Objectives specify 'what we want to achieve', while your strategy summarises 'how we are going to get there'.

Objectives (or goals) have a range of different but often complementary roles in business.

They are a clear and concise action statement of what you want to achieve and are critical to your planning and evaluation.

When deciding upon your objective:

Ensure that it works within a hierarchy whereby each objective, at each level within the company, is linked in order to achieve the overall long-term mission of the organisation.

So your objective cascades down from, say:

1. A corporate objective to:
   
   
2. a particular business objective to:
   
   
3. a functional marketing objective, which has:
   
   
4. a specific marketing communications objective, within which there is, for example, an:
   
   
   • Advertising objective, or
   • Sales promotion objective, or
   • Experiential marketing objective or
   • Direct marketing objective, or
   • A digital marketing objective (with, for example, a website objective)

   And this objective is focused on:
   
   

5. a particular marketing activity, so has:
   
   
6. an operational or subsidiary objective:

   Which focuses on optimising your priority, which then, ideally, boils down to:
   
   

7. one primary objective that is briefed a member of the marketing team, or external agency or other supplier, to achieve.
   
   
   

See Objectives: principles and techniques

See also media objectives and creative objectives.

Other priorities

1. Make sure the objectives are presented in SMART format.

   Doing this ensures that you know exactly what  must be achieved, by when, and what evaluation metric/KPI will be used to determine success.

2. Rank your objectives, to find which is the primary objective that must be achieved.
3. Agree your time scales (how long you have to achieve your objective).
4. Keep the objectives consistent, and balanced with associated performance measures.