Setting Objectives in Marketing - iContact

• Updated on: 2017-06-24
• Read original article here

I’ve been told by countless marketers that their campaigns don’t work. When I ask them how they’ve come to this conclusion, more often than not, they tell me that their sales haven’t increased. This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes that marketers make. You see, marketing isn’t about selling (that’s the sales department’s job). Marketing is about engaging an audience with useful, informative, entertaining information that leads to further engagement (and yes – this engagement may result in additional sales).

The biggest problem is that many marketers just push out campaigns without giving any thought to why they are doing it.

Because they have not set objectives, they have no clear understanding whether a campaign is successful or not. I would also question any marketer’s ability to plan and create a useful campaign if he or she has no clear idea of what the campaign is designed to achieve.

Before you create your next email marketing campaign, write your next blog post or schedule your next bout of social media activity, ask yourself what you want to achieve.

Note: Sometimes marketing success can be found in cost savings rather than in increased revenues. At the end of the day, building objectives around both of these goals will help your organization to become more profitable.

So before you start your next campaign, ask yourself: What do I want to achieve from this?

Remember: If you don’t have a goal, you’ll never really be sure if you could have done better.

So what’s the objective of this blog post?

Well, it has a number of goals.

At the most basic level, it has been written to fuel our SEO and social marketing efforts, driving targeted small business traffic to the iContact site and making people aware of our email marketing and marketing automation technology.

Its next level is to increase brand awareness, helping to increase trust and encourage potential customers to check out our free trial software (this is where the sales process begins).

The final objective is to inspire existing and potential clients to get smarter in their approach to marketing. We know that not all iContact customers are professional marketers. They might be highly skilled in other areas of business and look to us for help and inspiration with their marketing strategies. If we can show them what marketing success looks like, we’ll grow our business not only by attracting new clients who need a helping hand but also by retaining our existing clients who now know that their marketing campaigns can and do work if they set objectives.

All of these goals are designed to help us meet our weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual targets for website visits, lead generation (trial downloads), conversions (sales), customer retention and many other metrics. Only by having these clear goals in mind can we successfully plan for success and beyond.

What’s the point of your next campaign? Start with an objective and build out accordingly (taking the time to test, adapt and learn), and you’ll soon know what marketing success looks like.