How do we speak about internal objectives?

As Peter Drucker remarked, “management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.” In the world of marketing, there are many ways to define objectives. Marketing objectives need to be understood in this common language to connect measures of performance to clear owners of action without having to rely upon detailed account-by-account qualification criteria. Marketing objectives and the marketing funnel are proxies to drive clarity on a customer journey-aligned view of total addressable market without being requiring insight specific to every account. A common language removes ambiguity on objectives and supports prioritisation of work into the right teams and keeps everyone on the same path to success. “If you don't know where you're going any road will do,” said Lewis Carroll. Without some kind of performance framework that connects activity measurement, owners and actions, random act of marketing easily come to sap your effectiveness.

You can develop a marketing performance framework by starting with a set of general marketing activities and clustering all the respective KPIs together. The similarity between these objectives and the customer journey framework should be readily apparent, but so too should it be clear that they’re not duplicative. The customer journey is the steps a customer goes through. These objectives are things you want to achieve. Common objectives that most Marketing functions need to support are:

Marketing objective	Objective description	Overview of objective measures
Build mindshare	Build awareness of the brand, recognition within the right context and perception against the right attributes Mindshare is a combination of awareness (knowledge of your existences), perception (what they actually think of you) and mental availability (the likelihood that they'll recognise and think of you in a buying situation).	Awareness of brand, recognition of marketing messages and sentiment measures among select audience groups
Grow contact and account intelligence	Capture named contacts within your target accounts and build account-level insights. Build insight into accounts that are in the market for your solutions from third-party data sources.	# new contacts acquired, %age accounts with VP / C-suite contacts
Create opportunities	Generate demand to support the acquisition of new contacts and early- to mid-stage leads.	Digital interactions with gated and ungated touchpoints that capture details
Nurture & Engagement opportunities	Engage existing contacts to the point of becoming an opportunity and opportunities to advance them through the purchase funnel	Engagement with programmatic email nurture campaigns and discrete high-touch first- and third-party events and activities
Accelerate & Convert pipeline	Support Sales closing target mid- to late-stage opportunities	Activities specifically design to support closing deals faster
Drive adoption and usage	Increase usage of purchased products and solutions to create customer value	Adoption of purchased solutions at key milestones after purchase
Increase renewals	If you are a contract organisation, increase the renewal rate of existing customers at highest customer value.	Impact of activity on renewal opportunities vs baseline
Re-engage lost customers	For opportunities you have lost, re-engage them with touchpoints relevant to their Usage and Review customer journey stages, positioning the limitations of their choices and sharing support to mitigate these.	Engagement with content and conversion to new opportunity
Create advocacy	Build an audience of customers that will evangelise the value you create for them, will speak at your events and will be your case studies.	# public-facing customer stories

You could follow Lewis Carroll down the rabbit hole defining many more of these top-level objectives, but that’s not really the goal. Sometimes the development of perfection must lose out to the adoption of imperfection. And since you work the how by driving consistency and adoption you will likely want to streamline the objectives that you focus on. A Performance Framework for Marketing needs to work within your marketing organisation’s capacity for complexity. It needs to fit with how you prioritise work, how you sell, your solutions and you product mix, and they may all benefit from a simpler view of objectives and performance achieved.

At its base level, the goal remains to align the organisation on a common framework of the value you want to deliver, communicate and measure against. Marketing objectives typically span multiple customer journey stages and may have their own sub-funnel KPIs that can be used to establish if they are on track or not. For example, at the awareness stage, you may look at how many anonymous users that visited your website. This can support retargeted digital engagements that drive towards gated content. If website visitors are too low for ungated content we may find difficulty later converting those audiences into known contacts, so we can view ungated visitors as a leading indicator of future contact acquisition performance.

Though they may parallel the customer journey framework, we should be clear that these are internal measures of performance and do not represent a customer’s objectives. Upsell and cross-sell could be argued as being separate pre-purchase objectives as from an operational perspective marketing activities may be different. Within a pre-purchase stage net new customers and prospects could be targeted for acquisition while cross-sell and upsell activities targeting specific existing customer segments with differentiated calls to action could also run. You define the objectives that best represent your highest priorities, where you add the most value and what you want your marketing team to be known for.

For many organisations a performance framework of five or so objectives is a manageable number. Five can easily be rolled off the tongue, reported in a PowerPoint slide, activated in a goal-setting framework and memorised by the entire function. The long list that shared previously is really just the inputs to inform the final measures you align upon and in refining this list you’re trying to bring focus, simplicity and clarity to the totality, not omit a number that you sneak back in at a later date. These activities are best viewed against the customer journey framework to add context to how they are differentiated.

Every objective needs a success criteria and KPIs. As you’re thinking about these measures it can be useful to break them down into different types. Your success criteria are your primary measures; they’re the objectives you define as your goals to achieve. KPIs are then your diagnostic measures – the supporting measures that you will look at regularly, ensure you have actions plans to hit and are useful for diving deeper into underlying trends or to understand data points from the primary measures. Diagnostic measurements can go near infinitely deep so pick the level you want to go to with these. And then there are efficiency measures – the KPIs that can be used to measure the efficiency of operations for this objective. These could measures of global consistency, asset re-use or similar.

Before you build your performance framework, define qualitatively the objectives you’re trying to drive.

Objective	Description
1. Build Mindshare	Do senior leaders in the buying group think of you as a strategic partner relevant to their priorities and business imperatives. Would they direct their teams to prioritise you in research for possible solutions, and would they sign off on purchase recommendations.
2. Create Opportunities	Are you able to develop a pipeline of new opportunities for a solution? Is there strength and recent evidence of success at being able to achieve this?
3. Accelerate and Close	Does your pipeline convert to closed won business at the expected rate? Are you benchmarking well against the wider industry or across your other solutions products?
4. Drive Adoption and Usage	When buyers complete a purchase do they get the expected value from their decisions? Are they satisfied and likely to buy more from you? Are they using your solutions and likely to renew them?
5. Increase Renewals	Do customers renew their purchases or are you constantly seeking new customers?