It’s important to have goals. Whether that’s aiming for a set number of miles on the running track or a monthly revenue target at work, goals keep you focused on improvement.
A group may strive toward a common type of goal. For example, two runners might both set mileage targets for themselves. But you’ll see differences in how they set and strive for those goals based on experience, needs, and ability. The runner who just finished a marathon last week might aim for a shorter recovery run, while the person training for an upcoming race might aim to run 15 miles.
The same principles hold true for marketing teams. While there are some common marketing goals, how you approach them will depend on your unique circumstances. We’ve gathered a list of marketing objective examples for you to review. Pick the ones that best fit where your business is and use them to aim for growth.
Contents
- What are marketing goals and objectives?
- Why do you need to set marketing objectives?
- 12 smart marketing objective examples
What are marketing goals and objectives?
Let’s start with the basics. Marketing goals are long-term objectives that your team—and, by extension, your business—hope to achieve with the work you undertake.
They can encompass all forms of marketing—inbound and outbound, analog and digital—and they should work in service of your business’s broader objectives.
It’s important to remember that your marketing goals or objectives should be set with your specific business and situation in mind. For example, If you’ve just launched a new brand, you may set goals that focus on awareness or establishing search engine placement.
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Why do you need to set marketing objectives?
Every plan worth pursuing has an end goal in mind. NASA didn’t just putter around aimlessly in the 1960s, hoping to hit upon a great idea. It set the objective of landing on the moon and succeeded eight short years after President Kennedy announced that goal to the world.
In the same way, concrete marketing goals give your efforts a clear path to follow. And SMART marketing objectives are often the most effective ones.
SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
By adhering to this framework for goal-setting, you set realistic aims that you can actually track with appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs). So, instead of saying you want to grow, your SMART objective might be “to increase sales to our core customer base by 8% in the next 12 months.”
12 smart marketing objectives examples
Fortunately, the marketing team has ample opportunity to contribute to broader business objectives by setting SMART marketing goals.
You have a vital role to play in moving customers through the marketing funnel, from initial awareness to conversion to customer retention and loyalty.
These 12 marketing objectives will make sure marketing is supporting your business across all stages of the funnel.
1. Boost your brand awareness
Whether you’re just starting out or running an established business, connecting with new prospects is always a worthy goal.
As with all marketing objectives, you’ll want to establish concrete SMART goals. How will you measure any increase in brand awareness, and in what time frame? How will this objective serve your broader business goals? What KPIs will you use to track success?
Few businesses have stronger brand awareness than McDonald’s. You know just from a sliver of the arch which company is advertising on those billboards.
Cross-channel marketing can increase your brand’s prominence. A combination of paid tactics (advertising) and organic (unpaid social media, local SEO) is often the best way to flood the market and make your brand omnipresent to prospects. You can even set specific social media goals as a subset of bigger objectives.
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2. Drive website traffic
Getting new people to your website is often the first step in lead generation. Nearly 87% of consumers regularly or always research a product or service online before buying. Making your business easy to find during that research phase puts you in the running to be the one they ultimately choose.
There are several marketing tactics you can try to boost your website traffic. Pay per click (PPC) advertising, also known as search engine marketing, can place your site in the sponsored results at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Running display ads on third-party websites can direct more visitors to your site. They are image-based; when done correctly, the visual element can stop someone mid-scroll.
Finally, social media advertising can drive site traffic. When you advertise on social platforms, you’ll be prompted to set a campaign goal before you create your ads—driving site traffic is one of your options.
3. Generate new leads
Lead generation is crucial for successful marketing and sales efforts. This is where you ask for a prospect’s contact information, intending to stay in touch and move them closer to a buying decision.
Lead gen can happen in several places like on your website, via social ads, or even on a good old-fashioned clipboard in your store.
Social platforms allow you to build out lead-gen-specific ad campaigns, which prompt prospects to fill out a form as part of the ad.
You may also opt to create your own lead capture forms and house them on your website. A lead capture form that invites prospects to schedule a product demo or request an estimate is common.
Brands can also create gated content in the form of a high-value downloadable asset like a report with proprietary industry research. The form invites prospects to input their contact information in exchange for access to the content.
4. Optimize conversion rates
Conversion rates can be helpful for measuring how people move through your marketing funnel. To calculate your conversion rate, divide the number of people who take a desired action by the total number of people who were presented with the option.
For example, if 10 people visit a form on your website and two fill it out, your conversion rate is 20%. You can measure conversion rates at any stage of the marketing funnel. Are those who discover your brand becoming leads? And are those leads converting to customers?
Optimizing conversion rates at various points throughout your marketing funnel ultimately means more consumers will become customers. A/B testing can help you try different messages and designs to see which approach drives desired results. Most digital platforms make A/B testing easy. Social media ad platforms and Google Ads allow you to test different headlines and visuals in your advertising.
Many email marketing tools have A/B testing features that will send two versions of an email to your list. And A/B testing tools allow you to try out different headlines or calls to action on your website.
With A/B testing, the most important thing to remember is to only test one variable at a time. This helps you attribute any changes in conversion rate to that specific element.
5. Increase customer acquisition
Business growth can only happen in two ways: by expanding your relationships with existing customers or acquiring new ones. Increasing customer acquisition is a common jointly-held goal for the marketing and sales teams.
