You’ve been in business for a while. You know the score. You understand that marketing has a direct relationship to your financial outlook. Now that you’re ready to kick things up a notch in the marketing department there’s one thing you must do first. You must define the marketing objectives for your business.
1. Identify and Understand Your Target Market
Before you do anything else, you need to know the specific group of people you’re targeting in your marketing efforts. You cannot create effective marketing objectives without a clear image of your target audience.
It’s not enough to simply know the demographic. You have to understand what motivates your target audience to buy.
Not too long ago, in a marketing venue dominated by men, a gentleman was promoting a product he believed would end bed wetting among children. He said he’d tried every approach he could think of to market the product and wasn’t getting the traction he needed.
The four women in the room, almost in unison, uttered a single word – laundry. His problem wasn’t that the product was a failure. It was simply that he didn’t understand the motivations of the people most likely to buy it.
You don’t have to be a mother to make or sell these products, but you do have to understand that she’s the most likely buyer as well as why she’d buy it in order to effectively market it to her.
2. Establish Specific, Actionable Marketing Goals
Marketing objectives are short and long-term goals you set for the marketing activities of your business. You can call them objectives, outcomes, goals, or whatever you’d like. In order to be effective, though, they must share the certain characteristics.
The most important are that the goals be specific and actionable. What this means is that vague undefined goals are impossible to achieve. An objective that states “We want to make more money in the next quarter,” isn’t specific enough. Whittle it down to the nuts and bolts.
How much more money does your business want to make in the upcoming quarter? $1? $10,000? Be specific as this helps you decide upon the appropriate marketing actions necessary to accomplish your marketing objectives.
Then there’s the actionable part. How are you going to achieve the marketing objectives you’ve put into place?
3. Sweat the Details
Just as you must be specific when defining your marketing objectives, you must also be specific when putting them into play.
- Who - Identify the person in charge of each goal or step in the overall strategy.
- What – Define the specific outcome that should happen once each goal is met.
- When – Establish when each objective should be complete.
- Where – Determine where each player should be positioned in order to maximize the potential for success.
- Why – Never lose sight of what the ultimate objective, why you are doing this, is.
These are all important details you need to define at the planning stage and not leave up to chance.
4. Procure Agreement among Key Players
One of the most critical elements for successfully creating objectives and goals is to secure agreement among the people responsible for meeting those goals. You’ll never get the engagement required for success if your own people aren’t committed to accomplishing the goals set for them.
5. Make all Objectives Measurable
It’s important to be able to measure the success of your marketing objectives for two reasons.
- You want to expand and improve on the things that are getting favorable and positive results.
- You need to be able to identify what isn’t working so that you can make changes to the plan or go back to the drawing board completely.
One without the other is weaker than the whole. Each part of the process needs to have a pre-defined measure of success or failure in order to be truly effective.
When all the pieces work together, your marketing objectives can bring your business to new heights. Without an effective marketing plan, though, it’s going to be difficult to accomplish those goals. That’s why it’s important to consider partnering with someone who can help you create and define marketing objectives for your business that will serve your needs today and well into the future.
If you are in need of some help in any of these directions, we offer a free Complimentary Inbound Marketing Session that might be what you need. Just click on the button to get yours today.
Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.
Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook - www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing - and LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar. He can also be found at Jaco+.