Convincing customers and prospects that your brand should be their go-to product or service will take a great effort on your part. You have more than one goal of increasing sales, in fact there’s a whole list of objectives that will help you build a strong and lasting customer base.
Your focus should be divided into two distinct groups of objectives: communication objectives and marketing objectives. Communication objectives will focus on measuring the attitudes your customers have towards your brand such as its credibility and customer satisfaction. Marketing objectives will be measuring the behaviors of your customers: their visits, rate of purchases, and requests for information.
Measuring the attitude
The communication objectives are all about your customers’ view of your company. Thinking about the types of things that make your brand unique and the attitude you wish to display is essential when creating your strategy and goals.
Are you focused on providing great customer satisfaction? Set a goal to increase awareness of your warranty program to a certain percentage.
Have you won recent awards for the durability of usability of your brand? Display it proudly and convince a percentage of your target audience that your brand is the best.
Measuring the to dos
Your marketing objectives focus on specific audience interaction with your company. These interactions should build relationships with your customers. By giving your target audience samples of your products, setting goals for referrals and visits during promotions you’ll be able build lasting relationships. Then later down the road you can measure the impact your objectives had on sales.
The two groups are much like a cause and effect relationship. The communication objectives build a positive customer attitude, which will then lead to marketing objectives with an increase in the rate of purchases or information requests.
Often though, companies only build marketing objectives due to the fact that communication objectives do not always guarantee an increase in sales. I argue that this is the wrong way to look at it.
Each objective group goes hand in hand affecting the other along with sales. While communication objectives may not always have a measurable affect on sales they will have an impact on marketing objectives and should be allocated accordingly.
Rather than eliminating communication objectives companies should give their attention to both objectives to truly see the impact on sales. Both too are necessary to gain insight on the working behind the overall marketing communications strategy to determine and increase the chances of effectiveness.
