How to Set Marketing Objectives for Your Brand and Website

Marketing objectives are goals set by a business when promoting its products/services to its customers/clients. These goals should be achieved within a time scale.

Marketing objectives come from a marketing strategy, the strategy is used as a guide in order to achieve these marketing objectives.

Without a strategy, it would be difficult to measure each objective making it hard to know when each objective was achieved.

To make meeting objectives clear, they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-specific. SMART.

An example of a business’s marketing objective for a website could be creating awareness for a new product, or to make the buying process easier on your eCommerce website.

An example of a business’s marketing objective for a brand could be making brand values clear and perceivable.

Let’s get to it!

Resources

The Marketing Brief Template

The Marketing Brief Template

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The SMART Targets

Before we get into how to set marketing objectives for your brand and website, let’s look into SMART.

• Objectives need to be specific, be precise about what you want to achieve
• Objectives need to be measurable, this could be the traffic on your website and the percentage of conversion rates
• Objectives need to be achievable, are your objectives reasonable in terms of what you can realistically achieve
• Objectives need to be realistic, does your business have the resources to achieve the objective?
• Objectives need to be time-specific, you want to set a deadline for each objective

Let’s take a look at a scenario to put this into perspective.

Say you are setting up a new landing page for your business website.

This landing page has a call to action variant that has different text

Your goal could be landing page performance.

You may be a web design business and you want to get more clients by increasing conversion rates on your business’s website.

To make this a SMART objective, you need to get the details correct.

1. Specific: landing page to generate more leads by using a different call to action text
2. Measurable: increase the conversion rate to 5%
3. Achievable: the current conversion rate is 3%, we know this from Google analytics. 5% is a reasonable target moving up by an additional 2%
4. Relevant: more conversion rates means potentially more clients
5. Time Specific: 1 month from now based on the number of visits we get per week

Let’s break this down

You design and develop a new landing page with different call to action text. This is in order to see what text works best with clients, do they like what they see or are they put off?

You want to increase your current conversion rate of 3% to 5%. The percentage jump is measurable (the increase in the number of potential clients)

The objective is reasonable, a 2% increase is not out of reach. If this is the first test of a variant, and this target goes way above and beyond what you expected, then this can set the baseline for future tests.

For example, if it goes up to 15% or a 10% increase, you could always strive for another 10% increase (30%) in future tests.

This is a relevant objective, your business needs clients in order to run, you want to have the highest conversion rate possible for your website.

4 weeks is plenty of time to test and gather new data for this new call to action text.

But how do you know whether or not 1 month is enough to gather data?

You base this time as per the number of visits you get, say you get 1000s of visitors per day, you would gather 7000+ visitor data on your analytics tool. You could see results in 1 week.

If you only get 5 per day (an extreme example) you probably would want to test for 1-month minimum (140 visitor data).

If you were to test only for 1 week, 35 visitors are barely anything to go off. The amount of data is too little.

What we are saying is you need to be realistic in terms of time scales.

If you are a brand new business, a good thing to do is keep tests running for a good length of time until you have a good pool of data. From there you can create baselines for future tests (like with the call to action example).

It’s all well and good being provided with an example about setting SMART targets, but how do you come up with your own SMART targets?

Every business is different and has different resources available.

So, look at the SMART acronym.

Specific:
Look at what you’ve specifically achieved in the past, an objective met. What was it?

Measurable:
Was this objective measurable? If not go back to step 1, you need to pick measurable objectives.

Achievable:
Was this objective achievable, the answer is most certainly a yes. At this stage, ask yourself what made this objective achievable?

Realistic:
How did your business achieve the objective? What resources were used?

Now that you know how to make goals SMART like any smart (you) person does, it’s time to move onto the next step – setting an overarching goal.

The Overarching Goal

Marketing objectives are the fundamental steps of a marketing strategy.

To begin setting marketing objectives for your business’s brand and website, you firstly need to think about your mission statement. This is the what and how of your company.

In the end, your mission statement should answer “what you do and what makes you different”.

Let’s take a look at an example to get a better idea of what a mission statement could be.

“To help businesses unlock the power of their brand with branding, web design and digital marketing.”

This is actually our brand mission.

