How to plan and hit your digital marketing goals

Digital marketing is all about goals. Without clear goals, you’d be lost with no direction and no way of knowing whether your efforts are worthwhile.

Clear, actionable and achievable marketing goals underpin your strategy and should be a priority. Not only do they give your team something to work towards, but you’ll also be content in the knowledge that you’re supporting the wider business objectives.

Setting these goals will help you continuously evaluate your digital performance which is key to gaining buy-in and support from the business.

But how do you set goals the right way?

Lucky for you, that’s exactly why we wrote this blog. Discover how to set better marketing goals, hit them and grow your success.

What you’ll learn…

• Understanding your business goals
• How to tie business goals to your marketing goals
• The importance of focused marketing goals
• Why SMART objectives should be used
• The different tactics available to help you reach your goals

Understanding your business goals

It’s no use if you don’t know what the bigger picture looks like. The starting point for creating any marketing objectives should always be the overarching business goals. These provide the direction on exactly what it is you need to achieve.

As the last couple of years have shown, things can change fast. You’ll need to keep in touch with the business direction and priorities as it evolves.

Connecting your marketing goals to business goals

Now you know what it is the business wants to achieve, you’ll have a better understanding of how your marketing efforts can slot into this. Aligning your marketing goals to your business goals is key to success. If you don’t consider the wider business and focus purely on marketing metrics, you risk your strategy not delivering what the business wants.

Although the marketing team won’t be able to support every business goal, there are many that your team will be able to feed into, including:

• Grow market share
• Boost business growth
• Move into new markets

We often see businesses underestimate the importance of connecting marketing and business goals or not understanding what the business wants at all. This can result in badly defined marketing goals that may not be beneficial or could even be unrealistic.

Focusing your marketing goals

It’s easy to get carried away when setting your goals, whether you’re excited about what could be achieved or have lots of things you want to implement. Here are our pointers to keep you focused:

• Don’t set too many objectives as you could spread yourself too thin and risk not achieving any
• Focus on setting goals that will help your team understand their priorities and give them confidence in what they need to do
• There will always be lots of things you could do but this doesn’t mean you should do them – prioritise, prioritise, prioritise!

Focusing on just a few impactful goals will support your business better than slowly moving towards multiple goals with little direction. Examples of digital marketing goals that tie back to the wider business could be (but are most definitely not limited to):

• Generate more leads
• Improve conversion rates
• Increase sales
• Increase traffic
• Improve ROI

Setting SMART goals

This nifty acronym is well known in the business world. SMART objectives are the targets your team can firmly set their sights on achieving. So, what does SMART stand for and how do you create SMART objectives?

• Specific: Your objectives need to be clearly defined. Think stating what exactly it is you will do.
• Measurable: Be sure to quantify your goals, otherwise how will you know your efforts have been successful? Measurable objectives play a big role in giving your team something to aim for.
• Attainable: While targets should be a challenge,they need to be realistic otherwise you risk demotivating your team. Base your objectives on data to create a better chance of achieving what you set out to do.
• Relevant: Do they relate to the overarching business goals? Consider how your marketing goals tie back to the business strategy.
• Time bound: Providing deadlines for each objective ensures ongoing progress is made. Without deadlines, your team won’t know what timescale is expected.

Communication is key

It’s not just important to clearly define your goals, you also need to clearly communicate them. Gaining stakeholder buy-in is hugely important. When your marketing efforts are aligned to the needs of your management team, it becomes easier to achieve your goals and ensure all efforts are focused.

To ensure your marketing goals are always kept at the core, define who is accountable for each. Making someone, or in some cases, multiple people responsible for each objective makes it more likely that they will be achieved.

With a driving force behind the goal, direction won’t be lost, and it will make it easier to incentivise your team by recognising efforts and rewarding achievements.

What tactics will help you reach your digital marketing goals?

Outlining your digital marketing objectives is not enough to succeed. You need to develop a plan that will set you on the right path to achieving them.

It’s all well and good knowing what you want to achieve but the next step is understanding how you will achieve it.

The world of digital marketing offers a wide variety of tactics, some of which may be more suitable than others for achieving your marketing goals. If you’re struggling to understand where your time and budget is best invested, it’s wise to chat with a digital agency that will be able to provide guidance.

Some of the most common digital tactics available to your business include:

• SEO
• Paid media
• Content
• Digital PR
• Outreach
• Social media
• Email marketing

You may have specific areas you want to focus on. Perhaps you want to improve your organic visibility with SEO or maybe you want to focus on creating engaging copy and content that will convert the reader. Possibly you’re aiming to build brand awareness and links with the help of outreach or support your wider strategy with digital PR.

In some cases, it may be most beneficial to combine multiple tactics such as SEO, PPC and email marketing to achieve your marketing goals. Again, an experienced agency will be able to help you strike the optimum balance of tactics.

How can an agency help?

Working with an agency throughout this planning process can help you define the right goals for your business while keeping your tactics on track to deliver the biggest impact.

Underpinned by a commercial mindset, exclusive data tools and technical expertise, our team of digital experts have years of experience creating tailored digital strategies that perform. If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy or simply require support to define your digital marketing goals, please feel free to get in touch with our industry experts.