Marketing Metrics and Objectives in Startups 101

You can run a startup and suggest something completely new and unique on the market, and it doesn’t matter what you are doing, developing an app or setting up an e-commerce store. This brand-new product or service looks promising, and you believe in success.

However, without setting the right marketing objectives, your startup is doomed to fail.

Marketing objectives help you focus on the things that play a crucial role in the business. If you set the objectives correctly, your entire marketing strategy will work for a hundred percent.

In this post, you will find out what marketing objectives exist and how to set them up for your startup.

Let’s start!

Still looking for that breakthrough concept? Check out ways to find an idea for a unicorn startup.

A Few Words On How To Set Marketing Goals

When you set clear goals, you give your marketing efforts direction and purpose. Vague ideas like “get more customers” don’t help much. You need goals that guide your actions and show your progress. That’s why every marketing team should use the SMART criteria. It helps you shape goals that are specific, realistic, and easy to track.

Here’s how it works:

• “S” is for “Specific” – define exactly what you want to achieve. For example, “I need to gain 1,000 new Instagram followers to boost social media engagement.”
• “M” is for “Measurable” – you need to track progress. Use metrics like website traffic, conversion rate, or email sign-ups.
• “A” is for “Achievable” – set goals you can reach with the time, budget, and resources you have.
• “R” is for “Relevant” – make sure your goal supports your overall marketing strategy and business goals.
• “T” is for “Timely” – set a clear deadline. For instance, “Grow newsletter subscribers by 15% in three months.”

Remember that marketing objectives for your startup must comply with the SMART framework. This framework helps you set structured and effective marketing objectives.

Now, compare these two marketing objectives:

a) Increase sales by 25%

b) Increase sales of your service across Canada from $50K to $75K by the end of the first quarter of 2021

How do you think which of these two objectives aligns with the “SMART” criteria?

You are right!

The second option is an example of how a SMART objective should be compiled.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t limit yourself to a single objective for your startup. It makes more sense to create a few general marketing objectives that everyone in your team could understand what to do.

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How To Choose Marketing Objectives For Your Startup

Marketing objectives can vary depending on your goals, and you can set several of them to work toward. But if you want to be a smart strategist, start by thinking about what not to focus on. Trying to do everything at once can stretch your resources too thin and slow you down. It’s hard to achieve meaningful results if you attempt to pursue every objective simultaneously.

So, how do you choose the right marketing objectives for your startup?

You can stick to these two rules:

1. Make sure your objectives are specific and measurable.
2. Align your objectives with your overall business strategy.

After choosing your objectives, be sure to test them to evaluate their effectiveness and ensure they are aligned with your business goals.

KPIs must be short-term and long-term

The best way to see whether you achieve your marketing objectives is by executing short and long-term key performance indicators. To put it simply, the objectives must fulfill both profit and brand building for your startup. Lastly, it will help you keep your growth marketing efforts afloat.

Key roles and responsibilities

The makeup of your marketing team may change depending on your startup’s size, stage, and goals, but some roles are common across most teams. Here’s a quick overview of the key players and how they contribute to your objectives:

• Marketing Manager: Sets the direction, develops strategies, manages budgets, and keeps the team focused on the most important objectives.
• Content Creator: Crafts engaging articles, blog posts, and social media content that attract and educate your audience, helping to generate leads and build trust.
• Social Media Manager: Manages your presence across platforms, schedules posts, and interacts with followers to increase social media engagement and expand your reach.
• SEO Specialist: Optimizes your website and content to improve search results rankings, driving more organic traffic and making it easier for people to find your products or services.
• PPC Specialist: Runs pay-per-click campaigns to bring in targeted traffic and qualified leads, ensuring your ad spend delivers a strong return.

Each of these roles plays a part in increasing your reach, boosting engagement, and generating leads—key ingredients for startup growth. Depending on your needs, you might combine some roles or bring in specialists as your marketing activities expand.

Don’t create too many objectives

The best way to see whether you achieve your marketing objectives is by executing short and long-term key performance indicators. Using specific measures, such as relevant metrics and tests, allows you to evaluate progress toward both short-term and long-term objectives. To put it simply, the objectives must fulfill both profit and brand building for your startup. Lastly, it will help you keep your growth marketing efforts afloat.