Your mission statement actually is derived from your values. Values could be outstanding design every time, transparency and clarity and building partnerships with clients.

Just like the brand mission, these are actually our brand values.

As you can see these values make up the overarching mission. If you’d like more information on this, see this blog post on What is brand strategy? (the 10 step development guide).

Your brand’s mission is what defines you as a business, it simply defines the purpose and primary objective of your brand and website. If you are just starting up and need guidance, check out our Branding services or marketing services .

Once you have understood your mission statement, it’s time to ask yourself: what is your primary marketing objective?

Let’s look at an example:

Take the previous example of “To help businesses unlock the power of their brand with branding, web design and digital marketing.”

In order to help businesses, clients are needed, but revenue is needed in order to run the business. It works both ways.

So, we will use this primary marketing objective as an example:

To increase the revenue your web design business earns. You could set this target to be an increase of £10,000.

This “increase the revenue for your web design business earns” is the overarching marketing objective.

In order to achieve this “overarching objective” sub-goals and objectives can be set.

There’s actually a fine line between goals and objectives.

A goal is: the actual result that you want to achieve.
An objective is: the steps needed to achieve a specific goal

Think of football, in order for a team to score a goal (the goal), they need to have a strategy in place – you have the defenders in place to stop the other team scoring and strikers in place to score the goals. Without these different team members, it would be impossible to score a goal and to prevent the other team scoring.

So, in order to increase your business revenue by an additional £10,000 goal, you need to have a set of objectives in place.

Let’s break this down:

1. Goal: increase business revenue by £10,000
   • Objective: increase conversion rate (engaging with more potential clients)
   • Objective: increase the size of the audience (helping more businesses)
   • Objective: increase project value (quality of work, size of project etc.)

But, just like the goal, the objectives need to be met.

In order to meet these objectives, sub-goals can be put in place in order to achieve these objectives.

Examples of sub-goals could be:

1. Increase conversion rate objective. Goas would be set to increase the ranking on google, increase the user experience (call to action button change etc.) and decrease bounce rates – this could be reduced through rankings and user experience upgrades
2. Increase the size of the audience objective. Goals would be set to increase promotional activity, more sign-ups and newsletters and to increase your network and partnerships
3. Increase project value. Goals would be set to improve the quality of work (training etc.) and to win larger scaled projects (this could happen through increased conversion rates – more clients to pick from)

Once the objectives have been met, your business is on its way to increase its overall revenue.

This is all well and good, but statistics need to be put in place.

In order to achieve revenue by an additional £10,000, this will be a percentage increase based on your current revenue.

Once you’ve worked out the percentage difference, you need to break down your current conversion rate, size of the audience and current project value and calculate a percentage of how much they contribute towards the current revenue.

So, take the average project value objective – you’d want to see how much each project contributes towards the total revenue with a percentage.
From here, you’d be able to calculate how much you’d need to increase project value by in order to achieve a £10,000 revenue increase.

But, there are other factors that make up your revenue, how many clients you have and how well your website converts – no conversions means no clients, no clients means no revenue.

As you can see, the objectives contribute toward the goal.

Just like with the SMART targets, it’s fine and dandy having an example, but how do you come up with your own goal and objectives that derive from your mission statement?

Simply look at what you have achieved in the past (go back to the SMART target example) and set a goal that improves upon the current goal you have achieved.

There are other factors at play here, you can look at your business weaknesses and create brand new goals and objectives from your weakness to get rid of that weakness.

The SWOT Analysis

In order to be able to create new goals and objectives, you need to carry out a SWOT analysis.

If we look at the weaknesses here, branding.

It could be your brand awareness is weak and your website isn’t performing as it should. Your website is part of your brand. It’s the online front of your business.

From here you can set a new goal to increase brand awareness.
The objectives under this goal would be the steps needed to achieve the goal.

The goal:

1. Increase brand awareness

Objectives to achieve the increased brand awareness goal:

• Increase website traffic
• Increase sign-ups, purchases or leads
• Promote products/services

If you sit down and complete the SWOT analysis properly, your business will be able to pick out the most pressing concerns and get rid of them by setting new goals and objectives.

Setting marketing objectives for your brand and website can be tough. Reach out to us if you need help.
In order for your goals and objectives to be relevant for your brand and website, you need to have guidelines in place.

