How To Set SMART Marketing Objectives?
Marketing Objectives
At the core of any great marketing plan is a list of strategic and clear marketing objectives.
Marketing objectives are a brand’s defined goals. They outline the intentions of the marketing team, provide clear direction for team members to follow. And offer information for executives to review and support.
Marketing goals are a pivotal part of a marketing strategy. Without defined goals, a brand will struggle with achieving its plans because it won’t be clear on what it wants to do. A straightforward plan is required to know what you hope to do and how you plan on doing it.
Why You Need Set Marketing Goals
Without clear goals, you’re basically directionless – and working to achieve vanity metrics that don’t necessarily help you achieve your overall business objectives.
For example, without social media objectives, you’re basically working to get more likes and engagement – but does that necessarily translate to success?
On the other hand, if your goal is to convert more followers – arguably one of the most popular objectives – then don’t focus on creating content that only gets you likes and comments. Instead, try to drive more social media traffic to your website, and encourage your followers down the digital marketing funnel.
The Basics of Setting Objectives: How to Set SMART Goals
When it comes to setting objectives, there are various criteria you can use. We recommend strategic marketing planning through SMART goals work best because they cover every important aspect of a successful marketing goal:
- Specific: There are two ways to interpret this and both are very useful. For one thing, you need to be specific with your goals and ensure that it’s a very clear objective; and for another, you also need to be very specific about what this goal means and what it encompasses.
- Measurable: In other words, what KPIs will help you understand whether you’ve reached your goals or not. This is very important as you want to be able to understand whether your efforts actually paid off. And how they translate to revenue. Also, it’s worth noting that with some digital marketing strategies. It can be difficult to quantify your results and understand how they translate into revenue (particularly with social media marketing).
- Achievable: When setting goals, it’s a great idea to aim high – but not so high that they’re unrealistic. When you’re setting your digital marketing objectives, ask yourself whether they can actually be achieved or whether you’re simply setting yourself up for failure.
- Relevant: Or, how do your digital marketing goals help you reach your business goals? As I mentioned earlier, this is very important. Because at the end of the day, you’re developing all of these marketing strategies to help grow your business. In fact, you should start with your business objectives first and think of what digital marketing objectives will help you reach for the former.
- Time-bound: Giving your objectives a clear deadline tells you when you need to measure your results and benchmark these results against past (and future) campaigns. This is another highly important practice. As it helps you understand how to optimize your future strategies – and objectives. In order to achieve better results with each new campaign.
