An average organization spends 7.7% of its annual revenue on marketing, finds Gartner. Younger businesses and early-stage startups spend a lot more. For most startups, marketing is the third biggest expense after payroll and product development.
Naturally, business leaders and investors will demand a return on this investment. To measure that, they set a clear and well-defined set of marketing objectives that need to be achieved.
In this blog post, we explore how you can do the same for yourself with the right tools and techniques.
⏰ 60-Second Summary
Marketing objectives define the purpose and targets for all activities performed by the marketing team. They guide the team’s marketing journey.
It is important to set marketing objectives because they provide:
- Clarity and focus for team members
- Coherence of efforts among cross-functional teams
- Flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs
- Measurement of efforts and outcomes
- A higher chance of success
To set marketing objectives within your company, try the following framework.
- Understand the organizational goals
- Derive marketing objectives from the organizational goals
- Make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART)
- Track progress with real-time KPI-driven dashboards
With , you can set, manage, monitor, and achieve marketing objectives in a highly customizable, AI-powered platform that gives you and your teams clear visibility at all times.
For examples of the marketing objectives you can set and ways to measure them, keep reading.
How to Set Marketing Objectives and Goals (+Examples)
What Are Marketing Objectives?
Marketing objectives refer to the goals and targets set for an organization’s marketing activities. These objectives serve as the Northstar for the marketing plan, strategy, and execution of campaigns.
The primary purpose of marketing objectives is to align all brand, advertising, promotions, events, social media, and PR activities to the organizational goals.
For instance, if the company’s biggest goal is expansion, then your growth marketing strategies need to be around expanding brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions.
On the other hand, a marketing tool startup’s primary goal might be customer retention; then, the organization would invest in customer success, new feature adoption, engagement, etc.
Importance of Marketing Objectives
An objective is a clear and memorable statement of the destination. It is the goalpost. By extension, this offers several key benefits.
Clarity and focus
Objectives give the marketing team clarity on what they need to accomplish during the year. It helps them make the right decisions around investing their time and budgets across activities.
Coherence
As marketing teams grow, it isn’t always possible for all of them to collaborate on all issues. Actionable marketing objectives are the glue that binds them. It is what makes sure that the social marketer and the designer are working in tandem toward the same marketing strategy, even if they don’t really interact much.
Flexibility
Objectives are often assumed to be inflexible. In fact, the opposite is true. Clear objectives provide great flexibility for teams to move around the activities that produce the best results. Ads not converting? No worries, let’s move those funds to an event sponsorship!
Measurement
Objectives ground marketing efforts in reality. They help measure the success or impact of the tasks performed by the team. Based on your performance on these objectives, you can also set benchmarks and refine marketing goals along the way.
Higher likelihood of success
Marketing objectives help teams draw the roadmap for all their activities. It gives strategic direction for making decisions. It enables better resource allocation and helps build competitive advantage.
In essence, marketing objectives set the ground for success. Let’s see what that might look like in practice.
📽️ Bonus Watch: As with most things, AI transforms marketing strategy and operations, making it easier to meet your objectives. Learn more in this video:
Common Marketing Objectives Examples
The marketing objectives you set depend on a number of organizational, industry-related, and environmental factors.
Stage of business: If you’re in the early stage, you might focus on acquiring new customers. If you’re an established enterprise, you might have goals for account expansion or cross-sell/upsell.
Organizational goals: While the most common organizational goal is to sell more, sometimes, situations demand something else.
For instance, the tourism industry, immediately after the pandemic, needed to build trust among customers.
So, your marketing goals depend on the company’s goals.
Industry: A B2B accounting software company is less likely to spend budgets on television advertising than an ice cream vendor would. So, the product, target audience, industry, etc. play a critical role in marketing objectives.
Need help creating marketing objectives? Enlist the services of Brain
Across all these parameters, here are the ten marketing objective examples to consider.
1. Improving brand reputation
Brand reputation is the way prospective customers perceive your organization’s offerings. This could be based on their own experience with your products or a result of your digital marketing efforts.
For example, Volkswagen has long been known for its safety and sustainability. Yet, in 2015, when the emissions cheating scandal struck, the brand’s fundamental reputation was in question.
The company took responsibility for its failings and doubled down on environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) initiatives to gain back its reputation. As per their annual report, in 2020, customers’ confidence in the brand stabilized in the core European markets.
