12 marketing objectives your team should care about

When you think of a highly effective marketing team, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Creativity. Storytelling. Snazzy branding. Outside-the-box thinking. Ingenious SEM. Optimized SEO. Psychology and persuasion. Imagination. In lock-step with sales.

All of these things are true—and they’re all foundational to a best-in-class marketing squad. But beyond that (and perhaps even more important) is a marketing team’s ability to set measurable goals and work towards them together. Goal-oriented marketers are 376% more likely to achieve success—but it’s not just about having goals, it’s about committing to the right ones.

Getting super-intentional about what goals can *best* set your team up for success can make a huge difference for morale, engagement, and outcomes. Especially on remote and hybrid teams, metrics keep teammates aligned and create a north star to work towards. In this article, we’ll break down examples of marketing objectives used by highly effective teams. Let’s dive in.

Having numbers to hit helps us drive outcomes, rally the team, and show impact to stakeholders. Metrics keep us aligned and give us a north star to work towards, especially when we’re remote or hybrid. But it’s not just about having goals—it’s about committing to the right ones.

Getting super-intentional about what goals can best set your marketing team up for success can make a huge difference for morale, engagement, and outcomes.

Let's break down some examples of marketing objectives to get your team started.

1. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost is a common marketing objective that looks at the total sales and marketing spend required to gain a new customer for your business. This includes everything from marketing department salaries and general overhead to the technology your team uses, advertising expenses, and more. To calculate customer acquisition cost, first decide on a time frame to measure (year, quarter, or month). Then, divide the cost of your marketing and sales efforts by the number of customers those efforts acquired during that time period.

2. Marketing-originated customer ratio

The marketing-originated customer ratio shows what percentage of your new business is driven or influenced by marketing. To calculate it, take all of your business’s new customers over a given time period and look at what percentage of customers started out as a lead generated by marketing.

3. Marketing-influenced customer ratio

Similar to marketing-originated customers, your marketing-influenced customers also include any new business that marketing played a role in nurturing through the funnel. For instance, if Sales prospected their own lead and then that lead attended a marketing webinar before becoming a customer, that customer was influenced by marketing. Your marketing-influenced percentage will include every customer from your marketing-originated group as well.

4. Marketing-attributed revenue

Marketing revenue attribution allows you to see how effective your marketing efforts are and attribute a specific dollar amount to those efforts. It helps ensure that, as a team, you’re making the right marketing investments. You can look at marketing efforts overall or dig deeper into specific campaigns or parts of your marketing strategy to explore what has the greatest return on investment. For instance, how do content marketing efforts increase sales in comparison with paid advertising?

Some common models for tracking marketing revenue attribution include:

• Single touch attribution: This looks at someone’s first or last interaction before converting. First-touch can tell you a lot about what’s attracting users at the top of the funnel. Last touch gives you insight into which touchpoint gives that critical push, prompting something to turn from a lead into a customer.
• Multi-touch attribution: This model gives richer insight into someone’s journey from potential customer to paying customer—crediting a percentage of revenue to each touchpoint that user interacted with leading up to conversion. For instance, if you clicked on a social media post, read a blog article, downloaded an ebook, and then signed up for a product or service, each of those marketing resources would get credit for your conversion. There are different ways to split up the percentage of revenue attribution, too. Linear attribution gives equal credit to each touchpoint; the time decay model gives more credit the closer you get to conversion, and the u-shaped model gives the most credit to someone’s first and last interaction. You can also create a custom attribution model, giving greater credit to those sources you know are most impactful based on analytics.

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5. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

Some visitors who land on your website or marketing content have greater intent to buy than others. We call those users marketing qualified leads—or MQLs. MQLs are a critical part of any sales funnel. They’re better prospects to send to your Sales colleagues and help keep pipelines flowing in a way that’s a valuable use of the sales team’s time.

Tracking MQLs can give you a lot of powerful insights about your marketing initiatives and funnel, too. It can tell you where a lead is at in their buyer journey and help you understand what they might need to move through the funnel. MQLs can also illustrate the ROI of different marketing efforts—in general, the more MQLs, the higher the ROI.

