When working in the marketing industry, it is important that you understand industry terminology and strategies in order to increase your contribution. Advertising objectives help marketers establish an effective method for engaging with customers and building brand awareness. Your ability to understand and incorporate advertising objectives into your marketing strategy allows you to elevate your professional profile and maximize campaign results.

In this article, we define what promotional goals go into marketing, discuss when marketers implement promotional goals, consider why it’s important to have promotional marketing goals, and provide more information on how to create promotional marketing goals for your department with examples.

What are advertising objectives in marketing?

In marketing, advertising goals are goals that marketing teams set to guide their marketing campaign management strategies. These goals include a set time frame and the number or percentage that marketing teams should aim for throughout the process. Advertising goals can also be short term or long term, depending on the company’s marketing initiatives and advertising needs.

When to implement advertising objectives in marketing:

There are several situations when it is necessary to realize advertising goals as part of marketing initiatives. Here are some examples:

To promote a new product

Marketers develop advertising objectives to determine the best methods to promote a new product and measure its success with consumers. Typically, these promotional goals define sales goals or customer acquisition goals resulting from marketing initiatives for a new product.

To maintain customer loyalty

When a business has many competitors with similar products, the marketing team implements promotional goals so that customers continue to use their brand and not the competitor’s brand. They do this by developing competing marketing campaigns, boosting their SEO rankings, and using promotional offers like sales to encourage customers to keep doing their business.

To stimulate sales of an existing product

Marketers use promotional targets to guide marketing initiatives for a company’s existing products. This includes notifying the public about new features, designs, or color options. This also includes finding creative ways to maintain or increase the product’s current sales figures.

To stimulate sales in retail outlets

In large corporations, marketers set promotional targets to motivate those who work in retail stores to sell a certain amount of their products within a certain period of time. They measure the success of internal advertising targets by looking at sales data across retail outlets over time.

To learn more about your clients

Promotions such as membership cards, apps, or email newsletters allow marketers to gather information about their customers’ needs through feedback channels and account details. In this situation, marketers use promotional targets to create an action plan to get more customers to participate in membership programs. They also use advertising objectives to determine the success of creating marketing materials that meet the interests of customers.

Why is it important to have promotional goals in marketing?

It is important to have promotional goals in marketing for several reasons. Here are some ways to use promotional objectives that benefit the marketing team and company initiatives:

Reminds the marketing team of the purpose of their work: Promotional goals are especially useful when marketing teams are working on long-term campaign projects. This is because promotional goals help team members refocus on a common goal in relation to their individual job responsibilities, such as updating campaign schedules or creating promotional content.
Motivates marketing professionals to achieve goals. By including target numbers or percentage points in promotional targets, marketers can use them as a benchmark on which to base their current success. This encourages them to make changes or create other ideas to match the numbers in the original goal.
Encourages marketers to develop a detailed action plan: Starting with a promotional goal helps marketing teams determine what they need to do to achieve it. This includes setting deadlines, developing promotional materials, and scheduling the release of promotional materials to consumers.
Gives the marketing team a standard to measure results: after the completion of marketing campaigns, it is important to analyze the results in order to measure success and learn lessons for future campaigns. By setting advertising goals early on, marketing teams have concrete numbers against which to measure their success.

How to Create Promotional Marketing Goals

Here’s how to create promotional marketing objectives that match your employer’s products and marketing channels:

1. Determine what you want to achieve and why

To create a promotional goal for your marketing team, you need to start by defining the specific result you want and the result goal. For example, you want to increase your company’s social media presence because you want to align your social media presence with that of your competitors.

2. Review your budget and labor needs

No matter what you want to achieve, you need to make sure you have the right budget and the right professionals to help you achieve your goal. Consider how much money you need to reach your goal, and whether you need to hire professional freelancers in the process. By looking at the talents you currently have and the amount of money you need to contribute to reach your goal, you can get a realistic figure on which to base your success.

3. Review what you want to achieve to reflect your resources

By looking at the talents you currently have and the amount of money you need to contribute to reach your goal, you can get a realistic figure on which to base your success. For example, you originally wanted to increase your company’s social media presence by 60% within three months, but after analyzing your resources, you determined that you had enough funds in your budget to increase engagement by about 12%.

4. Set a realistic time frame for achieving the goal

Your advertising goal should include a set time frame within which you want to achieve it. Consult with your team about how long it may take to achieve your promotional goal and how other marketing activities may affect its timing. This allows you to set a realistic expectation for your team to successfully achieve the goal.

5. Create milestones to track your progress towards your goal

By setting milestones after you set your promotional goal, you’ll stay productive and meet each milestone to ultimately reach your goal within the time frame you’ve set. This can help you save money and keep consumers engaged throughout the process.

Examples of Advertising Objectives for Marketing

Check out these examples of short-term and long-term promotional marketing goals to get some inspiration for your own:

Examples of short-term advertising goals

Marketers use these types of promotional marketing goals to complete tasks over several weeks or months. Here are some short-term promotional marketing goals:

Sell all non-seasonal inventory by the end of next month.
Get 10 new social media followers per week.
Run a social media promotion next Thursday to increase sales of our new product by 15%.
Organize an online flash sale next Friday to compete with a competitor’s sale and encourage new customer purchases by 10%.

Examples of long-term advertising goals

Long-term advertising goals are focused on completing tasks over a period of several months to a year. Here are some long-term advertising goals:

Increase brand awareness nationwide by 20% by December 31, 2021.
Increase your conversion rate by 10% over the next eight months.
Update social media platforms to reflect brand changes effective January 1, 2021.
Increase social media signups by 15% over the next nine months.