Business Objectives: How to Set Ones Marketing Can Support

Ask a room full of business owners what their marketing is for and you’ll hear “more followers”, “better engagement” or my personal favourite, “just to get our name out there”. None of those are business objectives. They’re activities, or at best side effects. And when marketing isn’t tied to a clear objective, it’s almost impossible to tell whether it’s working.

I’m Chief Operating Officer at Delivered Social, so I spend a lot of time looking at the numbers that keep a business running. In my experience, the best marketing plans start well away from the marketing. They start with what the business is actually trying to achieve this year. Get that right, and every post, ad and email has a job to do.

What are business objectives, in plain English?

Let’s get business objectives defined properly, because the phrase gets thrown around a lot. A business objective is a specific result the business wants to reach in a set period of time. It’s about the health of the business, not the health of your Instagram account.

Good examples sound like this:

• Win ten new retained clients by the end of the financial year.
• Increase repeat bookings from existing customers.
• Fill the new evening classes before the spring term starts.
• Reduce reliance on one big customer by growing enquiries from a new sector.
• Hire two new team members without paying recruitment agency fees.

Notice that none of them mention likes, reach or followers. Those can still matter, but only as signals that you’re moving towards something bigger.

What is the difference between goals, objectives and KPIs?

This is where plans tend to wobble, so here’s the simple version I use with our team:

• The goal is the big direction. “Grow the business in Hampshire.”
• The business objective is the measurable result that proves you’re getting there. “Sign eight new clients based in Hampshire this year.”
• The marketing objective is how marketing will help. “Generate forty qualified enquiries from Hampshire businesses.”
• The KPIs (key performance indicators, the numbers you check regularly) are the signs along the way. Website enquiries, landing page visits from local search, booked calls.

When these line up, everyone can see how their bit of work connects to the bigger picture. When they don’t, you get a social media manager proudly reporting record engagement in the same month the business had its worst sales figures in years.

If your marketing report could be read without knowing what the business sells, it’s measuring the wrong things.

How to set business objectives marketing can actually support

Not every objective is a marketing problem. If the issue is that the product is too expensive or the delivery is slow, a clever campaign won’t fix it. So when you set objectives, it helps to check that marketing genuinely has a role to play. Here’s a simple process:

1. Start with the numbers. Look at last year’s sales, enquiries and customer numbers. Where did the business do well, and where did it fall short? You can’t set a sensible target without knowing your starting point.
2. Pick a small number. Two or three objectives for the year is plenty. Ten objectives means no objectives, because nobody can focus on ten things.
3. Make them specific and time bound. You may have heard of SMART objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. It’s an old framework, but it works because it forces you to put a number and a date on things.
4. Work backwards. If you need eight new clients and roughly one in five enquiries turns into a client, you need around forty good enquiries. Now marketing has a real target.
5. Agree who owns what. Marketing can bring in the enquiries. Sales, or the owner, has to convert them. Write down where one hands over to the other.

That fourth step is the one that changes everything. Once you’ve worked backwards from a business result, you know how many leads, visitors or bookings you actually need. That makes it far easier to decide where to spend time and money.

Choose the channels after the objective, not before

A lot of businesses do this the wrong way round. They decide they need to be on TikTok, then try to work out why. If the objective is winning a handful of high value business clients, LinkedIn and a strong website might do far more than a daily short video habit. If it’s filling a local café on weekday mornings, Instagram and Google reviews might be the stars.

We’ve made the case before that your brand does not need every platform. The objective is what tells you which ones it does need.

Keep checking in, because objectives drift

Setting objectives once in January and forgetting them until December is how plans quietly die. A few habits that keep them alive:

• Put them somewhere visible. The top of the monthly report is a good spot, so every update starts with what you’re aiming for.
• Review quarterly. Are you on track? If not, is it a marketing issue, a sales issue or a sign the target was unrealistic?
• Be honest about changes. If the business changes direction, change the objectives too. Sticking to an outdated target helps nobody.
• Report in the business’s language. “We generated twelve enquiries, three became clients” lands far better with a director than a page of engagement rates.

Clear objectives make marketing easier to defend

Here’s the bit that matters if you work in marketing. When your work is tied to clear business objectives, it’s much easier to show your value, argue for budget and say no to random requests. “Does this help us hit our enquiry target?” is a brilliant filter for the endless list of ideas that land on a marketer’s desk.

It also makes the conversations with directors and clients calmer. You’re no longer defending a vanity metric. You’re showing progress towards something everyone already agreed matters.