How you measure MQLs will depend on your business and should evolve over time. Your company’s analytics, user personas, and conversations with Sales can help inform your definition of an MQL. Some examples of an action someone might take that indicates greater intent (and thus, MQL-ness) include: signing up for a free trial, requesting a demo, or downloading a pricing breakdown.

6. Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead measures the dollar amount of each new lead by marketing campaign, channel, or overall spending. It can help your team track ROI, understand the performance of your different channels and digital marketing efforts, and allocate marketing budgets more effectively.

To measure CPL, first define a time frame. Then, divide the amount of money you spent on a particular channel, campaign, or marketing initiative by the number of new leads it acquired. It is a key metric, especially for B2B SaaS marketing.

7. Traffic-to-lead ratio

Of the people who visit your website or interact with your marketing efforts, how many actually have intent and interest in moving through the conversion funnel? This is your traffic to lead ratio. It’s an easily measurable objective that can help you understand if your marketing efforts are attracting the right prospective customers in the first place. For instance, a low traffic to lead ratio might mean you need to focus on content strategy efforts that speak to your target audience or adjust your paid marketing strategy to bring in stronger prospects.

You can look at your overall traffic to lead ratio, or dig in to explore it for specific marketing campaigns or channels.

To calculate traffic-to-lead ratio, divide your total number of visitors to your website, campaign, or marketing channel by the number of qualified leads it generated.

8. MQL-to-SQL ratio

Once your team hands off its MQLs to sales, it’s up to your colleagues on that team to determine if they’ll become sales qualified leads—or SQLs. Not every MQL will become an SQL. Tracking the ratio between the two can help you understand the health of your pipeline and know whether you need to adjust the way your team qualifies leads.

To calculate the MQL-to-SQL ratio, simply divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs.

9. Lead-to-customer ratio

Your lead-to-customer ratio measures how many qualified leads actually turn into paying customers. This measurable objective is important for a few reasons:

• It can help you understand just how many leads your team should aim to bring in to meet sales goals each month.
• It can shed light on the quality of the leads you’re bringing in
• It can help you identify the most effective ways to turn leads into customers and offer more effective marketing tactics (educational content, case studies, email campaigns, blog posts, and more) to help close deals.

To calculate lead-to-customer conversions, just divide your total number of leads by the number of new customers during a given time period.

10. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is the total amount that one customer is projected to spend on your business. It’s typically based on your pricing model, potential up-sells, and forecasting data, and is a great way to identify current customers or user segments that are most valuable. You can also use CLV to identify opportunities to up-sell or educate your current customer base, and where you might focus on customer retention objectives. To calculate CLV, you’ll need a few different inputs:

• Average purchase value (APV): Total $ value of all purchases over a particular time period (typically a year), divided by the number of purchases in that time period.
• Average purchase frequency (APF): Total # of purchases made in that same time period divided by # of individual users who made purchases during that time.
• Customer value: APF x APV
• Average customer lifespan: Average length of time a user continues buying from you

To calculate CLV for individual customers, follow this formula:

11. Traffic rates

Marketing teams are typically responsible for efforts across a variety of channels: in-person or virtual events, social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, a blog team, content strategy, paid marketing (like ads), a customer loyalty program, PR and communication strategy, and more. You’ll want to track traffic across each of them to understand ROI, identify opportunities to improve conversion, and budget more effectively.

12. Conversion rate

A conversion happens whenever a visitor, user, or customer takes a desired action that you lead them to take. There are a number of different ways someone can convert — it all depends on the business or service you offer and what stage of the marketing funnel you’re tracking. At the top of the funnel, a conversion might look like RSVPing for an event or clicking the CTA on a LinkedIn post. At the bottom of the funnel, a conversion could be signing up for a paid subscription or completing a purchase.

You can calculate customer conversion rate by dividing your total number of conversions by your total number of interactions.

Bonus: Tips and best practices for setting your goals

Goals + subgoals go hand-in-hand

Once you land on your highest level goals and metrics, you’ll want to choose a few sub-goals that ladder up into them. Sub-goals are a great way to break big, longer term goals into manageable parts. Especially if it’s something you’ll be tracking towards for a long time, sub-goals can give your team a sense of progress and accomplishment along the way.

For every goal, a clear owner

Most goals will be a team effort, but you’ll still want one person who’s directly responsible for each goal and subgoal so it doesn’t fall through the cracks. Assigning clear owners helps with accountability and ensures that work isn't duplicated by multiple folks on your team.

