The Difference Between Marketing Goals and Objectives

A Guide to Achieving Commercial Goals with Your Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is a lot like a roadmap. The different marketing goals that you set are like destinations. The marketing objectives are the vehicle, driving you to each stop. A successful roadmap, or marketing strategy, will see your business grow.

Of course, growth often means profits – and many business owners begin marketing with the aim of boosting revenue. At Ebony & Salt, we understand that meeting commercial business objectives is a key outcome for SME marketing.

Which is why, we’re breaking down how to understand the difference between marketing goals and objectives when you design a marketing strategy with commercial objectives in mind.

Defining marketing goals and objectives

Let’s start with some definitions: goals and objectives. But let’s take it further; there are differences between business goals and objectives and marketing goals and objectives.

Business goals are predetermined targets that your business hopes to accomplish in a set period of time. Like we said before, goals are like a destination – it’s big, well-known and takes time to get there. An example for your business might be to become more profitable by the end of the financial year.

Business objectives are usually shorter-term and are the measurable action you will take to achieve your goal. The objectives are your vehicles – they’re small and versatile. You could take a bus, train, car or scooter to your destination, and as long as it’s in motion, you should get where you want to be. There are business objectives across all departments of an organisation, including marketing. We’re going to get specific about those particular objectives.

Marketing goals are the high-level marketing-related plans that you have for your business. However, there should be a direct correlation between these and the business goals. Examples could be building awareness, improving brand loyalty or increasing revenue. Each of these items can play a part in improving profitability in the example above. If your marketing goals don’t have a clear link back to the business goal, it’s a good indicator there’s some work to do.

Marketing objectives are the measurable outcomes that tell you if your marketing strategy has been a success. An example could be increasing your website traffic by 20% over 12 months. Each objective plays a part in helping you arrive at your marketing goal, which in turn should contribute towards the company achieving its overall business goal.

There will likely be multiple marketing objectives as achieving each goal might take a few different strategies, each of which will have their own objective.

A lot of business owners have a good understanding of setting goals for their business, but less experience setting marketing goals and objectives. A marketing strategist is someone who can help you with the nitty gritty details – turning your business vision and goals into measurable strategic marketing objectives.

It goes without saying that when we talk about objectives, they should be SMART objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (or Timely).

Marketing tasks are not objectives

Before we go any further, let’s get one thing crystal clear. Marketing tasks are not objectives. We have lost count of the number of marketing plans we see that have items such as this listed as objectives:

“Sign up for Google Adwords and run SEM campaigns”.

This is a task or activity, not an objective. Using the examples we had in our definitions above, the marketing objective is to increase our web traffic by a certain percentage within a given timeframe. Running SEM campaigns, or any other digital advertising spend, is one of the tasks or activities we are implementing to achieve that objective.

Not all marketing objectives are commercial objectives

The desired outcome of any marketing strategy is usually money. Your business has more sales and you have an opportunity to grow. But, that doesn’t mean every marketing objective should be measured by how much money it makes.

Commercial objectives are the kinds of marketing objectives that are directly tied to revenue and growth. An example could be achieving X sales for your new product in the first 6 months after launch.

It’s important to focus on both commercial and non-commercial marketing objectives in your strategy. It takes time to lead customers into a sale and you don’t want to pressure them too early. Objectives that meet some of the other stages of the sales and marketing funnel, such as awareness, consideration and nurturing, are just as important as those within the conversion / purchase stage.

A non-commercial objective might be the growth of brand awareness. An example could be to grow brand recognition amongst a specific target audience by 15% over a 12-month period. Whilst not directly related to a specific revenue or commercial sale at this stage, an objective of this kind leads to commercial objectives. Ie, more awareness amongst your target audience increases your funnel for eventual sales conversion.

Examples of marketing goals and objectives

So how do all of these goals and objective come together to meet the organisation’s overall goals?

Business goal

The overall business goal in this example is to increase profitability by 20% year on year. A common organisation goal. In breaking that down across the business, each department will form their own business objectives to contribute towards this goal, for example:

• HR may put in place a hiring freeze to keep headcount to its current level, ensuring no further increases in salary costs.

• Manufacturing may look for production efficiencies to help reduce costs across the production line.

Each department is likely to come up with a number of objectives across their areas of responsibility to work towards the common goal.

Marketing goal

As per other departments, the marketing department will require multiple marketing goals to help contribute towards the overall business goal. By reviewing your areas of marketing responsibility, your goals might touch on sales revenue, marketing cost minimisation, increased retention, and customer experience improvements. For example:

• Increase sales revenue of product X by 30%

• Improve repeat purchases by existing customers by 20%

• Improve brand recognition in a certain target market by a percentage

Marketing objective

When it comes to the objectives, multiple objectives will likely be required to achieve one goal. Thinking through the 4P’s will help you identify relevant goals across your marketing framework.

For example, to help increase sales revenue, you could increase the leads funnel so that with a maintained conversion rate, more leads will result in more sales, which meets our marketing goal.

Other objectives you might consider to achieve the same goal could include:

• Increase the number of units sold at the current price

• Put the price up of each unit

• Discount the price but aim for increased sale volumes

• Consider new markets to increase where your product is sold

• Improve upsell and cross-sell opportunities to existing customers

Think through the objectives you might require at each stage of the sales and marketing funnel and your product lifecycle.

In drafting your objectives, you need to make them SMART otherwise you’ll have no way of measuring your team’s performance against them. As an example:

• Increase leads of product X by 50% by the end of the current financial year, compared to the previous financial year.

Tasks

Underneath each objective will be your ‘to do’ list of tasks or activities / projects required to achieve your objective. In our example, in order to increase our leads for a certain product, we might look at a combination of tasks that might include:

• Implement Google Adwords or other advertising strategies to attract the right kinds of customer leads

• Offer existing customers a referral reward if they refer a friend

• Try marketing on a different social or digital platform

• Develop a presence at industry events

• Offer a downloadable guide on your website

Using a project management tool is a great way to keep track of all the tasks, and to set them out with time frames to meet your objective’s deadlines.

Marketing activities directly link to commercial business goals

Keeping within this type of structure makes it easier to stay on target with your tasks. As an added benefit, it also helps you speak with authority when you might be asked why you and your team are working on a particular type of marketing task or activity. Your answer?

To achieve <insert the task’s objective>,

which leads to <insert the marketing goal>,

which will directly impact <insert the business goal>.

It’s simple.

This also helps the analysis of new ideas or suggestions. Ask yourself, does doing that task achieve my marketing objective, link to the marketing goal, and therefore contribute to the business goal? If not, add that suggestion to the ‘maybe another time’ pile. Don’t discount it altogether. It might be a great idea when the goals and objectives of the business change.

Design a strategic marketing strategy that achieves your business goals with Ebony & Salt

 With the skills and experience of an expert in-house marketing department, Ebony & Salt provide a single touchpoint for small business marketing strategies. As a marketing agency for SME’s, it’s our goal to make marketing simpler for business owners like you. No matter what stage your business is at – we’re here to help.

Get in touch to start planning a marketing strategy.