Marketing Focus – Setting Marketing Objectives
When you start a business, or are planning a marketing campaign, the first step is to set objectives. These objectives will give the campaign a clear purpose and are the foundation of everything you do moving forward.
To start to set objectives you should ask yourself, or your team a key question – What do we want to achieve?
This question is at the very root of your business, but you need to ensure that you answer it clearly and realistically, breaking down larger objectives into smaller ones where possible.
Objectives should always be SMART
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time bound
How to make an objective SMART?
Let’s take a look at an example of a common objective we will all have when we go into business – to make money.
That’s of course the aim for all businesses, but “I want to make money” is not a SMART objective.
In order to make this a useful statement, we’d need to define how much money we wanted to make, in what time period and make sure that this amount was within our reach, given the level of investment you have for your business and the people, skills, technology you have available.
So a SMART objective would be, “I would like to make xx€ per month for the first 12 months of trading, ramping up to xx€ per annum when we have recruited staff and have a strong brand presence in the market.”
However getting a monetary figure can be tricky when costs are not established in the early stages.
We often recommend our clients look at how many customers they want and need and how many new customers they should aim to be bringing in per month.
Once we have this number, we can look at conversion rates of leads or enquiries to sales, and a typical customer lifetime value, or repeat purchasing schedule. With this knowledge you can know how many leads to aim for and how many people we need to try to be reaching with our marketing.
At this stage we should also look closely at how much money each client will bring you in and your costs, to ensure this is viable.
Creating “SMART” objectives will allow you to evaluate the campaign by measuring how successful the marketing activity has been. They also help you to make a plan for reaching those concrete numbers and goals and keep you on track and accountable throughout your year.
Tips for setting objectives
- Is the point of the campaign to achieve an increase in sales? If so it is important to think about by how much and over what length of time
- Think about web traffic and social media “likes”. Is this something which you are looking to increase, if so then by how much and how long is the timeframe?
- How many leads would you like to get through the campaign and what should the minimum conversion rate be
- Consider customer satisfaction and retention as valuable objectives, rather than just customer acquisition – it is much cheaper and easier to retain a customer and encourage repeat purchase, rather than require a constant stream of new customers
- Consider the man power required to achieve the goals you are setting – do you have enough people, or would you need to recruit more? If you’ll need to recruit, you need to take this into account when calculating profit margins.
Once you have your objectives set in place it is then easy to see what needs to be done and how the campaign will be evaluated.
To learn about marketing watch our A-Z of marketing video series on YouTube or join us for a marketing training session today.
For more information on marketing on the Costa del Sol, please visit our website or contact us on (+34) 952 903 154 or email info@shawmarketingservices.com