Implementing marketing campaigns without strategy, goals, or objectives is a quick way to waste time and money. Strategy guides your overall direction, while goals and objectives provide structure for your campaigns.
Goals and objectives are two of the most important tools in planning for success. Goals provide a broad vision, while objectives are specific actions that help you reach your goals. Understanding the differences between these two terms is essential to setting up an effective marketing plan.
Goals can be thought of as the desired end result or outcome, such as increasing sales by 25%. Objectives, on the other hand, are measurable steps necessary to achieve those goals; for example, running an advertising campaign or offering discounts on certain products. Objectives should always align with your overall goal and be achievable within a given timeframe. By understanding how each term works together in concert with one another, you'll have a better chance at reaching success faster and more efficiently.
If you've read a few of our articles here at OSM, you'll know we always recommend starting with strategy first. Knowing your customers, and how you fit into the market, will inform how you build your marketing campaigns.
Your goals will change over time as your business evolves. At first your goals might be based on acquiring new customers. More established businesses may focus more on customer retention. Once you've built up some data on the effectiveness of different campaigns, you can use that to fine tune your goals to be even more specific. For example, increasing average order value or decreasing the rate of returned product.
Objectives are the specific activities you'll implement to reach your goals. It's possible to have multiple objectives, or even keep the same goals but adjust the objectives. This might look like testing several advertising platforms to see which performs best, then focusing on the winning platform exclusively.
In this example, let's say you're launching a new e-commerce shop. You have your website up and running, and making a few sales. Based on the Campaign Design framework, there are several areas that are worth focusing on in this phase of business. Outreach, Targeting, Capture, and Nurture are very important in the beginning.
For this campaign, we'll put a narrowed focus on Capture. The Capture phase is all about building your audience, and specifically, your email list. Building your list is essential. You'll be able to sell to your list repeatedly over time. It's much easier to sell to a warm audience than to bring in more cold customers.
With Capture being your focus area, your goal might be to increase your list size by 50% over the next quarter. What objectives could help you reach that goal? You could offer coupons, run a giveaway or contest, recruit affiliates or referral partners, or create a lead magnet. There are many tactics that can help grow an email list.
For this campaign, you could host a product giveaway. Your objective is to get as many people to sign up for your giveaway as possible. Each new entry adds a new email address to your list.
To sum up this campaign example:
A local coffee shop will have a very different goal than an e-commerce shop. Ultimately, they both want more customers, but the goals & objectives need to be different to achieve that outcome. For this example we'll assume the coffee shop has been in business for several years, and they are established in the community. Continuity is the Campaign Design phase that we'll focus on for this business.
Generating regular customers who come back on a daily and/or weekly basis is necessary for growth. It's easier to retain a customer than gain a new one. This phase is all about keeping our current customers happy and coming back time and again.
Our goal for this phase could be increasing sales by 5% this quarter by focusing on increasing repeat business. It might be difficult to track new vs. repeat customers, so we'll pick a goal of an overall sales increase.
For your objective, you implement a rewards system. This could be a physical punchcard or a digital app. You make sure your employees are trained to talk to customers about your new program to create excitement.
Here's what this campaign looks like overall:
These campaign examples are measurable and focused on a specific phase of the OSM Campaign Design framework. What phase do you need to focus on with your business right now? Need help creating a strategy? Feel free to contact us to chat.
