Your marketing objectives are the foundation for a successful marketing strategy. Your objectives should be the goals you want to achieve during a certain period of time, giving your team measurable KPIs. With these objectives in place, it provides you with a guide that allows you to execute a plan in order to successfully meet all of your goals for the year.
5 Ways to Set Realistic Marketing Objectives
The best way to create your marketing objectives is to make SMART goals. The acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Keeping these factors in mind will help you to create realistic, quantifiable goals that you can aim for.
1. Specific
Decide what you want to improve upon, whether it be website visitors, leads, customers, etc. Then, decide what each team member will work on in order to reach these goals.
2. Measurable
Create a system where you can easily gauge the progress you are making to be able to keep and stay on track. By assessing progress, you will have a better chance at staying focused to meet your deadlines.
3. Attainable
Make sure that the goals you set are actually achievable. Making and accomplishing constant small goals is easier to manage than creating one big goal that may never be attained. Ask yourself questions such as, “Is it a good time for this goal?” and “How realistic is my goal?” Having support for your goals is important to ensure that you maintain control over them so you can achieve them.
4. Relevant
You need to create goals that will actually be beneficial to your company and trends within your field. Make sure that whatever goals you set matter to your company, and you’re not creating random goals and jumping on the trend of what others may be doing.
5. Time-Bound
A great way to stay on track for your marketing objective is to add a time-line to your goals. A time-line creates pressure and encourages constant and significant progress for the long-term.
You need to focus on concrete targets, and fully understand what goals you want, why you want them, and how you will achieve them. A marketing objective is a concrete number you are working towards. The more specific you are with it, the better you will be in order to achieve it.