How Important are Marketing Goals and Objectives to Your Business’ Success?
Ironing out your marketing strategy is one of the first steps to salvage your situation… / © Campaign Creators
Doing something without a vision or a proper plan is like building a product that no one wants. Not only are you wasting your precious time and resources at building it but also end up disappointed at its impending failure. Maybe, you’ll even lose your volition to move on and continue. This is why it is important to structure your next moves. This involves setting up specific marketing goals and objectives for your business.
Yours may be a fledgling startup that aspires to prepare the world for the future. You may have an established organization with its roots already clinging tight to the earth. But, without a solid marketing plan that defines a set of objectives and the higher goals, your business will become vulnerable. Today, the importance of marketing in business success trumps that of everything else that was relevant a decade ago. This is all thanks to the rise of the Internet.
To begin working toward your goals, ask yourself some questions.
- So, what exactly is a marketing goal?
- What are marketing objectives?
- How are they different from each other?
- What is the importance of corporate and marketing objectives in an information age where the customer is not only king but also minister with tons of information in his kitty?
- How can you define them?
- How to set your marketing objectives that will lead to ultimate business success?
Let’s find out one by one.
What are Marketing Goals and Objectives?
Ever heard the story of a merchant who sold demand to create a higher demand? He used to sell vases of flowers in the market area of his hometown. The vases were hand-crafted and beautiful. Anyone and everyone would buy them to add some jazz to their living room. Through word of mouth, the vases’ popularity grew quickly. This also increased their demand in the marketplace.
No one realized that the merchant’s primary product was not the vase but the flowers, which would wither away in less than 7 days. He sold the vases to create a constant and never-ending demand for flowers. This helped his business flourish even when he ran out of vases.
Creating never-ending demand for something that can always be supplied is the marketing goal in this fictional anecdote. The way he reaches that goal is through accomplishing a series of objectives. The process involves getting the vases made, the logistics of the process, marketing them, and maintaining their popularity.
The objectives, when completed one by one, lead to satisfaction of the business goal.
Essentially, a marketing goal is the highest point of a journey that you reach through target-specific objectives. These must be set up as per the needs and conditions of your business, making them different in every situation. For example? An online store selling smartphones can have the goal of reaching 100,000 visitors per month. Here, some of the common marketing objectives will be:
- Setting up the website
- Optimizing the content for success in organic and paid search to establish online visibility
- Setting up the e-store and a secure payment gateway to reinforce trust among consumers
- Creating and running a blog to further improve visibility.
A series of objectives typically lead to the achievement of a goal. But how do they differ exactly? Where do these marketing objectives come from? And what should you pay more attention to? What is the importance of a marketing plan in business? Why are goals and objectives important? The answers to these questions are a bit tricky, as you will find out.
The Difference Between Marketing Goals and Objectives
Observe the hierarchy of business goals below. To match the requirements of today’s always-online culture, we will focus more on online marketing. At the same time? We’ll talk about the impact of inbound strategies.
The top 5 elements for marketing
Today, every successful organization in the world has both vision and mission statements. The former can be called the highest point of a marketing journey. This is followed by individual goals. These goals can be achieved by executing specific objectives. Measure these through project-based key performance indicators (KPIs).
In this regard, the purpose of marketing objectives and strategies is to achieve short-term and long-term business goals. Ultimately, this drives the business forward. The initial period of any campaign has to give weightage to these elements depending upon the final goal. The importance of your business objectives should influence the activities and their planning.
For example, managing and maintaining local online citations for your business can be considered as an object to your main goal of marketing. What’s this? Achieving a traffic target. If your goal is to reach 100 citations overall, measuring it week-after-week can be a KPI activity.
Tools like Enfusen’s proprietary Citations Manager allows you to keep a track of this number so that you can utilize your time on more important tasks.
A snapshot of Enfusen’s Citations Manager. Note the summary and the list of primary citations, which make it easy to track your marketing objective.
Metrics are the lowest measurable parameters in the hierarchy of marketing. The search volume of a keyword that you want to blog about can be considered a metric. So, this can be the search engine results page (SERP) rank and the clickthrough rate (CTR) after you are done blogging.
It is also wise to define the vast difference between business and marketing objectives before every digital campaign. In simple words, the latter will collectively help in the achievement of the former. It is up to all the teams of your business to equally contribute to the interpretation of these individual business and marketing objectives.