Whether you’re launching a new brand or recovering from a crisis, improving brand reputation is an important marketing objective for any organization.
Example: Increase positive brand image among core customer groups by 30% within the financial year with a new marketing communication strategy.
Measurement: A qualitative objective like this needs to be measured using net promoter score (NPS), targeted surveys, social media sentiment monitoring, etc. Depending on current benchmarks, you can set targets for each of these metrics.
2. Increasing brand presence
Brand presence and the following visibility are key contributors to the top of the marketing funnel. It helps increase brand awareness, creating a market for the product you’re selling.
Example: Increase brand presence across key customer acquisition channels by the end of the quarter.
Metrics: Brand presence can be increased in a number of ways.
For instance, a beauty or F&B product might open new stores in various locations. A B2B technology brand might publish content on its blog or social media. A D2C brand might invest in advertising on marketplaces like Amazon.
3. Optimizing brand positioning
Brand positioning refers to the position that the product has in the minds of consumers and prospects. You might think of yourself as the best transformative and innovative offering in your market. However, if the customer thinks of you as a cheaper alternative, that’s who you are.
So, creating a space for your brand with a specific positioning is a key marketing objective.
Example: Position the brand as an easy-to-use, lightweight, AI-powered app to perform everyday tasks.
Metrics: The best way to understand positioning is to speak to customers directly. Surveys and focus groups are a great way to do this. Social media sentiment analytics and studies of online reviews might help, too.
4. Increasing traffic
Traffic is yet another important top-of-the-funnel metric that plays a key role in moving customers from awareness to consideration. Whether you’re nesting it into the brand presence category or creating an objective for traffic independently, here’s how you can approach it with some marketing roadmap templates.
Example: Increase website traffic by 2% month on month over the course of the next year.
Metrics: The primary metric is, of course, website traffic itself. However, to optimize it over time, you can break it down into other targets, such as:
- Increase organic traffic through SEO project management by 30%
- Improve email clickthrough rates to the website by 10%
- Optimize the paid marketing campaign to generate 100,000 visits each month
5. Enhancing the prospect pipeline
A prospect pipeline refers to the customers across various levels of engagement with the brand. Typically, a prospect pipeline or funnel consists of stages such as awareness, consideration, intent, and decision.
Enhancing this pipeline might mean two things: Increasing the volume of leads reaching the top of the funnel or improving the rate of conversion at each stage of the pipeline. The marketing objective you set will impact the strategy you follow.
Example: Increase the number of monthly demos to 150 per sales development representative (SDR).
Metrics: This can be achieved through various paths, such as:
- Increase conversion from intent to purchase by 50%
- Increase top-of-the-funnel lead generation by 50%
- Increase conversion rate at each step by 5%
6. Diversifying lead sources
A typical organization generates leads through a wide range of sources, such as online advertising, social media, word of mouth, partners, affiliates, etc. Sometimes, some sources might be more concentrated than others.
For example, an early-stage startup might be too dependent on its investors or incubator to acquire leads. This is a high-risk strategy. So, they might seek to diversify their lead sources.
Example: Generate at least 60% of leads from 4-5 channels other than that top one.
Metrics: This could be measured by the number of new lead generation channels, the share of leads from each channel, and a healthy breakdown of inbound and outbound channels. Try some of these marketing plan examples to find the right mix of elements for your needs.
7. Increase revenue
This is the primary objective of any business, not just marketing. The survival of a business depends on its ability to generate, retain, and increase revenue year on year.
Example: Increase company revenue by 10% by the end of the financial year.
Metrics: Leading metrics to this can be increase in customer count, higher share of wallet, inroads into new markets, etc. For example, if you’re a B2B tech company, you can increase revenue by:
- Selling more software
- Upselling advanced features to existing customers
- Upping the number of licenses bought by each customer account
- Increasing prices for each license
- Increasing market share
8. Increase profit margins
Despite the disproportionate focus it gets, revenue is just a means to an end. The real Northstar metric for an organization is its profit margins, i.e., the actual amount left after all expenses and taxes.
Example: Increase profit margins by 5% by the end of the year.
Metrics: You can increase profits by increasing revenue with the same expenses or reducing outflow for the current revenue. In the above marketing goal, we’ve seen what increasing revenue looks like. So, here are some metrics for reducing costs.
