From goal to objective
Once you know where the business is going, set the objective that gets it there. The objective decides which channels you turn on, which you leave off and how you will know it worked. Get it wrong and every decision below it drifts.
The cascade
Each decision feeds the next. The business goal shapes the marketing objective. The objective shapes the strategy and the system you build to deliver it. That decides where your money and effort go in tactics, and tracking tells you whether it’s working. Skip a step and everything below it is guesswork.
F.R.Y.: three ways to grow
If you are growing within your current market, there are three ways to do it, and each one calls for different channels.
Frequency gets existing customers to buy more often. If a company sends you its newsletter, you’ve probably bought from it before, and it wants you back sooner. Reach creates customers who have never bought from you, which is where most advertising lives. Yield gets existing customers to spend more each time they buy.
Design each campaign around one. A campaign trying to do all three usually does none of them well.
What frequency, reach and yield look like
Frequency lives in the channels you own. An email newsletter, or a text from the plumber who fixed your sink two months ago reminding you a freeze is coming, both bring past customers back sooner.
Reach is mostly advertising and earned attention: getting in front of people who have never bought from you.
Yield happens at the moment of purchase. Every “customers also bought” suggestion online, and every fast-food “make it a large,” is a yield play.
Can you do all three?
Yes, if you have the budget, and budget means time and people as well as dollars. Large companies with big marketing teams run all three at once. Startups and smaller companies should usually pick one and do it well. It’s the reason budget comes before objectives in PB²-GOST³.
Make it S.M.A.R.T.
A real objective is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. “Increase registrations” is a wish. “Grow registrations 15% by March 1” is an objective. You can plan against it, fund it and know on March 2 whether you hit it.
“Achievable” is a budget question
A 20% jump in new customers in three months sounds great. Do you have the money, the people to make the ads and the time to test them? If not, 10% might be the honest number. An objective you can’t fund is a wish with a deadline.
The best objective ever written
NASA started with a lofty mission about leading the world in space exploration. Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 and the United States panicked. In 1962, at Rice University in Houston, John F. Kennedy committed the country to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely before the decade was out.
That’s an objective: specific, measurable, ambitious but possible, and timed. The whole agency organized around it, and in 1969 it happened. Most marketing programs never write a sentence that clear.
Objectives make tracking possible
Once you have an objective, the tracking plan almost writes itself. You know what to measure and what “working” means, and every report tells you whether you are getting closer or further away.
A scoreboard, not a promise
Imagine watching football with no scoreboard: no score, no down, no clock. That’s marketing without an objective. You won’t hit every objective, and that’s part of the game. When you miss, the objective tells you how far off you were, and the next question becomes why, and what to do differently.