Setting Your Marketing Objectives
Creating a successful marketing plan can be quite a complex business. One of the easiest things you can do, however, is to set meaningful objectives for your plan. With the right objectives in place, the rest of the plan begins to take shape as you structure your activities and budgets.
But what are the right objectives? Obviously the detail depends on your business, the position you have in the market, your product plans and a range of other factors, but there are some general rules to consider.
Put simply, a marketing strategy is a vehicle for delivering marketing objectives. A strategy should not include detail but instead it should set out a general direction that can be fleshed out with tactics.
So, let’s imagine that our marketing objective for the year was to grow market penetration by 15% among males between the ages of 18 and 25. What would be a suitable strategy for doing this? We could suggest something like increasing brand awareness or expanding the product line. These are high level strategies.
We wouldn’t set out our marketing communications plan here. We would leave that for a discussion about tactics. Marketing strategy is where we decide what we want to do, not how we do it. Observe the following:
Firstly the goals you set need to be in line with your overall strategic plan. It’s no good setting a goal to expand the company into China if you have no foreign language skills or don’t understand the local market. You could use outsourced marketing services of course but you must make sure that your overall strategic aims inform your marketing goals or you might find you are pulling your business in different directions.
Secondly, ensure that your goals are measurable and achievable. There’s no point in setting vague goals as you won’t be able to measure your progress and there’s no point in setting unachievable goals as you’ll be doomed to failure before you begin. A good idea to set these objectives is to involve your whole team in a marketing workshop, this way you’ll get input from all areas of the business and get to see a range of ideas and suggestions.
Finally, make sure that your goals are targeted towards very specific outcomes. If you do plan to expand the company in China then you need to be very precise about what that means. Set a precise growth target and a date for achieving this.
With the right goals in place you’ll be well on the way to developing a successful marketing plan.
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