If you, like me, work in Digital Marketing, you know that we are living in the machine revolution: algorithms are digital robots used by search engines and other platforms to interpret all content on the Internet in milliseconds!
Based on this analysis, the robots will also decide where to display such content on the search results pages — out of dozens or thousands! That is, if they even decide to show anything at all!
The more updates search engines release, the smarter their algorithms become. The smarter they become, the more they reconsider the rankings they previously gave to websites and links shown in searches.
It means that doing the minimum possible sales planning (which is part of Marketing) and updating some content with the keywords of the moment is not a strategy!
It’s very risky!
Any change in algorithms can destroy the sales (and perhaps the existence) of brands without goals or sales plans.
To avoid such a gray (and increasingly common) fate, your company needs to:
- From a dedicated Marketing team (and, possibly, assistance or training from a partner agency like Enjoy Minder — I’ll talk about this below);
- And decide which objectives need to be achieved with Marketing (and what is their order of importance in the history of growth of your brand’s profitability from now on).
But I don’t blame anyone who isn’t aware of these needs: it’s not the most obvious thing for anyone who doesn’t work in Marketing.
This observation is only evident to me because I have been the CEO of one of the largest Inbound Marketing agencies for over 15 years and I have learned how to create positioning strategies with lifetime traffic to make my company (and my clients) immune to machine revolutions!
In this text, you will find everything you need to do the same thing for your business, so don’t stop reading!
Why set clear objectives?
It is not possible to transform a company from small or medium to large without dedicating a creative and multidisciplinary team (the Marketing team) to understand customers and facilitate the closing of sales by the sales team.
Unless your company operates in an industry beyond the reach of the Internet (which is reserved for a few mega industries), your brand will be subject to technological and cultural changes that have been changing at enormous speeds due to the popularization of cell phones!
At one point or another, you will need a team that translates the company’s financial goals into a sales strategy that takes into account the public’s behavior in the current culture — another role of Marketing!
Furthermore, a growing company needs to hire more professionals and group them into teams that, without a common task to complete with individual efforts, may work in a segmented manner, limited to fulfilling the role of a position.
One of the most effective ways to ensure the sum of people’s experiences, tools and intelligence on a team (or connect them with more teams) is to give them a purpose.
The goal is a vision of how things should be.
When faced with a goal, people can see themselves contributing with the talents they have to make that desire come true!
In other words, the goal is “where” your company, and the people in it, want to go.
Goals are “how” this objective will be achieved ! Measurable milestones that will determine whether a goal was successful and brought the company closer to its goal, or if the goal did not meet expectations and needs to be revised.
Without goals, a business doesn’t grow. Without objectives, it doesn’t move.
Defining clear objectives in Marketing serves this purpose: to prevent your brand’s success from disappearing in the face of modern obstacles — from algorithms to culture!
How to Set Effective Marketing Objectives
It all starts with your company’s financial goals: what does your brand need to achieve at a business level to stay afloat and continue growing in the years to come?
If, for example, my goal is to own the company that sells the most in the pharmaceutical industry, I need help from Marketing to understand “how” I will get to that “where” in my niche.
To plan sales and growth goals in this context, my Marketing team (or my partner agency) would need to analyze:
- What is the size of the industry;
- How big are my competitors;
- How many new clients do I need to have this year (and in the coming years);
- And what revenue increase would be realistic to expect.
Answers to these questions will give rise to more specific and easily measurable sub-objectives, in Marketing’s attempt to adapt the brand to the cultural and behavioral changes of leads and algorithms: the key results!
The ideal is to communicate the business objective in a short and direct way, as in the example I gave earlier about the pharmaceutical industry: to have the largest company in the sector!
From there, determine between two and five key results that, when achieved, will indicate that the objective has been met and that it is time to think about a new one.
In Marketing, to know whether a key result has been achieved, you need to define (and hit) a target for it — a KPI (a Key Performance Indicator).
In the case of making my store the largest pharmacy, the key results—and the goals for achieving them—might involve:
- Dominate industry sales (key result) through a 5,000% increase in sales over the next 5 years (KPI);
- Retain current customers (key result), increasing the repeat purchase rate by 20% in the first year of the project (KPI);
- Make the brand known to the public on the Internet through Branding (key result), reflected by a 500% increase in unique visits to the company’s website over the course of the campaign (KPI).
