Marketing Objectives and a Strategy Statement

The elements of a good marketing plan include two things: marketing objectives and a marketing strategy. Many people mistake an objective and a strategy as being the same thing, when, in fact, they are not. An objective is a more specific path to take to achieve your business goals. Examples include increasing brand awareness or increasing a certain perception about your product or overall company. A strategy, however, should encompass your objectives and steer your overall plan in the right direction. And constructing a strong strategy statement helps you do that.

For example, if you own a small business, you’ll likely want to increase its overall brand awareness. But your marketing plan still needs a focus. The best way to figure out what to focus on for your marketing plan is to research. What is it about your company that makes it different from others on the market? What part of your product or overall company do you want more people to know about? That’s where you should start.

SMART Objectives

When creating your marketing objects, a helpful acronym you can use is SMART. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, reliable, and timely. Every business has goals in mind, but when you create SMART objectives, it narrows down your focus and guides you toward those goals. Without them, you’ll have goals without any clear direction or tasks going forward. And it’s hard to accomplish a goal if you don’t know where to start or how to achieve that goal. Creating a SMART objective means determining a more specific goal in mind, one that will focus on growing your brand on a single platform, like Instagram or your website. It means using specified but practical numbers and setting a definitive deadline for yourself.

For example, maybe you want to increase your brand awareness by increasing your overall website traffic. To determine a realistic number to grow by, look at the average amount of traffic on your website and base your objective on that. When looking at how to achieve that goal, marketing tactics could include improving your site’s search engine optimization (SEO), growing your social profiles, increasing email subscribers, or other avenues. For example, if you average around 120 users a day and determine that your site has poor overall SEO, you can strive to increase your average daily user count by 10% by making technical SEO fixes, which would also increase your site's organic search engine results page (SERP) ranking. If you're looking for tips on how to grow your social media pages, check out our new YouTube video.

A Marketing Strategy

Being equipped with those objectives makes forming a strategy that much easier. While your marketing objectives give you a clear set of steps for you to take to achieve your overall goal, your strategy statement will help inform them. It’s easy to say you want to grow your business online, even with specific goals in mind. But it still requires a sense of direction. How will you encourage users to subscribe to your email newsletter or follow you on Instagram? That’s where your strategy statement can help you. To construct one, it’s best to think about what makes your business unique or what you want potential customers to know more about. The question you really need to answer is: why should a customer choose your company over another? And what benefit can you leverage as a smaller company?

Whatever it is, use that to construct your strategy statement. For example, if you’re a smaller airline company looking to promote your family plans and overall safety, your strategy statement could be: “Fly with us, North America’s safest choice for family-friendly travel”. So, while people may use marketing objectives and a strategy statement interchangeably sometimes, they are different. They each help to inform the other and work together to help give marketers a clear direction in their overall marketing campaigns. And it’ll help you market your business moving forward. If you need any marketing help for your small business, reach out to our marketing experts here at PSPINC.

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