One source of truth to rule them all

Once you have goals and owners in place, you’ll want to make sure they’re all tracked in one place. This will give the whole team visibility into how things are going, build greater accountability and excitement around the work, and make it way less of a headache to keep track of how things are moving along. If something’s blocked or needs attention, tracking everything in one place ensures you’ll catch this early on and be able to pivot accordingly.

Once you’ve got your goals squared away, the next step is to build practices to help your team track (and crush) them.

When it comes to actually making progress on goals, connecting them to daily actions is key. According to Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal, taking small daily steps that are in line with your goals is one of the best (research-backed) ways to work towards a goal over time. She says, “People often get lost thinking they have to change everything all at once [...] But small changes can pave the way for bigger changes.”

Take a moment to think through a week in the life of your marketing team. Does everyone’s day-to-day work, for the most part, contribute to your big-picture goals? If you asked a teammate how their work maps to quarterly goals and objectives, would they be able to answer? If not, building a daily accountability practice can help connect the dots.

Daily goal-tracking for marketing teams

Daily accountability means thinking about team goals every single day, not just at the beginning and end of the quarter or when some big milestone is approaching. High-performing marketing teams plan with the long-term in mind, and then use daily goal tracking to help keep everyone on track.

Building a practice of daily goal tracking gives marketing managers (and everyone else on the team) more visibility into in-flight work. Everyone can see how work moves from point A to point B and managers can quickly step in and offer support if they need to. If something is off track, the team can spot it early and recalibrate.

Daily goal-tracking doesn’t have to be a daunting task, either. You can do it in 5 minutes or less each morning—grab your cup of coffee*, bring your goals into focus, and then get to work crushing them.

(*or matcha, mocha frappuccino, lemon water, smoothie — whatever beverage gets you that morning fix!)

How to structure your status updates

There are a number of different ways you can approach daily goal-tracking. We recommend doing it asynchronously, so there’ll be a written record of everyone’s progress, which is especially valuable on a remote or hybrid team. Make sure the format is simple — we recommend the GROW format:

• Goal
• Reality
• Obstacles/Opportunities
• Wins
  

Once you’ve got a daily goal-tracking practice in place, you’ll want to think through some intentional moments where you’ll come together and discuss how everything’s going as a group. This works best on a weekly or bi-weekly cadence—your goals won’t matter much if you only talk about them a few times a quarter.

Rather than add another meeting to the mix, try carving out a section of your existing marketing team meeting for this purpose.

Ways to rally around goals in your marketing meeting

• All-up progress review: Add a recurring agenda item at the beginning of the meeting to check in on progress. If you’re using Range, you can automatically pull in updates by #tag so you can see everything that’s happened related to a given goal or subgoal easily.
• Collaboration time: Did folks flag anything as a blocker or for feedback throughout the week? Team meetings can be a great place to collaborate and work together.
• Celebration and gratitude: Celebrate progress towards your goals, and wins big and small. You might use the last 5 minutes of your meeting to go around and high five each other for specific progress made that week, or recognize folks for lending a hand or stepping up to see the work through.

Especially on a marketing team, where your work is so deeply intertwined to so many other parts of the business, lifting up wins to colleagues and stakeholders can be an opportunity to expand your influence and champion your (amazing) team.

Benefits of sharing day-to-day progress with cross-functional partners + leadership

• Shows your team’s impact and the value you’re driving for the business
• Helps you make the case for more headcount and resources, and secure buy-in on new initiatives
• Helps your team set boundaries—when cross-functional partners know your team’s goals and objectives, it’ll be easier to say “no” to projects that don’t align with those objectives fit into them
• Gives individuals company-wide visibility and recognition for the work they put in
• Helps build empathy with collaborators outside of your immediate team

How to share progress

Whether you're reporting up to company leadership or sharing your daily work with teammates and cross-functional colleagues, Range makes it easy to share progress on your marketing team’s goals.

Once you build a practice around daily check-ins, it’s easy to create custom reports on your team’s progress and share them with leadership and stakeholders. You can pull reports on a specific goal or sub-goal (using #tags)—and then share them over email or Slack in just a few clicks.