What are marketing objectives?

Hello there, my name is Martin Henley, this is the What The series and in episode number 19 we are answering the important question what are marketing objectives?

What will we be covering in this marketing objectives definition?

In addressing the question what are marketing objectives, there are six questions that we will be answering; we will of course be answering the question what are marketing objectives; why marketing objectives are important; who needs to be thinking about marketing objectives; if there is an issue with marketing objectives; how you structure your marketing objectives and when you put your marketing objectives together. Let’s get this started Sonny.

What are Marketing Objectives?

As always, when we’re trying to understand marketing jargon we like to find a definition and we found this marketing objectives definition right at the top of Google at blogalexa.com and what they tell us is that; “Marketing objectives are a brand’s defined goals, they outline the intentions of the marketing team, provide clear direction for team members to follow and offer information for executives to review and support. Marketing objectives are a pivotal part of a marketing strategy. Without defined goals a brand will struggle with achieving its plans because it won’t be clear on what it wants to do. A straightforward plan is required to know what you hope to do and how you plan on doing it.” That makes absolutely perfect sense to me but I’m aware that there is some marketing jargon in there so what I wanted to do is go back to basics and see if I could find a definition of objective and the second word they’re using here which is goal. If we look at Oxford Language they tell us that an objective is “a thing aimed or sought, a goal.” That brings us back to this idea of a goal so what actually is the difference between an objective and a goal? You know what happened, next I went looking for a definition of goal. The same people, Oxford Language, tell us that a goal is “the objects of a person’s ambition or effort, an aim or desired result.” So actually there’s not very much difference between an objective and a goal but absolutely, in your business, your marketing should be your ambition, it should be what you are looking to achieve. A marketing objective, as we define marketing, finding, winning and keeping customers profitably should be the ambition of your business.

Why are marketing Objectives important?

Which brings us to the question, Why are marketing objectives important? Marketing objectives are critically important and I can think of three reasons, three good reasons why you should be investing in marketing objectives in your business. The first is about direction which was brilliantly illustrated in Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland where he describes this interaction. “One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don’t know Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn’t matter. If you are completely directionless in your marketing I would say it absolutely matters. What you’re doing in your marketing is investing your time, and your energy, and your money in your business success. If you are wandering around in the wilderness, not knowing what it is that you’re trying to achieve, then I would say it is far more likely that you are going to run into the snakes, and the bulls, and the sharks, and the boars who are all interested in draining you of your marketing resource and your money. This might be your one chance to be successful in business, it’s really important that you establish for yourself what it is exactly that it is that you want to achieve. The second reason you want to be investing in marketing objectives for your business is about clarity. Not just clarity for yourself, but also clarity for the people that you are working with. It’s reported that 50 percent of employees claim they don’t really know what it is that they are expected to do, that clearly is hugely wasteful. My recommendation is that you invest in marketing objectives, you make sure a hundred percent of your team know exactly what it is that’s required of them and that will make it that much more likely that you will achieve your marketing goals. The third reason that you want to be investing in marketing objectives is because objectives are powerful. There is power in knowing what it is that you want to achieve, there is power in committing that to paper, there is power in letting the people around you know what it is that you want to achieve. There is something about having a fixed set of objectives at the front of your mind that makes it so much more likely that you will achieve those objectives.

Is there are issue with Marketing Objectives?

So is there an issue with marketing objectives? There’s not an issue with marketing objectives if you have them, if you sit down and you develop marketing objectives, if you work towards marketing objective. I think the only issue with marketing objectives is that people don’t do this work and I honestly don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s because people don’t understand marketing and what can be achieved through marketing, I don’t know if it’s because they are struggling in their business and it seems absurd to set higher expectations. I would argue the opposite; I would say that you are struggling in your business because you haven’t set those expectations. If you are in business, if you are investing in your sales and marketing sit down and have a think about what it is that you are hoping to achieve. This is your opportunity to do this work, this is your opportunity to dream, this is your opportunity to fall in love with your business again. Think about all of the things that your business could be achieving for you, and your family, and the people that you love. Take some time to sit down and develop some marketing objectives of your own.

How do you structure marketing objectives?

