Strategic Objective Overview

Beginning With the End in Mind

At the end of Leadership, you developed your company’s Strategic Objective document. This is the set of goals that guides your company forward, each objective being a key component to fulfilling your company’s vision. As a part of that process, you set out some objectives for Marketing. As you progress through Marketing “Standing Out From The Crowd,” keep your Marketing Objectives in mind. Here, you will begin the work of building the systems that comprise the strategies, which will achieve your objectives. As you encounter new ideas, think about how they can be used to bring about progress toward the goals you have set for your company. In other words, let’s begin with the end in mind, and continue to make progress toward your goals.

Strategic Objective Review

Let’s review the objectives you set that are directly influenced by your marketing department. Some of your objectives will need to be carried out by a number of interdependent departments. For instance, you'll likely have set profitability objectives. For your company to be profitable, your operations department will have to be performing at a specific level, creating product, distributing product, or delivering services. Your sales department will have to be busy selling these same products or services, and your marketing department will be responsible for marketing them. Each department will have targets, and action plans for reaching those targets. You'll have chosen Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to let you know about progress made toward those targets, and a system for collecting and reviewing your KPI data.

Review your Marketing related Strategic Objectives. Do they still make sense? Are they Specific? Measurable? Actionable? Realistic? Time Bound?

What you'll see as you lay out your marketing-related objectives is in most cases, your marketing department will influence progress toward the Strategic Objective. However each Strategic Objective will need to be broken down into supporting departmental objectives. For example, your marketing department influences profitability in a number of ways, but in most cases it does not have the power on its own to determine profitability. For that reason, you'll want to set objectives for your marketing department that support each overall Strategic Objective. Profitability is made up of two components: revenues and expenses. You may decide that your marketing department will need to reduce expenses in order to contribute to the overall profitability goal. On the other hand, you may decide your marketing department will need to create a certain number of leads to feed to your sales department, and you'll have to increase your marketing expenses in order to achieve a significant profitability increase. Whatever the case, you'll need to decide on a course of action, set your targets, put action plans in place to achieve them, and have KPIs in place to measure your progress.