See how key results are straightforward and require specific information about what they need to become a reality?
Effective Marketing objectives take into account the ease of extracting exact numbers about audience behavior and sales revenue through Internet platforms!
Defining your business’s objectives, key results and KPIs is a strategy that can and needs to be customized to your brand’s current scenario compared to the victories it would like to achieve in a given period.
Knowing this, I have two methodologies for creating goals that can help you plan for the growth of your business — instead of leaving it to the whims of the market.
Check it out!
SMART Methodology
The acronym SMART comes from English and can be translated as the adjective “smart” in Portuguese, describing the 5 pillars on which an objective needs to be built.
It needs to be:
- Specific;
- Measurable;
- Achievable;
- Relevant;
- Time-bound (temporal).
Specificity defines, in a short, direct sentence, a single objective to be achieved (such as “increase sales”).
But how much would you increase sales by? What percent would be considered a success (or a failure) — 100%? 50%? 20%? This is where the goal needs to be measurable .
Is this increase possible? Is it achievable? If not, there is no point in wasting resources on it. The same goes if increasing sales is not a relevant goal for the company in the end.
But if the brand knows that it needs to increase sales (it is relevant) and this is possible, how long would it take to achieve this increase?
Increasing sales by 20% in 6 months will make all the difference in your team’s urgency and clarity on what needs to be done to get there on time, especially when compared to a 50% increase in 3 months!
Either way, a specific and quantitative result avoids waste and leaves no room for procrastination about what really needs to be done to do well!
Without limits, the project can drag on forever and never be reviewed — and review is essential to correct mistakes and strengthen the success of Marketing objectives.
Following this formula, idealizing objectives and then breaking them down into key results and goals to be achieved, makes the entire growth process more structured, predictable and possible!
OKR Methodology
The difference between the OKR and SMART methodology is simplicity.
OKR comes from the English “Objective and Key Result” and, when translated into Portuguese, becomes ” Objectives and Key Results “. It is the concept popularized by Intel that tries to effectively communicate:
- The objective (the letter “O” in OKR) that the company wants to achieve;
- And the key results (the “KR” in OKR) that will give rise to the goals (the KPIs) that, when met, will move the business closer to the objective.
While in the SMART methodology it is necessary to follow the 5 principles of building an objective or goal, the OKR methodology only requires that:
- You set a goal, such as “greatly increase sales”;
- And between 1 and 5 key results for it, such as “tripling the number of customers”, “increasing website conversion by 15%” and “investing 10% in Paid Media “, for example.
There is no right or wrong methodology: use the one that best suits your team size, current pressure and deadlines!
What are the main examples of Marketing objectives?
Each company will have its own objectives, results and goals to achieve, since the need for growth (and the conditions available for this) vary from business to business.
Even with this variation, some goals tend to be more common and urgent than others — and these are the ones I will present to you!
1. Increase sales and revenue
Even though the ultimate goal of every company is to make more profit, there will be periods when paying attention to revenue will be essential to stabilize business growth or allow for innovation!
Marketing objectives aimed at increasing sales and revenue tend to create strategies for directing the actions of potential customers, building customer loyalty, and attracting people — all measured using specific KPIs, such as sales volume and conversion rates!
2. Build customer loyalty
Speaking of selling more, customer loyalty is essential not only for growth, but for getting closer to the security of having a business that suffers less from market trends (or crises).
Tracking customer lifetime metrics, their recurring purchases, and conducting satisfaction surveys help you understand what your company needs to do to attract the right people (those who buy more often).
3. Improve brand visibility
As marketing objectives stack up like rungs on the ladder that take a company from small to large, there will come a time to prioritize brand visibility.
Increasing a business’s presence means both appearing to all of its potential customers and establishing authority in the segment in which it operates.
This authority is not limited to those who know your company or not: it becomes synonymous with the brand itself!
Quality is synonymous with Apple. Wine is synonymous with Casa Valduga. Digital Marketing is synonymous with Organic.
Improving brand visibility involves showing up and being relevant, so the metrics used to track this goal are numerous — including impressions, bounce rates, and conversion rates too!
4. Brand strengthening and management (Branding)
Visibility only becomes authority when your brand knows how to behave in front of the audience it intends to captivate!
