Is your website good enough? Does your marketing content keep consumers attention? To compete in the current market, it needs to. There’s no room for businesses with sub-par marketing campaigns.

Having a well-constructed marketing strategy is more complicated than hiring a team. You’ll need to base all your content off of key marketing objectives. Don’t know what those are? Hang tight, we’re explaining below.

What are Marketing Objectives

Marketing objectives are the why behind the what. They give your material purpose and a theme to drive content creation. They can be financial goals or brand awareness, it’s different for everyone.

The most important thing about marketing objectives is that that they align with your business objectives. Creating a marketing plan without consulting other parts of your business is a waste of time.

Learn how to create a plan without wasting time below.

How to Create SMART Marketing Objectives

Like any other successful activity, you need to start from scratch. Gather your executive business (and/or) marketing team and identify your business objectives. If your business is active, you should never have a singular objective.

Identify Business Objectives First

Businesses have many moving parts and your objective list needs to reflect that. Make your objective list and then review it. Ask yourself,

• What objective on that list is the most important?
• Which will be the easiest to achieve?
• What are we willing to spend on this?
• Do We have the resources?

Take apart each goal like you’re dissecting it. Then you can put your list back together multiple ways. This exercise will give you interesting perspective and help you choose a marketing path.

Shape your Marketing Goal From a Business Objective

Once you’ve worked with your team to determine what your company needs, you can think about how to get it. If your goals are at all related to your customers, your marketing team will be your ticket to success.

When your marketing objectives are identified, prioritise them further by asking these questions:

• Is this measurable? Do we have the tools?
• Is the campaign cost worth future revenue?
• Do we know anyone who specialises in this?
• Is this something we can stick to?
• What can we track to know we’re succeeding?

With those questions answered, you can set your first SMART marketing objective.

Learn from the Past

Once you and your team have your objective in mind, think about what brought the problem about. Was it not a problem in the past because of market differences? Or has the company’s culture changed?

Asking these questions will keep you from making the same mistakes down the line and having to start this whole process again. Spend enough time on the past to create a to-do list and a not to-do list for your goal.

Then move on to the next step!

SMART Marketing Objectives

SMART goals are an acronym for how to set realistic goals. In order, the letter means: small measurable achievable results timed. Broken down, it’s not the best English but it’s been proven the best goal setting method.

Let’s walk through an example. In this example, the company’s goal is to increase sales. That is too general to succeed. It doesn’t tell us by how much, in what category, or how it’ll be measured. Using the SMART system, that goal looks like this.

Specific: Increase shoe sales to women ages 19-26 in Canadian market

Now we know who the marketing team should direct their content to and where money should be spent.

Measurable: Increase shoe sales to women ages 19-26 by 15%.

Timed: Increase shoe sales to women ages 19-26 by 15% before the end of the next quarter.

What started as a vague goal with no hopes of being accomplished, is now a stable plan. The SMART goal system is much easier to follow than an idea with no constrictions.

Some people refer to SMART goals as SMARTER goals. The difference is in the last two letters. Those who promote SMARTER goals view the initial task as on going. The E and the R stand for evaluating and revisit.

Those who use SMART goals don’t skip the last two stages, they think of them as part of another goal. The two theories get the same things done, but with different states of mind.

Marketing Objective Examples

If you don’t know where to start, that’s fine. The digital marketing world is big and there’s no wrong place to start. To spark your imagination, we’ve gathered some examples of marketing objectives.

Make Mobile Site More Friendly

You’ll notice that this goal is not in SMART form. That’s because the specifics need to come from the goal-setting business. This goal is not a random example. Having a quality mobile site is essential for search engine optimisation rankings (SEO). Google highly prefers websites that are easily accessed by mobile devices.

They’ve even gone as far as adding a lightning bolt next to search entries, to let the viewer know they can expect a fast experience.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

While this doesn’t seem like direct digital marketing, it can be. Your business could set the goal of having such good customer service, that people post about it.

Your reputation gets a boost without you having to do anything. You can then use their post or review as marketing content. Using customers experiences is a great digital marketing strategy.

Improve Brand Awareness

Not every piece of marketing content needs to be selling a product. It’s worth budgeting some money towards selling a brand. If your customers don’t know who you are, they won’t remember what you do.

Stay SMART

When establishing your marketing objectives, remember to stay smart. Keep your goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. You’ll see a higher rate of success, with lower levels of frustration.

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