Marketing Objectives Lead to Goals
The difference between a goal and an objective is essentially based on what they lead to. Marketing objectives in a marketing plan beget goals. That is where your focus as a digital manager should be. All the parameters will seek your attention. What you pay it to and what you leave for technology and automation is up to you.
An even simpler way to look at it is this: your goal may be to establish your business as an industry leader in your field while your main objective of marketing may be to gain a certain percentage of the market share. Your marketing objective should be designed to support your company’s specific goals for the future. Here, the importance of your business goals precedes that of your marketing goals, no matter what they might be.
However, in some cases, the thin line between a marketing goal and an objective can completely disappear. IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat can be seen as both a goal and an objective for both the parties. We like to see it as the latter, where the pioneer of computing is looking at taking over the technology sphere through this new sibling.
This brings us to the question of how.
How can a manager be in control of all these parameters without losing focus? Consider SERP ranks to conversion rate to optimizing content to monitoring advertisement spend and revenue. Where all do you move your head without causing lapses in the cycle? Through the use of technology, of course.
Achieving Marketing Objectives Without Breaking a Sweat
One of the oldest concepts of defining goals and objectives is to go the SMART way. It is a relief to find that it is still as relevant as it was when it was first adopted. Together with assistance from online tools and resources, you can easily minimize your load when you think about marketing goals and objectives. Here’s how.
SMART Goals
SMART goals are those that provide you with an easy way to ensure that you start running in the morning and don’t get lost on the way back home. When you are creating your goals, make sure they are:
- Sensible – Have real expectations and be specific in what you’re striving for. (Ranking on page 1 for a competitive keyword as compared to ranking at #1 early in the campaign)
- Measurable – You must have a way to determine if your efforts are successful. (SERP monitoring, automatic reporting mechanisms, etc.)
- Achievable – Stay within the realm of possibilities. (Outranking a Wikipedia article as opposed to a website with a domain authority of thirty)
- Realistic – Avoid setting objectives that are too difficult to accomplish. (Outranking a Wikipedia article which is at #1)
- Time-specific – Make sure that you frame the goals within a reasonable amount of time. Give yourself a definite date to keep yourself motivated (100 citations over a period of 3 months.)
By applying this formula, you will be able to create smart digital marketing objectives and goals that are not only attainable but also profitable. But, make sure that you assign proper tools for these activities. This allows you to use your time for measuring the output rather than for execution.
The answer to the question “What are smart objectives in marketing?” can be further simplified through this infographic.
The 5 qualities of SMART promotional objectives (click to enlarge in another tab)
Online Tools to the Rescue
Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trends are life-saving apps for any digital marketer. They not only extract important data that you can use to charge and materialize your marketing strategy but also help simplify the achievement of objectives of that strategy.
For example, let’s have a look at an example in the online gaming community. If you are a business in the online video gaming sector and want to produce blog content about trending topics, use Google Trends. This is where you can head to first to get a broad picture of the current (as well as the historical scenarios in terms of online search popularity.
The following comparison graph of worldwide interest for two games – Fortnite and PUBG – is pulled from Google Trends. A content creator can pull more such insights from the application. Using this information, devise a strategy that garners the most interest and engagement from the target audience – or niche market, as it is often called.
Google Trends data of comparison between two popular video games. © Google Trends
A great way to pull off some great content marketing is to use Trends data. This produces and promotes content when a specific topic garners more interest. We searched for the term “air conditioner” in Google Trends and found that the interest in the United States peaks in June every year. This is when most of the country experiences the hottest temperatures.
A good way to use this information for an air conditioner sale or repairing business would be to create and push content on blogs, websites, and social media in and around this time. That will ensure the maximum return on investment.
Google Trends research can act as a subtask for the main objective of content creation and publishing.
The constant peak in search trends for the query, “air conditioner”. © Google Trends
Content, the King, Calls the Shots in Marketing Objectives
Another example of technology helping further down in the objective of executing search optimization is Enfusen’s native content optimization platform. Ask any content creator out there about the struggles of creating original content. You’ll get a blank stare back – especially when asking about content that is both catchy and useful to the users at the same time.
Does the concept of comparing your content with hundreds of thousands of existing landing pages on the web to see what elements lead to the most traffic interest you? That is basically what our native platform does. It assigns a score based on elements. These include meta title and description, heading tags, content density, and several others. These are meant to help you keep a track of the quality of your content. This is done by looking at both search bot and user perspectives – which is very useful.
A snapshot of Enfusen’s content optimization tool in action.
You can effectively manage your smart digital marketing objectives when you know exactly what needs to be done. High-quality and unique content can aid in your quest to grow your business exponentially.