This broad marketing objective usually requires a multi-pronged strategy. The marketing rule of seven is a popular adage that states most consumers won’t even consider buying from a brand until they see or interact with it seven times.
Digital marketing tactics empower you to ensure your brand is seen multiple times across various channels, helping you hit that threshold faster.
6. Amplify customer engagement
In the age of online reviews and social media, an engaged customer base can pay dividends for your brand. Research shows that for every brand evangelist you cultivate—that is, a person who’s eager to gush about your brand—you can generate three new customers.
Social media is a vital tool in creating a positive public buzz around your brand. A tactic as simple as responding to comments on your posts can nurture customer engagement. Similarly, social media contests can create a lot of excitement.
Online reviews play a role here, too. Invest in a systematized approach to soliciting reviews (for example, an automated email campaign that asks customers about their experience after they shop with you). Then, take the time to respond, which shows your attention to detail and commitment to customer care.
7. Strengthen customer loyalty and retention
Scads of marketing studies have found that it’s cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. That makes building customer loyalty a worthy marketing goal.
This particular goal straddles the sales, marketing, and customer success realms, and the marketing team has a vital role to play in building a strategy to achieve it. Once you’ve set shared measures of success, you can begin to explore tactics for the marketing team to implement.
The marketing team can help get the word out about loyalty programs that hook new customers and keep existing ones coming back.
You may have a role to play in establishing and administering a customer loyalty or subscriber program. Your team might also create a segmented email list for your top customers where you reach out with special offers or early access to new products.
8. Ramp up revenue
Increasing revenue is everyone’s end goal. The marketing team has its own way of contributing to this business-wide objective.
You may work in concert with sales to develop and implement cross-sell and up-sell strategies. For example, abandoned cart emails are an effective way to win an online sale that’s at risk. Klaviyo reports that abandoned cart email flows generate an average revenue per recipient (RPR) of $3.65—by far the highest of any email flow type.
You may also aid in the promotion of certain cross-sell tactics, like creating a feature on your site that serves up “customers also buy” suggestions or auto-generates “purchase together” groupings for complementary products.
9. Foster customer satisfaction
Ensuring your customers are happy is key to long-term success. It often leads to repeat business, referrals, and positive online reviews.
While customer satisfaction is a mandate that falls most squarely on your customer success or sales teams, marketing also has a role to play here. Marketing can help systematize outreach to existing customers to ensure they feel seen and appreciated—which helps foster those good vibes.
Consider creating a segmented email list for your most loyal customers. You can use it to regularly reach out with special offers, first dibs on new products, and other perks.
You can also work with the sales and customer success teams to develop email flows to support their work. For example, you might create an email flow to follow up with people who have opened a ticket with your customer success team. Once your colleagues have closed it, the email flow can check in to see how they did and ensure they solved the customer’s problem.
10. Expand market reach
Another way to grow your business is through expansion into new markets. You may opt to move into a new geography (by opening a new store or expanding your service area), or you may target a new audience. Either way, any strategic expansion into fresh territory requires marketing support.
Expanding market reach is a business-wide objective and requires cross-functional collaboration, but the marketing team can set its own goals to bolster the effort. Paid advertising can help you reach your specific target audience, whether that’s individuals in a certain geography or people who fit a distinct demographic profile.
When expanding into new areas, your local SEO strategy should also adjust. Ensure your site copy and metadata include the new geographies you serve, and update your local listings to do the same.
11. Improve ROI
Another common marketing objective is to improve upon the work your team is already doing. To tighten up your return on investment (ROI), your team has a few options. You can either hold your marketing investment (i.e., your costs) steady while increasing sales or lower your overall marketing spend while maintaining your current sales.
To increase your sales without boosting marketing spend, you may undertake A/B testing to strengthen your existing campaigns. Testing different messaging, imagery, and CTAs can help you pick up conversion gains across a range of marketing efforts.
Lowering spend might require you to lean more heavily on organic tactics. Investing more in SEO can help you move up in search results. Investing in organic social media can help you reach new customers without paid advertising.
12. Bolster your competitive position
To improve your competitive position, you need to unearth new ways to help your brand stand out. To power this common marketing objective, it helps to gather customer feedback.
A suggestion board like this one can help you source new ideas to further differentiate your offering.
Send a survey or schedule time for some one-on-one interviews. Ask your customers what problem your brand solves for them and why they chose you over your competitors. Learning more about your brand’s perception in the market can help you refine your messaging to further differentiate yourself from your competitors.
SMART marketing goals to support your broader business objectives
No two businesses will have the exact same marketing goals. The objectives your team focuses on will be determined by your business’s overall aims. How can your work support the bigger picture?
Your team will answer that question with specific, measurable goals of its own. As you work toward them, you’ll keep an eye on key metrics to understand if your tactics are paying off. What you learn along the way will help you continuously refine your work and deliver stronger results for your brand.
Here’s a recap of the 12 marketing goals and objectives to keep on your radar:
- Boost your brand awareness
- Drive website traffic
- Generate new leads
- Optimize conversion rates
- Increase customer acquisition
- Amplify customer engagement
- Strengthen customer loyalty and retention
- Ramp up revenue
- Foster customer satisfaction
- Expand market reach
- Improve ROI
- Bolster your competitive position
