I have often heard it said that marketing doesn’t work, but seriously, if you don’t know what is that you are trying to achieve how will you ever know if your marketing is working or not.
If you have been following this thread you will now know how your business is performing, and you are now in a position to set yourself some marketing objectives that will take you from where you are now to where it is that you are looking to end up.
Objectives in the sense that we’re talking about here are defined in the dictionary as a noun “a thing aimed at or sought; a goal.” Marketing, as we have established, is the activity of identifying, winning and retaining customers profitably. So that should give you some clarity on what marketing objectives are.
The first thing we do in every single marketing training that Effective Marketing run is to establish all of the things that could be achieved using whichever marketing initiative it is that we are discussing. If you are focused only on winning quick sales your marketing is likely to fail. Not only are quick sales hard to come by but the quality of those sales will be poor. Poor quality sales will lead to poor customer satisfaction, poor customer retention, a poor reputation and no referrals, which will make your next sale even more difficult to secure. The broader the range of marketing objectives, the broader the target and the greater your chances of hitting it.
It is worth remembering of course that your marketing objectives will be dependent on each other. For example, no one is able to buy something from you before they are aware of you and what it is that you have to offer. So chronologically your awareness objectives need to be met before you can increase the number of enquiries or sales. It is, therefore, really important that you set out your marketing objectives in a chronological order. You need to increase your markets awareness of you before you can increase enquiries, proposals and sales for example.
Your marketing success will depend on your ability to identify and meet your marketing objectives. The greater your awareness of all of the things that marketing could be achieving for your business the more likely you are to achieve.
Next week I am going to be talking about how you frame your marketing objectives using well established mnemonics like SMART, so come back next week if you haven’t got a blogging clue about SMART objectives.