If you’re hearing me, and you’re believing me, I would hope that you are getting excited at the prospect of having some rock solid marketing objectives for your business. If the reason people don’t set marketing objectives is that they don’t understand marketing and they don’t understand what it is they should be achieving with their marketing, we are better off. You might remember, all the way back in episode number two, when we defined marketing we defined it as finding, winning and keeping customers profitably. We have had this clarity from the very beginning, we know what marketing is about, we know it’s about finding and winning customers and we know it’s about doing that as profitably as we possibly can. We have absolute clarity, our marketing definition is a definition of a marketing objective, it is a marketing objective and this is where we start from. This is why vague marketing objectives like generating more leads or getting more sales are completely ineffective because that doesn’t guarantee increasing our profitabiltiy. Spending a lot more money on a lot more leads doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to improve your profitability and neither does getting more sales. What we’re interested in is improving the profitability of our business through our marketing. There are effectively two ways to do that. The first way is to reduce your cost of customer acquisition and the second way is to improve your lifetime customer value. If we were to look at this, for example, we might say that our objective is to decrease our cost of customer acquisition. What we might do is look at all of our marketing activities; we might look at our content for example; our facebook marketing; at Adwords; SMS marketing; our LinkedIn marketing; SEO; our twitter marketing; at email marketing; we might be doing WhatsApp marketing or messenger marketing; we might be doing Instagram marketing or youtube marketing; the first goal, if we want to decrease our cost of customer acquisition is to look at all of our marketing initiatives and decide which of those is generating the best cost of customer acquisition. If we decide that that’s email, email marketing very often is the most cost effective way to acquire customers, we will want to acquire more customers through email marketing. What we would have to do is understand exactly what our cost of customer acquisition is from Email marketing. Then we would want to add more people to our mailing list. The way we might do that is by generating more traffic to the website. Then we would need to look at our conversion rate to make sure those people are signing up for the emails, to have more people on the database. Then we might want to segment the database to make sure that we are landing exactly the right message on exactly the right people. At which point we might decide that we want to send many, many, many more emails. What we’re going to have to look at then is our conversion rate to make sure that people are opening those emails, so they see the content of those emails. Then what we would want to look at is the conversion rate, to make sure people are clicking on that content to get through to see that content on our website. Then we might want to look at the products and the offers to make sure that people are engaging with us and looking to buy. The last thing we will do in this whole process is look at our cost of customer acquisition after we have done all of this work. You can see that if we can gain five percents in these different places, if we can grow our list by five percent, if we can increase our click conversion, get more people opening the emails, get more people clicking through to the website, if we can get more people actually clicking through and buying the products and services you can see how this would generate many, many more sales through email marketing. To be fair this is everything you could possibly do to generate more sales from your email marketing. The truth is if you were just to increase the number of people on your list, or you were to increase the frequency and the number of your sends this might have the effect of increasing the number of customers that you win through email marketing. The point of this is is that marketing objectives or objectives don’t stand alone. Beneath every marketing objective there are a tier of other marketing objectives. For example, here the objective is to reduce the cost of customer acquisition from email marketing, grow the list, increase the conversion rate, do more segmentation, send more emails, increase the conversion through to open, increase the conversion through to the website and then increase the conversion once people are on the website. What we’ve got here is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine marketing objectives. This is the way it typically works; people might ask you what are the four marketing objectives or the four objectives of marketing, it doesn’t work like that. The way it works is that you set a high level objective; we want to reduce our cost of customer acquisition; the second objective is we need to understand which of our marketing initiatives are actually delivering the best value in terms of customer acquisition; then we need to understand how to make that process more effective. What we have done here is demonstrate with email marketing that there are probably nine things that you could be doing to achieve that. Each of those actions is a marketing objective. So don’t think I need more sales, I need more leads, think about, actually, how am I going to increase the profitability of my business through my marketing.

When should you set Marketing Objectives?

Which brings us to the question when should you set your marketing objectives? In the next video we’re going to talk about SMART objectives and in that instance the T always stands for timed. It’s really important that your marketing objectives are timed. In the exercise that we’re going through we’re essentially walking you through putting together a marketing strategy, in which instance I would say that you should do this once a year. Whenever you put together your marketing strategy you should make sure that your objectives are stretching enough that it will take you a year to achieve those objectives. If it doesn’t take you a year and you surpass those objectives then all the better. You should definitely sit down once a year, when you review your marketing strategy and look at exactly where it is you are now and exactly where it is that you want to go. You should document your marketing objectives, share them with your teams and give yourselves the very best chance of achieving those marketing objectives over the next 12 months.

What did we cover in this marketing objectives definition?

If you are still with us well done, really well done. You now know exactly what marketing objectives are; you know why marketing objectives are important; you know who should be thinking about marketing objectives; you understand the issue with marketing objectives, people don’t do it; you understand how to structure your own marketing objectives and you know when to set your marketing objectives.

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