But, how do you compete with giant competitors? The ones who are out there pulling all the known tricks in the book to gain maximum real estate on search? As of July 2018, close to 12 billion monthly searches are carried out on Google. How do you get a chunk of those searchers to find your business?
You turn to artificial intelligence and data science. That’s how.
Setting Marketing Objectives Based on Priority
Once you have a vision for your business and have identified long-term goals to get closer to that vision, it is time to prioritize your business and marketing objectives. Every business is different and has dynamic requirements at every stage of the marketing cycle. For these reasons, it can be challenging to set priorities. Setting marketing objectives can also become an uphill task if you don’t have clarity about your end goals. But, not if you have the magical helping hand of artificial intelligence.
In addition to our content optimization platform, the one feature that sets the Enfusen framework apart is the built-in task manager. It analyses your website and other relevant data fed into it to prioritize your marketing objectives. You can drive your primary goal by giving precedence to those that matter the most. This, to an extent, can even mean a substitution of goal-based project management.
For example, consider that the main goal of marketing is to increase the visibility of your company website. The task manager will set priority to important tasks like technical audit, content optimization, and off-page SEO. You don’t have to peek into those countless online forums to see what matters anymore.
Making the right use of automation and advanced technology is the key to defining marketing aims and objectives and achieving them SMARTly.
Conclusion
When establishing your marketing objectives, ensure that they don’t just push your business to the next level. They also need to produce the tangible results that you are expecting. First, understand the importance of the goals and objectives of your business. Then set out to the planning phase.
Before you commit any new business ideas to paper, ask yourself the important question. Are you – as an individual running a business – ready for such an undertaking? You may be able to push your business further and further. However, you must also be prepared to deal with the results as and when they come in. Getting the desired results means looking into different options for success. It also means being open to adjustments made throughout the lifetime of your business. Be flexible. Be open, and be ready for success.
The best way to do that is to adopt the concept of SMART goals with your business aspirations. If you have carefully considered your marketing aims and objectives to align with your inbound marketing strategies and you’re ready to go the extra mile, you will find success.
Let artificial intelligence help you get seen on search. Check out our powerful all-in-one local marketing platform today. Make setting up marketing goals and objectives of your business a lot easier.
What are some marketing objectives?
Marketing objectives allow you to set goals and determine where you are headed with your marketing strategy. Some objectives include:
- The sale of your product or service
- How you plan on positioning your product or service in the market
- How to price your product or service
What are the four marketing objectives?
There are certainly more than four marketing objectives, (as listed in this post). However, the top four marketing objectives involve using the four P’s. What are they? Product, price, promotion, and place.
What are marketing goals and objectives?
Marketing objectives can help you determine your goal and map out the steps necessary to achieve that goal. It is important to always know where you are going. Marketing objectives will help you know where that destination is.
What are marketing goal examples?
There are a variety of marketing goal examples. The best way to create goals is to use SMART goals. That stands for sensible, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific.
What are the differences between marketing objectives and sales objectives?
Sales and marketing objectives are so intertwined and so similar that very few people know the difference. When it comes to differentiating sales from marketing, it breaks down to sales being able to persuade someone’s decision and marketing being more understanding and applied.
What is the marketing objective of a new company?
The marketing objective for a new company is dependent on its product and goal. For most, it is to increase public awareness of their product or service to increase sales.
Why are marketing objectives important for a business?
Marketing objectives are important for many reasons. Mostly, because they allow a business to determine the goal and the marketing strategies needed to get there to ensure success.
How do you define and measure marketing objectives?
The best way to define and measure your marketing objectives is to use a combination of SMART goals and your measurable KPI’s. By looking at both, you can define your exact goals and be able to measure their success.
What is the ultimate guide to marketing objectives?
Lucky for you, you have stumbled upon the ultimate guide to marketing objectives by finding this blog post.
What’s the best way for setting marketing objectives for your business?
The best way to set marketing objectives for your business is to use SMART goals. SMART goals are sensible, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific. By using SMART goals you will be able to effectively create marketing objectives for your business.
How do you set & achieve marketing objectives in 2019?
The best way to set marketing objectives in 2019 is to use SMART goals. Again, this stands for sensible, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific. To achieve your goals you want to measure them on a weekly or monthly basis using your KPIs.
How to define SMART marketing objectives?
By creating marketing objectives that meet each of the SMART criteria (sensible, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific) you are setting yourself up for success.
