Marketing objectives are the goals a company creates for the marketing of its products or services.
Ultimately there is only one goal for all business: make profit.
Yes, you can do things like build a culture, create a great company, fill a customer need, but without profit none of those things are possible. So to keep it simple we’ll stick with profit as the ultimate business goal of any company or organization.
Before we look at marketing objectives it’s good to look at things at the company love.
Business Objectives
I’m a believer that all objectives start at the organization level. It’s good to start with core values and objectives for every person at every level in the company to use as guides for decisions.
For example, a company objective might be to reach a certain level of sales in a set number of years. The core values of the company can be to provide great products that solve problems while giving back to the local community no matter how big the business gets.
The sales goal can drive business decisions. Employees can work to find a way to make those goals reality. The core values and competencies keep everyone focused on what the business is good at and what it can be best at. Those are important because if a business makes drastic changes to what it knows things can get crazy.
Think of it like innovating and finding ways to grow while working within a framework.
Amazon started out selling books online. Soon they started selling other things online. It was innovation on the level of selling more products, but they were still selling online, which is what the company was and is the best at in the world.
Apple started selling computers and software. Later they started selling mobile hardware with accompanying software. It was innovation at the product level, but a similar product in which Apple still had competency.
Start by understanding your business objectives. It’s the best baseline to work from when you’re setting objectives elsewhere in the company.
Customer Objectives
Customer objectives are kind of in between business and marketing objectives. First you figure out what you want to do as a business. Then you figure out how that can align with what your customers want and after that you figure out how to fulfill the business and customer objectives with a product and a marketing plan.
Again with the Amazon example it started with Amazon wanting to sell things online. They found that a growing number of people enjoyed the convenience of shopping online and the availability of any product they could possibly imagine in one place.
An interesting dynamic with customer objectives is the customer may or may not understand what they want. It’s kind of up to the company to figure that out and sometimes it’s really difficult. You can do what you want and find no customer or you could listen to what the customer says and realize they don’t really want to purchase it.
Apple was able to figure out that people wanted digital music. They wanted to purchase it without worry and with ease. They also wanted portable digital music.
The result was iTunes and the iPod.
Finding out what the customer wants is not always easy and it usually takes some trial and error, but if you find what the customer wants and it aligns with your business objectives you’re in a really great place.
That’s how you approach customer objectives.
Marketing Objectives
Now we get to marketing objectives.
It really starts with your product. Great products do much of the marketing for a business. Once you get customers coming in and they’re satisfied with the product you’ll get referrals.
But it’s not that easy.
You have to get customers in the first place and to get lots of new customers you need a strong marketing plan with a way to get low cost acquisition of new customers.
Traditional marketing strategies can still work well. It’s good to really understand how your target customer gets information. Lots of people still watch TV. Older people really don’t use the Internet like younger generations do.
For online marketing objectives you have to understand how your customer uses the Internet and from their figure out how to introduce your brand and its product to them.
At GBW, we focus on business blogging.
We know our ideal customers are searching for information about online marketing, business blogging and social media. We try to provide answers to the questions and topics they’re searching for on Google and social media.
It’s an inbound marketing strategy aimed at creating new leads.
The marketing objective is to increase traffic to the site while moving toward a business objective to add more clients to the roster. For this past month the business objective was to add 10 new clients to the roster. We’re nearly there with a few days to go. We should hit it.
Conclusion
The marketing objectives started with the blog to get more traffic, which leads to more qualified leads. It starts with the right kind of traffic focused on the keywords our ideal reader is searching for and we create content we feel is the best for a particular keyword.
Your marketing objectives are created to fulfill business and customer objectives. With all three in mind you can really put together a successful business.