- Reduce payroll cost by 20%
- Reduce cost-per-acquisition to less than $50
- Increase customer lifetime value (LTV) by 50%
9. Increase customer retention
Customer retention refers to the percentage of existing users who renew each cycle. Modern technology/SaaS businesses allow the customer to cancel their contract at any point in time. Even the most strict contracts have a renewal period at which time the customer may leave without penalty.
This means that during every cycle, the organization must put marketing efforts into retaining every customer.
Example: Reduce user churn to less than 5% for the next financial year.
Metrics: The metrics for customer retention can be varied. Some examples include:
- Run a targeted digital marketing campaign for top customers
- Initiate 100% of renewals conversations at least 90 days before contract expiration
- Have customer success calls with business stakeholders at least once a month
- Demo significant new features to every existing customer
10. Improve customer advocacy
Very few organizations capitalize on word of mouth as an effective sales channel. This is a mistake. Word of mouth has credibility and reliability that no company-owned marketing channel might have. Prospects who come referred are more likely to convert than those who signed up for your newsletter.
Example: Increase leads generated through referrals by 30% within this financial year.
Metrics:
- Request reviews from customers on public platforms like G2
- Design a comprehensive customer advocacy program by Q1
- Develop a simple referral tracking mechanism for customers to use
Irrespective of the marketing objectives you’ve set, you need to make them SMART. Let’s see how.
Linking SMART Goals to Marketing Objectives
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The SMART goals framework enables organizations to make their objectives effective and successful.
While setting marketing objectives, it helps to make them SMART. For example, let’s see how it might look for an objective like increasing revenue.
Your SMART marketing objectives would be ‘increase revenue from core product by 10% within the next financial year.’ This is:
- Specific: Increase revenue from core product
- Measurable: 10%
- Achievable: Based on past performance, this would be a reasonable target to set
- Relevant: To support organizational growth, this is a relevant objective
- Time-bound: Within the financial year
If you’re new to setting objectives, try ’s SMART Goal Action Plan Template. This beginner-friendly, customizable template enables you to set goals, make plans, and track progress for your marketing activities.
How to Set and Achieve Marketing Objectives
The examples of marketing objectives in this blog post serve as an inspiration for you to set your own. Even if you know what objectives you want to achieve, setting them right can be a challenge. We’ve brought help.
1. Understand your organizational objectives
Understand from the business leadership what the overall goals and roadmap for the organization are. Learn about the top priorities, non-negotiables, and the resources available to achieve them.
It would be exponentially easier to manage and understand organizational objectives with a tool like ’s Company OKRs and Goals Template. This intermediate-level template is a powerful tool to consolidate and organize the many goals a company might have.
2. Derive your marketing objectives
Based on the organizational goals, plan your marketing objectives. Consider all aspects of marketing as well as related departments, such as sales and customer success. Use goal setting templates to accelerate this process.
Here are the Marketing Action Plan Template and Marketing Plan Template to help you design your marketing activities for the year. This beginner-friendly template helps document everything from goals to activities and outcomes, all in one place.
3. Set SMART goals
Set your marketing objectives in the form of SMART goals. Also, make them visible to the team.
Goals is a great way to do this. Set up your marketing objectives as key results with numerical, monetary, true/false, or task targets. Organize them in folders and use progress roll-up for a single pane view of your current state. Encourage team members to own objectives as part of their KPIs.
4. Track progress
Use marketing analytics software to set up comprehensive dashboards for your marketing objectives. With Dashboards, you can set up customizable widgets for any of the key performance indicators you’re tracking.
You can also effortlessly integrate external sources, such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales tools, social media management tools, etc. to build a complete picture.
You can start simply with the Marketing Report Template. Or set up your own multi-faceted dashboard for your needs.
Achieve Your Marketing Objectives with
The days of ‘build the product and people will come’ are long over. Whether it’s the orange juice aisle in a supermarket or accounting software, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of products in each category.
With little to differentiate one from another, marketing (positioning, messaging, targeting, etc.) plays a significant role in the success of the product. For marketing to be effective, you need a strategic approach beginning with the right objectives.
Setting measurable marketing objectives is just the start. From there, you need a powerful tool to set targets, track progress, make adjustments, and stay on track. for Marketing is designed to be that tool.
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