Types of Marketing Objectives

Now, let’s review eight important marketing goals and objectives examples that can boost brand engagement, generate leads, and increase revenue. Many of these marketing objectives can be mapped to different stages of the sales funnel, helping you structure your strategy from awareness to loyalty.

1. Increasing brand awareness

Boosting brand awareness stands for spreading the word about your company in the niche. The more people hear about your startup, the more potential customers you will attract. And that is when your startup becomes a corporation with a big name.

Brand awareness can be done by many means, such as search engine advertising, email signature marketing, social media marketing campaigns, TV ads, and even billboards.

Learn how to craft effective email marketing strategies for startups to boost customer acquisition.

Whichever channel you choose to invest in, you will have to set up a marketing plan and business objective measurements in order to assess the campaign’s effectiveness and contribution to your bottom line.

When you set this marketing objective, you should remember two things:

• Brand positioning. This is about how people see your brand and whether it stands out in their minds. Ask yourself: Does my target audience and my existing customers really “get” what my brand is about? Do my marketing efforts speak their language and grab their attention?

For example, if you’re building a startup that sells eco-friendly skincare, your brand should feel clean, honest, and natural. If your Instagram is full of flashy colors and heavy makeup looks, your message might not match your audience’s expectations. Clear and consistent brand messaging helps people connect emotionally with what you offer.

• Brand magnitude. This is about how many people in your niche actually know your brand exists. Even if your positioning is spot on, it won’t help much if no one’s heard of you.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a time-tracking tool for freelancers. If only a handful of people know about it, you won’t get far. You need to raise awareness through content marketing, partnerships, or ads until your name becomes familiar within your market. The ultimate goal is for your brand to become synonymous with your niche or product category, so that when people think of the solution, they think of your brand first. Think visibility: show up where your audience spends time.

In short, first make sure people understand what your brand stands for, and then make sure enough people are seeing it.

To measure the brand awareness of your startup, you need to run in-depth market research. For this purpose, you need to analyze analytical data, use search engine optimization software, or cooperate with a market research agency.

2. Share of voice

Basically, share of voice (SOV) explains how your brand is visible in the market compared to the competitors. What’s more important, SOV is tightly connected with market share. If SOV is higher than market share, it leads to creating excess SOV. While both these metrics should walk hand in hand.

A couple of SOV examples:

• Increase search visibility from 10% to 12% across Canada by the end of the first quarter of 2021
• Increase search ad impression share from 50% to 75% across Canada for your tool by the end of the first quarter of 2021
• Double YouTube subscribers from 1.5K to 3K by the end of the first quarter of 2021

To measure SOV, you can use the reports depending on the channel you want to analyze. Hence, if you are interested in organic search, you should track target keywords by comparing them with the competitors’ data. The tool you can use for this analysis is Rank Tracker from Ahrefs. When your share of voice increases, it often results in more website visitors—this is where understanding what traffic means for your business is crucial, as more traffic means more opportunities for engagement, lead generation, and sales.

The report called “Visibility” shows you the percentage of clicks from tracked keywords that land on your and your competitors’ websites.

Looking for effective marketing tools? Here are some top email marketing software platforms to consider for your business.

3. Track the Balance Between “Users” and “Customers”

Growing your user base is quite important. But it doesn’t mean that the overall number of converted customers will grow as well. Just because more people visit your site or download your app doesn’t mean they’ll all become paying customers. For example, if you attract the wrong audience or if your offer isn’t clear, they might leave without taking action. Quality matters more than quantity when it comes to user growth.

However, there is another side to the coin. If you really want to make your startup fundamental, you can earn more trust and followers in your target audience by offering something educational and for free.

When you share useful resources, like guides, webinars, or tools, you show your expertise, educate customers, and help them solve real problems. This positions your brand as helpful, not salesy. People are more likely to trust and remember you when they’re ready to buy. If you’re building a budgeting app, offering a free eBook on “How to Save $500 in 30 Days” or a free budgeting spreadsheet can attract the right users. They get value upfront, and you earn trust before even asking them to sign up or pay.

It brings no cost for the company but helps amplify the brand’s position and enlarge the user database.

4. Work on the Quality of Your Leads

If your startup belongs to a subscription-based business, this digital marketing objective is for you.

The concept of this objective is to generate qualified leads by improving the level of your marketing communication and text production.