Brand guidelines ensure the success of your brand, they help you build your brand and its identity.

If you have poor or no brand guidelines, this can be one of the weaknesses of your business. Therefore, this would be the primary objective before any other weakness.

The Marketing Strategy

As we mentioned previously, you need a marketing strategy in place. A marketing strategy simply allows you to achieve your goals and objectives. It’s kind of like a road map to success, you can use it as a guide. It keeps you on track.

Your marketing strategy, if you do not have one, will be created once you have come up with an overarching goal and sub-objectives each with their own goals.

You will simply lay these goals and objectives into a document.

Once you have your marketing strategy in place, the next step is to define your marketing funnels. If you’re not familiar with these terms, check out our list of the best marketing books to help out!

It isn’t just a marketing strategy you need though.

Currently, we have discussed setting goals and objectives and that these objectives are used to achieve specific goals.

We have also discussed how to come up with your own goals and objectives.

You already know that an objective could be to increase brand awareness.

And that the goals to meet this goal are:

1. Increase website traffic
2. Increase sign-ups, purchases or leads
3. Promote products/services

Take note of all these goals. How could these be achieved?

These types of goals can be achieved with a content plan.

A content plan goes hand in hand with your marketing brief.

This is because a content plan will:

• Attract more visitors to your website
• Build trust and rapport with your visitors
• Sell more products or generate more leads

A content plan is a component of your marketing strategy. And remember, your marketing strategy is made up of your overarching goals and its objectives.

If you have come up with goals and objectives but don’t have a content plan, this is the next thing you need to do.

Let’s take the goal “increase business revenue by £10,000”, we already know the objectives in order to reach this goal.

• Objective: increase conversion rate (engaging with more potential clients)
• Objective: increase the size of the audience (helping more businesses)
• Objective: increase project value (quality of work, size of project etc.)

But, how are you going to engage with clients, help more businesses and increase the value of work? Your content plan can help with all of this. Your content plan covers all areas of your website and what is to be added continuously (in the future).

A content plan is unique for every business.

The Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model. It’s designed to show the customer journey that happens when a customer is making a purchase.

Once you have defined your marketing goals for your brand and website, the next step is to map these goals to your marketing funnel.

A marketing funnel for a website may look like:

Conversion funnel

1. Lead generation
   • Awareness (content marketing – get your content out there and known)
   • Interest (show correct website content – peak interest)
   • Consideration (reviews, case studies, testimonials)
2. Lead nurture
   • Intent (product demos, entering the checkout process, filling out the contact form)
   • Evaluation (marketing and sales prove your product is the best)
3. Action
   • Purchase (making the purchase)

So, if we take the increase business revenue example from earlier, this would fall in line with the conversion marketing funnel for a business website.

Instead of explaining this, we will put the marketing funnel and goals and objectives into a table.

Lead Generation

Lead Nurture

Action

As you can see, each step of the marketing objectives for your brand and website fall within a section of a marketing funnel.

Measuring the progress

Now that we’ve covered SMART targets, the overarching goal, the SWOT analysis, the marketing strategy and the marketing funnels.

The next step is how you actually measure progress made.

To measure how well your brand and website perform there are various tools available.

The tools we recommend are:

• Google Analytics
• HotJar
• Active Campaign
• MailChimp

An example of when you could use google analytics and Hotjar is to test how well different call to action text performs. This is what is known as A/B testing.

Active Campaign and MailChimp can be used to set up marketing campaigns. These campaigns can be for new products/services or to send out questionnaires.

If you don’t use such software you will have no way of knowing how people are interacting with your brand and website.

You won’t be able to find out whether or not people like your brand, what’s wrong with it. You won’t be able to see which call to action text works the best.

Conclusion: How to Set Marketing Objectives for Your Brand and Website

Here’s what you need in order to start setting marketing objectives for your brand and website:

• SMART targets
• Overarching goal
• SWOT analysis
• Marketing strategy
• Content plan
• Marketing funnels
• A way to measure any progress

Whether or not you are a startup or an existing business, you must have marketing objectives in place for your brand and website. Without these, you simply won’t have a clear direction and will never know how well your business is really performing.

You should really seek professional help when setting marketing objectives for your brand and website.