Marketing Objectives to Drive Your Business

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If you think about any of the important achievements you have accomplished it is a fair bet that you probably set a goal or objective before you took any action. One reason is that it keeps you focused and ensures all your efforts are aligned to achieving the goal. In small business the same premise applies and setting marketing objectives actually makes the journey you take easier and less expensive.

What are Marketing Objectives?
They are simply what is required of your key customers (target market) to achieve your sales objectives. To put it simply, what action do you want your current and potential key customers to take? To ensure you can achieve your marketing objectives, limit them to a maximum of three or four, in fact if you only want to set two objectives for the year that is fine. A key point is always to set marketing objectives that are realistic and achievable.

Let’s take a look at some marketing objectives you could set for your business:

Awareness
Before a customer buys your product or service they must become aware of it. Awareness is particularly important if you have a new product or service, if your product or service is only bought occasionally or if your market has many competitors. For example, if you have 1,000 potential customers, the marketing objective could be to have 200 (20%) aware of your business by December 2009.

Purchase
This relates to the initial purchase and the purchase of specific products or services in your range. If we follow on from the example above; of the 200 potential customers above, you want 80 (40%) to make an initial purchase by December 2009.

Purchase Frequency
This relates to how often your customers buy your product or service. Getting your customers to buy more often is an easier way to increase your sales and profit than chasing new customers all the time.

Usage
This is different to purchase as the person who buys your product or service may not be the one who actually uses or consumes it. For example, mothers may buy the breakfast cereal but it is the children who are the ones who eat it.

Usage Frequency
This relates to how often your customers use/consume your product or service. By getting your customers to use a little more of your product or service can actually translate into more sales over the year. Big business marketers often do this by introducing larger pack sizes. The marketing objective could be: Increase the usage frequency of Tumi Satay Noodles from 2 times a week to 3 times a week by December 2009.

Customers
For your small business to grow you may decide to focus on gaining new customers for your business or to retain your most profitable ones. A marketing objective for customers is –  gain 10 more clients by December 2009.

As distribution channels available to customers wanting to purchase products or services grow, then it is important that you ensure your products or services are available in the most important distribution channels. If your product or service is not available in a distribution channel that is important to your customers they may decide to try a competitor’s product or service.

The key with setting marketing objectives is to make them simple and ones that you can track and measure your success against. It may take a little time at first to decide which ones to focus on but each year as you see your progress, you will know the time spent setting the marketing objectives is worth it.