes.
How Do You Write Marketing Objectives?
To write a comprehensive set of fundamental marketing objectives, you’ll use the five points listed as a starting point. These five points are: market share, customer loyalty, brand recognition and image, customer satisfaction, and growth. After narrowing and specifying your objectives, follow the six steps below.
Step 1
To begin, write down your sales goal in either total dollars or as a percentage increase.
For example, you might set a goal to achieve gross sales of $1 million in the next year. You can increase your sales by 25 percent. The objective regarding sales can be summarized with the strategy you plan to use in order to achieve it.
An example of a marketing objective would be if ABC company stated that they wanted to increase sales by 25% by finding a new market segment to explore.
Step 2
Next, set a target for market share. We recommend making this both realistic and incremental.
You shouldn’t expect to dominate the market in such a short time. Start with the percentage of the market you currently have and add to it over the course of your marketing plan.
We will try to increase our market share by 10 percent within the next year. Goals that are specific and have a deadline are more likely to motivate your marketing team than goals that are open-ended.
Step 3
Figure out how many customers you need in order to reach your sales goals and market-share targets. You need to look at how much people usually spend when they buy something. In other words, if you want to increase sales by $2,000, you will need 10 customers who each spend an average of $200.
You’ll need to spend money to gain new customers, so make sure you have the budget to reach your target. Our goal is to gain 100 new customers through Facebook advertising by the end of the year.
Step 4
After that, you should select a percentage increase for each individual customer purchase. Let’s say you want your customers to spend an additional 20% on their next purchase.
You would write out this marketing objective as:
We will increase the average customer purchase by 12% by suggesting additional products at checkout that they may be interested in.
Step 5
Here you want to set price targets. You should review your prices to see how they compare to other businesses in your industry. This will help you to determine if your prices are too high or too low, and how to adjust them accordingly. Your marketing objectives depend on effective pricing.
A wine that is limited in edition could be seen as more valuable to people who are wealthy and can appreciate it. IT services might have to be priced lower than competing businesses to be successful.
The goal is to find a balance between setting a price target that will make you a profit, and making sure that your prices are competitive.
Prices might need to be increased by 10 percent annually in order to reach the price objective.
Step 6
After you have listed all of your key objectives, you should create a summary paragraph to see if they work together.
You have two opposing objectives when you state that you will increase sales by 15 percent and lower prices by 20 percent.
The objectives for our marketing campaign are to generate $1 million in sales and achieve a 15 percent market share. We will increase the number of customers by 20 percent and the average purchase by 10 percent. We will also be increasing our prices by 5 percent over the next three years.
Types of Marketing Objectives and Their Meanings
You don’t necessarily have to stick to one objective. If you have multiple marketing objectives for the year or quarter, it will depend on your business needs.
INCREASE IN MARKET SHARE
A company’s market share is the percentage of the total market that its products or services make up. If your company offers software development services and there are 100 large corporations in your country, then your company is likely to be doing well. If 20 companies are your clients, then your company has a 20% market share.
The objectives of your marketing plan should be focused on increasing market share if you want your business to grow and expand. Such a marketing objective has the following implications:
- Greater Scalability: As your market share increases, there’s an opportunity for you to scale your business. You can operate at a greater scale and improve your profitability.
- Increased Sales: The most evident outcome of this marketing objective is more sales. The more clients or customers you have, the more sales you make.
- Larger Customer Base: Again, a greater market share means your company will have a larger customer base. Word of mouth marketing and customer advocacy play a major role in this.
- Better Reputation: Typically, companies with more sales and larger customer bases have better reputations than their competitors. It further attracts more customers and helps broaden your influence.
- Industry Dominance: With a significant market share, your company is likely to become dominant in its respective industry. Amazon is a good example of this. In 2016, Amazon had a 36% share in the e-commerce market. By 2021, its market share had increased to 50%, overshadowing other retailers in the space.
BUILD BRAND AWARENESS
Brand awareness is the level of customer familiarity with your brand and its products. The term ‘branding’ not only refers to the creation of a logo or name, but also to how recognizable and memorable your company is to the target audience.
For instance, the two most popular smartphones are Samsung and Apple. That’s because both companies have strong brand awareness.
If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you want your company to be better known to customers.
By doing this, you have a higher chance of selling your product as customers will think of your brand when they want that product. An example of this would be if someone wanted to buy something online, they would most likely search for it on Amazon before any other website.
LAUNCH NEW PRODUCTS
Many companies create objectives for their marketing plans that focus on launching new products. In order to be successful, you need to find a product that meets the needs of the market. Creating a product that meets the needs of the market.
To be successful in business, you need to identify a need in the market and create a product that meets this need. Blackberry is a good example of this. The company realized that people need a full keyboard on their phones and introduced new products that included a full keyboard.
Once you’ve found a product that meets a market demand, you can set goals like attracting new customers, increasing revenue, and boosting product awareness.
INCREASE REVENUE
Generating more revenue is one of the most common marketing goals for businesses.
There are two ways to achieve this goal: increase your profits or reduce your costs. The former is often more applicable. This means that your marketing will be focused on improving your ranking on search engines and using social media to reach more customers.
GENERATE NEW LEADS
If you don’t have a lot of sales prospects, your marketing goals might be focused on getting new leads. To achieve this, you will need to employ strategies to expand your email list and increase the number of qualified prospects in your client relationship management system.
The objective of your marketing could be to launch four new conversion funnels on your website every month so that you will increase the number of leads by 15%. Note how this objective is quite precise. It’s measurable because you’ve set the 15% threshold.
INCREASE CUSTOMER RETENTION RATES
Since it saves costs and increases revenue, customer retention is vital for businesses. Reichheld’s study showed that a 5% increase in customer retention rate leads to a 25%-95% increase in profits.
This is likely because most of your customers are repeat customers, 65% of your business comes from them. While it may be cheaper to keep customers than to bring in new ones,
Retaining more customers indicates that a business wants to grow. This also indicates a desire to cut costs related to acquiring new customers.
INCREASE IN CONVERSION RATE
You might want to make your sales process more effective by improving your conversion rates. An example of a marketing goal could be to improve conversion rates by 10% in 2022 by focusing on mid-funnel prospects.
This will result in you gaining more customers and increasing their lifetime value. It is also beneficial in reducing the cost per acquisition over time. This suggests that your company is looking to grow and prosper.
IMPROVE SEO PERFORMANCE
Many marketers believe that SEO is more effective than PPC for generating sales. This is why it makes sense for companies to focus on improving their SEO.
To improve your website’s ranking on search engines, you should publish high-quality, relevant content and update it regularly. You should also include backlinks, and make sure your SEO efforts are consistent with Google’s algorithms.
If you improve your SEO strategy, you will generate more leads, get more website traffic, and expand your customer base. If improving your SEO performance is one of your company’s marketing objectives, it shows that your company is interested in growing and expanding.
How Do Marketing Objectives Relate To Your Marketing Plan?
What are marketing objectives? They are actions that an organization takes to meet its objectives. A marketing plan is a strategy that outlines how your organization will market its products and services.
A marketing plan encompasses the mission statement, values, goals, strategies, and budget for a company. In other words, your marketing objectives are part of your marketing plan.
Some objectives you might want to include are: – Increasing revenue – Generating leads – Improving SEO – Expanding the customer base
In conclusion, your marketing objectives lay out what you hope to achieve in the next year (or quarter) as far as your company’s marketing goes.
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