The Importance of Clear Marketing Objectives
When it comes to your marketing strategy, you need to ask yourself whether you have clear objectives. These objectives are pretty essential, but many businesses don’t keep track of them. Perhaps you’re able to recall some of your more successful campaigns, but not your original purpose. And while it’s great that you got a positive outcome, you won’t know if you hit your target unless you record your goals.
If you don’t have defined goals, your campaign would basically be a waste of time and money. This is because you wouldn’t be able to measure the success or impact of your campaign, and therefore would not know the best way to make any improvements moving forward. Without objectives, with each new campaign you would essentially be starting from scratch.
Marketing objectives can provide you with clarity and direction, leading your business to success. They can also be a great way of showing other people in the company that the work you are doing has value. Rather than simply informing colleagues about the strategies themselves, you can tell them the objectives and whether you hit these targets.
If you don’t currently have any marketing goals, or wish to reevaluate the ones you do have in place, it’s a good idea to consider various marketing objectives. We’ve outlined five of the most common goals below:
1. Boost Your Brand Awareness
Around half of all marketing campaigns are mainly focused on brand awareness, according to a survey conducted by HubSpot. This does tend to make sense – you can’t really convince anyone to invest in your products or services if they haven’t even heard of your business!
When it comes to increasing your brand awareness, the main thing to remember is that you can’t simply shout about your business, as outreach needs to be a two way conversation. Make sure you listen to your audience and make them feel valued. That way, you may even turn these customers into brand advocates.
It’s additionally important to come across as human and approachable when promoting your brand. There has to be a brand personality for people to relate to, which can often be achieved through storytelling. You will need to consider the medium of your storytelling too – will this be via images, text or video? Think about where your audience spends most of their time, and match the medium accordingly. For instance, if lots of your followers are on YouTube, connecting through video is probably the way to go.
2. Increase Your Revenue
For the majority of businesses, increasing their revenue will be the most important goal, alongside improving the overall ROI of the business. Of course not every campaign will have higher revenue as an outcome, especially if you’re just starting out – brand awareness will most likely be your primary focus at that point. It’s also good to note that when you measure other goals, you’ll often get a rough idea of your revenue anyway. For example, if you can see that you have better brand awareness and more customers, this is likely to result in more sales.
So how do you increase your revenue through marketing? One great strategy is to target customers at every stage of the sales funnel. This will include building a strong online presence, email marketing, retargeting campaigns, as well as things like sharing customer success stories. Once a user has made a purchase, you’ll also need to focus on strengthening customer loyalty.
3. Improve Site Traffic
Another great goal in terms of marketing is increasing the traffic to your website. You know that not every site visit will lead to a purchase, but the more traffic you get, chances are, the more sales you’ll have overall. While this sounds relatively straightforward, getting more visitors to your website isn’t always easy, and might not be cheap either. You may need to try out a couple of different strategies before you hit upon the best combination.
In regards to strategies you can experiment with, common ones include increasing your paid advertising spend, and putting more resources into your SEO (search engine optimisation). The former is pretty self explanatory, while the latter can lead to more trials to see what works best! For instance, you could try starting a blog, or including more calls to action on your website.
4. Get More New Customers
As with increasing your site traffic, acquiring more new customers is probably harder than it sounds. Repeat customers are usually easier to market to, as they’ve already used your product or service, and have been impressed with the results. New customers will have to rely on the information you provide, along with reviews from other customers.
A key thing to remember with this strategy is that you need to get new customers in a scalable way. So if your main way of attracting people to your business is through content, you’ll need to ensure that you are investing enough resources into this area. You should also keep in mind that calls to action are invaluable when it comes to converting site visitors into customers.
5. Develop Your Internal Branding
Although this may not be your primary goal when setting up a marketing campaign, it’s certainly a useful outcome. Educating your employees about your brand will help you get better buy-in from staff, and will also present the opportunity for employees to request resources from you, boosting the overall business performance.
Overall, no matter what objectives you choose, you need to ensure that everyone within your organisation is on the same page. You all need to work together to reach the same goals, and then measure the outcomes so that you can improve future campaigns.