One thing is to measure the lead quantity using your CRM. The other is the lead quality, which is quite difficult. But if you pay attention to lead scoring, you can get the insights you need on this matter.

By analyzing the leads, you should draw attention to these six factors:

a) The overall purchasing power of your startup

b) Trial tier and setup

c) Customer engagement and user behavior on your site

d) What users say about the service to customer/sales teams

e) Customer reviews and feedback, which can provide valuable insights into product quality and brand reputation

f) Other information you’ve collected from a user registration process

5. Skyrocket Sales Growth

Obviously, you want to make money with your startup. Consequently, you must understand what financial metrics you should analyze based on your business model.

When it comes to measuring sales metrics, this process must be simple and precise. Use a good CRM system that can guarantee accurate data analysis. If you’re interested in how to build CRM from scratch, our guide will give you all the tools and insights you need.

Just for the record, if you’re using Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics, stick to using it for marketing insights, like tracking user behavior, conversion rates, or checkout drop-offs. GA isn’t perfect for financial reporting or exact business metrics because it can skew data due to session-based tracking, sampling, and other limitations. If you need precise numbers, rely on your backend systems or a dedicated analytics tool built for product or finance use.

Explore how CRM in recruiting can transform your hiring process and improve candidate relationships.

6. Boost Product Demand

Even if the representatives of your target audience are familiar with your brand or service, it doesn’t guarantee they will buy from you. At the same time, your goal is to get them converted into your customers.

With the help of boosting product demand, you will be able to fill the gap between the two stages of the marketing funnel: awareness and consideration.

To measure this metric, you should use Google Search Console. If you see that people search for your brand or service on Google, then they want to know more information about it.

You can analyze data for the past three months over the year, including search queries with the name of your brand or service.

7. Work on Improving a Marketing Funnel Flow

A marketing funnel consists of several stages that reflect how people move from first hearing about your brand to eventually becoming your customers. The tricky part? You can’t always tell exactly where or how someone discovered your service. Maybe they saw a promoted Facebook post. Maybe they read one of your blog articles. Either way, not every lead and revenue goal you set will be reached, and that’s perfectly normal.

It’s important to engage prospects at each stage of the funnel to build relationships, encourage interaction, and increase the likelihood of conversion and long-term loyalty.

Here’s a simple breakdown of the funnel stages, along with some marketing goal examples for each:

1. Awareness

People first discover your brand through ads, social posts, or content. An example of a marketing goal here could be increasing website traffic or social media presence.

2. Interest

They start engaging, like following your pages or signing up for newsletters. An example of a marketing objective might be growing your email subscriber list or boosting engagement on social media.

3. Consideration

Potential customers compare your offering with competitors. Your goal could be increasing product demo requests or time spent on key pages.

4. Conversion

They take action: buy, subscribe, or register. A clear goal example is boosting sales or sign-ups.

5. Loyalty (or Retention)

After purchase, you focus on keeping customers happy and encouraging repeat business. This is where building a strong community of loyal customers matters. Marketing goals here might include improving customer retention rates, encouraging referrals, or loyalty programs.

Your task is to identify at what stages the most drop-offs happen and close the gap.

8. Customer Lifetime Value

First of all, let’s see what Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is.

CLV is a marketing success metric that helps estimate the amount of money your target buyers spend to buy your service.

By increasing the average customer’s worth, you will improve the financial metrics and attract new customers. And here is the formula on how to measure customer value:

Avg. Order Value x Avg. Annual Purchase Frequency x Avg. Customer Lifespan

For example, if the AOV is $10, the customers tend to buy your service 8 times per year during the period of 5 years on average, the CLV would be 10*8*5=$4K

Marketing Objectives Examples Summary

Building a startup from scratch is hard, just like brainstorming and setting marketing objectives for your project. Working on brand awareness is a serious and challenging process that requires careful decision-making and a strong marketing team. Ultimately, instead of better brand reputation and customer loyalty, the wrong marketing objectives can lead your business down a dead end.

Start by listing possible marketing goals, then narrow them down to the most impactful ones for your business, whether it’s improving lead generation, boosting brand loyalty, improving search engine rankings, or delivering quality customer service.

Remember to use the tips on setting marketing objectives for your startup shared in this post to guide your choices.

And feel free to check out this post if you are looking for insights on app development cost.