Academy exercise: Setting marketing objectives
The nature of the business objectives an advertiser has doesn’t change if they are advertising online vs offline. The web is just part of the media mix, and although it can satisfy more marketing needs than any other media, it’s still important to be precise about what the needs are.
The closer that media sales and media planning teams can get to the true marketing objectives, the more effectively they can do their job of designing the right campaign strategy, crafting the right media schedule and selecting the right formats.
Types of objectives
To recap, marketing objectives typically fall into three categories:
- Brand objectives
- Acquisition objectives
- Retention objectives
Smart objectives
As a discipline, we encourage all marketers to make sure their objectives are ‘smart’. It’s particularly important in digital marketing because sometimes the departments developing these initiatives are quite new and may not have all of the same business rules and processes in place. That’s why it’s useful to check whether the objectives you have seen are SMART objectives…
· Specific
· Measurable
· Achievable
· Relevant
· Timebound
Exercise
Look back at your last campaign and run through this checklist. Were the objectives actually SMART, or was one of the areas weak?