What is your objective?

- You likely have a vision of what you need your marketing to accomplish. It might be to increase traffic to your website, drive more phone calls or get more customers to come through your doors. These are all examples of common marketing goals, but as is, they're useless. Your goals need objectives. You see, goals are just a general idea of what you want to accomplish. Objectives are how you'll make it happen and how you determine if you've succeeded. So the question you must be able to answer is, what is your objective? The approach I use to map out goals and objectives, which is also in use at companies like Google and LinkedIn, is to use OKRs. And the acronym stands for objective and key results. It looks like this, first, you set the objective. Objectives answer the question, where do we want to go? And then you provide two or three key results and the key results define whether the objective was met. They answer the question, how do we know if we've got there? This is important because otherwise, you can't decide if you've achieved your goal or not. Let's say we want to increase online sales for a coffee shop. So I'll set my objective, it's specific. Increase online sales for coffee beans and mugs. Next, we need to set our key results. There are measurable, relevant to the goal, and attainable. For this example, let's say, it's sell 100 packages of coffee beans and sell 250 coffee mugs. Now, all goals should be timebound, and traditionally, OKRs are timebound by a quarter. So we might say that this objective is due by the end of Q1 2020. As you can see, if I achieve each of those key results, I know that we've hit our goal. Now, if you'd like to check out more about OKRs, I recommend John Doerr's book "Measure What Matters." Now, there are many ways to set goals. What matters is that you commit to settings goals and measuring your progress. Failing to do so will put you at a serious disadvantage.