Branding is the segment of Marketing responsible for defining your company’s tone of voice: how it communicates with consumers through all content — from individual emails to posts on social media and Paid Media!
The more your business speaks the language that your ideal customer needs to understand the message, the more power it will have in building the authority capable of converting strangers into buyers.
At the same time, the originality that makes your company stand out from other options in the niche also comes from Branding: from the opportunity to translate a solution that only your brand has, into the language that your perfect audience (the one that buys) speaks!
The result is a considerable increase in your website traffic, a decrease in Customer Acquisition Cost, and the perception on the part of the public that only your brand has what they need!
5. Educate the market and potential customers
The act of educating is interpreted as altruistic because, when a person who needs the solution manages to implement it, they immediately connect (and trust) the figure who educated them.
Since much of the Internet is built on the need to seek answers (sometimes to questions that people would never share with anyone in the physical world), educating the market and your potential customers is a surefire way to strengthen your brand’s authority — and convert more people!
By “education” I mean anything that teaches someone how to do something: from changing a light bulb to understanding how your product or service works.
The case of preparing the market for your business’s offerings and innovations is covered by this Marketing objective — and it can be reflected in metrics such as retention time or the number of shares!
6. Team engagement and motivation
The mission behind Marketing goals is to drive entire teams toward the financial and cultural desires of a business, so it’s only to be expected that team engagement and motivation are goals in themselves!
It’s an effective way to reduce individualism and unite roles (and profit more as a result) because people come together against time to do what the business needs them to do!
A clear example of unity is when the Marketing team creates a strategy with the sales team in mind and they continue to exchange ideas after the plan is implemented to ensure that the goal will be achieved within the defined deadline — but without weighing too heavily on anyone’s productivity.
Carrying out internal surveys and monitoring your employees’ satisfaction metrics is essential and there is no way to grow without it!
7. Adapting to digital market trends
Another mission that naturally arises with Marketing objectives (and which can become an objective in itself, depending on the need) is not to let the ball drop in the digital market!
Creating goals to keep your team up to date on technological changes related to Branding and sales is the most valuable act to make your company immune to economic, cultural, and even algorithmic changes that decide what content to show (and to whom).
Goals to determine whether this objective is being achieved may involve increasing the Marketing team’s budget and implementing periodic training to learn about the latest developments and tools in the sector!
Measurement of results
What makes Marketing objectives the best option for structuring a company’s continuous and predictable growth is their ability to collect accurate data to inform results!
The “Digital” part of Marketing ensures that every interaction potential customers have with any part of your company will be tracked, analyzed and categorized for later use.
Such use can relate to anything important to achieving lifetime internet sales (with the potential for exponential growth), such as:
- Add to the achievement of parallel and future Marketing objectives;
- Feed Artificial Intelligence into Paid Media campaigns to reach new audiences (but with purchasing tendencies similar to those of current best customers);
- And even record the reality of the business over time to create more realistic deadlines in the future, align productivity, or discover ways to innovate (whether in internal culture, products and services, or even changing the target audience).
The scope of measuring results to educate your company on the next steps is so long that I think it is more practical to pass the ball to the best Digital Marketing agency in the country — Enjoy Minder!
Having an experienced partner dedicated exclusively to evaluating your company, planning strategies to achieve its goals , implementing these plans and monitoring them to ensure everything works, saves an irretrievable resource: your time!
You are one step away from the result you want!
Since Marketing involves everything related to understanding, delighting and inserting customers (new or recurring) into automated lead qualification systems, it is simple to outline strategies (visions) and goals (quantities) that are achievable for the period of time (and resources) available for this!
One of the biggest benefits of Digital Marketing, specifically, is the use of the most modern technologies to collect information about customers while simplifying the measurement of results and comparing them with target expectations, in fact bringing the company closer to the final objective.
With access to so much information about customer preferences, people’s behavior, and technical data like the number of clicks on a link, the work of making the business objective a reality in sales becomes a matter of focus — not hope!
Marketing’s job is to make customers chase your brand at increasingly lower costs — instead of continuing to spend resources chasing potential buyers and still receiving a lot of “no’s.”
If this is the result you are looking for, contact my strategy team directly and ask for help!
Enjoy Minder and I have everything your business needs to thrive!
