Businesses are always looking for opportunities for growth and expansion. Stagnant models often lead to slow or no growth, and possibly worse the shrinking or collapse of an organization. Perhaps a company is having difficulty managing change in technology or culture. There is also the belief that the way we have always done business is the right way to do business in today’s economic climate. The lack of adapting sales and marketing plans to the current standards and not thinking about the future can lead to troubling times. Successful businesses recognize this and set up plans to make sure that their sales goals align with how they promote their services or product. They also want to adapt to an ever-changing market and a consumer body that is the savviest in history when it comes to consumption. An easy way to do this is to complete a SWOT analysis of the organization’s marketing program and then look at the weaknesses and threats in the current business model. This will give you a hint on areas the business will need to work on and is always a good place to start when building marketing objectives.
So what are marketing objectives? This can be defined as clear cut and defined goals that align with your organization’s overall goals. (Kosaka, 2020) How does an organization choose what to concentrate on and how do they strategically align their goals to parallel with the overall business objectives? Like stated above, it is best to analyze the business and current marketing plan in place, and choose items that are thought to be weaknesses (internal) or threats (external). Concentrate on these issues and build marketing objectives to strengthen your plan and business alignment in these areas. The business needs to think SMART.
SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. These characteristics are used to develop marketing objectives that make sense for business and allow someone to measure success or failure. Below gives a few examples of companies and how they
SPECIFIC
John Hancock is an investment firm in Boston. They have been a leading sponsor for the Boston Marathon for quite some time, however, they weren’t seeing the return on investment as consumption habits started to change towards a digital medium. John Hancock also wanted to promote the sport of running and bring together the community after the marathon bombings. They went to AMP, a marketing company with specific goals. They wanted to build their online footprint and create a campaign that surrounds the stories of runners and their connection with the marathon. AMP brought John Hancock into the digital era by building a campaign based on the hashtag #weruntogether. (Case Studies, N.D.) John Hancock saw a gap in their marketing plan and came up with a specific goal to help them achieve success.
MEASURABLE
Being able to track the progress of your objectives is important. Your marketing plan should consist of goals that are able to be easily measured. You want trackable metrics. Dell has an example of this. Their strategies aligned their business model with other partners, and they were finding that there was a gap in follow up with these partnered campaigns. They set an action to personalize follow-ups to these leads and used analytics to measure their success. They saw an increase in revenue and a 300 percent increase in engagement. (Fonvielle, 2019)
ATTAINABLE
Yes. Your goals need to be attainable. This means rational and follows in line with measurable. If a business is starting a blog, one can’t go into this venture thinking they are going to get a million hits. Set a goal that states you can see 500-600 hits per blog posting after a year or so. The higher the expectation, the more frustrated one can get.
RELEVANT
Your objectives need to align with your overall goals. You cannot swim upstream and achieve growth. Your path must be parallel with the progress you want to see. When MINT was acquired by Intuit, they were facing issues with gaining trust from the consumers. MINT asked you to share your banking information so that you could track your spending. INTUIT then provided relevant content to grow the brand. They used social media and videos to interact with their customers and partnered with credit card companies to solidify their legitimacy in the market. These are all relevant objectives to help the brand grow. (Marketing Strategies, 2018)
TIME-BOUND
Finally, there is time. This parallels with measurable analytics for your business. How long does one want to carry out an objective? Marketers are best to set micro-goals in hopes to hit their targets at these set times. Be reasonable in your goal setting. Your goals have to be attainable and measurable.
When building objectives, you have to be careful of the consumer’s privacy and the data you acquire from them and how you use it. This drives ethical concerns amongst the general public. Also when building a marketing campaign, make sure that your plan follows the American Marketing Association code of ethics and that your objectives align with honesty in the product, be responsible, be fair, respect others, be transparent, and be a good social citizen. (Anastasia, 2019)
9 Successful Digital Marketing Case Studies. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2020, from https://www.singlegrain.com/res/digital-marketing-agency/case-studies/
Anastasia. (2019, September 19). Social Responsibility & Ethics in Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.cleverism.com/social-responsibility-ethics-marketing/
Facebook. (2018, December 25). 5 Leading Digital Marketing Strategy Case Studies to Inspire Your Next Step Change. Retrieved January 31, 2020, from https://blog.hellostepchange.com/blog/5-leading-digital-marketing-strategy-case-studies-to-inspire-your-next-step-change
Fonvielle, M. (2019, August 7). 3 Case Studies in Successful Marketing Campaigns and What They Taught Us About Content Marketing. Retrieved January 31, 2020, from https://www.relevance.com/3-case-studies-in-successful-marketing-campaigns-and-what-they-taught-us-about-content-marketing/
Kosaka, K. (2020, January 6). How to Define and Measure Marketing Objectives: A Start-to-Finish Guide. Retrieved January 31, 2020, from https://blog.alexa.com/marketing-objectives/