Why Marketing Needs Objectives... Not Just Goals

In this article, you'll learn how to...

• Create solid, actionable objectives
• Implement tactics that support your objectives
• Motivate employees to enhance the quality of your strategies

 











Many companies have essentially the same overarching goals: increase sales, decrease operating costs, and reduce churn. All of those goals result in growing a company's net revenue and profitability.
Seems pretty simple, but the way those business goals translate into objectives, specifically with marketing, is the secret sauce that ultimately determines whether an organization stands a reasonable chance of achieving success or whether it will blow another budget on a creative refresh that fails to better communicate or motivate the consumer to convert.

Turning Goals Into Objectives
A good starting point would be to provide Marketing with the sales goals. Without the integral intermediary step of translating that type of purpose into concise and actionable marketing objectives that align the product attributes, brand assets, and user needs, Marketing will most likely end up producing fantastical tactics and catchy messaging taglines, such as "Let's message the benefits of the product," or "We need a branded application for the iPhone!"
Meanwhile, the what, why, and who have vanished into the interdepartmental/agency abyss, leaving the business and the consumer at the mercy of Marketing's creative interpretation of best sellers.
Instead, at such a critical stage, marketing teams need to formulate actionable objectives and working strategies in cooperation with those who set the goals, make the product, and know the target audience.
According to Jan DeLyser, vice-president of marketing at California Avocado Commission, "It's imperative to have clarity of common purpose and freedom to work together." That means that individual departments and agency partners should work toward common business objectives in a collaborative fashion.
Though getting agency partners to cooperate (as opposed to compete) for working dollars is worthy of its own article, if not a book series, having a clearly actionable working objective that spans all agency partners is the key ingredient for collaboration and unity in purpose.
Because of our working relationship with the California Avocado Commission Red Door Interactive has been introduced to a methodology for creating solid and actionable objectives and supporting strategies. The system works by using a sentence structure that comprises three phrases:

• In order to (insert objective)
• We will (define a strategy)
• By (list creative tactics that solve the problem)

For example, if the goal is to increase sales, an objective may be to drive preference of your best target customer while she is in the consideration stage. That can be accomplished if you've conducted your research, identified the best target audience, understood how the target customer perceives your brand or product, and recognized how she engages and researches products (e.g., mobile search, reviews).
If you drop all of those elements into the sentence-structure framework, you could get the following result: "In order to drive preference with suburban sale chasers during the consideration phase, we will activate the online voice of existing customers by creating a game that requires multiple reviews on Facebook and Yelp and that focuses on the reliability of the product."

Implementing Tactics That Support the Objective
Although you'd end up with a game or contest (in the previous example), the resulting strategy contains key elements that support the greater objective based on the company's current needs.
Ensure that you've covered each step of the sales cycle: acquisition, consideration, purchase, and retention. For example, without driving preference, how would you account for competitive threats or influences? When possible, apply what you know about your audience. If you have working segments, or if you've done your homework and have customer personas, you can better refine the methods of activating them.
A company might even include learning more about its audience as an objective: "In order to increase the relevance and value of our communications with our audience, we will introduce programs that qualify and segment our users into a database and develop specific channels for different types of messages by (a) segmenting existing and potential customers in our email database, (b) offering and requiring selection of specific need state choices upon email sign up, and (c) monitoring the method or channel by which consumers sign up for our marketing messages (e.g., SMS text, mobile site, mobile email, website)."

Motivating Your People
Ultimately, the goal is to formulate high-level actionable objectives and provide direction and strategies that allow team members to say, "I have an idea on how to accomplish that!" If your company has creatives with great ideas, give them the opportunity to prove that their concepts make sense against the objectives or strategies. Those concepts might require only a few minor tweaks to produce something extremely efficient and effective.
If your organization can personalize the audience as part of the process, you'll likely see fireworks go off with your teams. They're creative problem-solvers, chomping at the bit to run with a strategic or tactical challenge.
Finally, make sure your infrastructure is in place before you set out to achieve a particular objective. There's no use in setting, say, a rebranding initiative based on customer service if it isn't in top form. Though that might seem obvious, it happens all the time.

by Brett Johnson