Understanding Digital Marketing & Setting Objectives for Success!

Digital marketing objectives…

…are a brand’s well-informed and well-defined goals having ambitious yet measurable values. They influence the marketing team’s intentions and guide their work by making them understand that their every action impacts the business outcomes.

Besides providing the team clear direction to follow, these objectives also offer the management team insights to review, exemplify, and support.

Setting marketing objectives is mandatory because a brand can’t progress when its team doesn’t know what to achieve. To devise sustainable and fulfilling digital marketing objectives, you need to know the following ten things:

1. What is digital marketing?

To understand digital marketing objectives, we first need to get acquainted with digital marketing.

It is the marketing of products or services using the internet, social media, mobile phones, or any other digital technology or medium.

It may involve social media marketing, email marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

It’s a trackable, result-oriented, and data-driven marketing process where you can get marketing reports and relevant data and information for review and analysis.

In comparison to traditional marketing, digital marketing is more advantageous for businesses. It provides better information about your customers and increases your interaction and engagement with them.

It provides insightful data about your campaigns, which can help you to review your marketing strategy critically.

2. Why setting digital marketing objectives in important

Every business needs marketing objectives to get maximum utilization from its marketing strategy.

Before investing in digital marketing, you must set your objectives because your efforts may go in vain without clear and targeted goals.

For example, if you invest your time and money on social media without setting your objectives, you will only get likes and comments.

Would you consider this a success?

However, if you aim to convert more and more followers, your strategy would change to create content that lures your followers to become your customers.

In short, objectives are important because they give you a direction, guide your efforts, and help to develop your strategy for achieving your goals.

3. Comparison between marketing objectives and marketing goals

Marketing goals are the long-term plans which a brand wants to achieve.

On the other hand, objectives are short-term plans that help to make the goals a reality.

For example, becoming a leader in a particular market to drive revenue growth can be a company’s goal.

While increasing the sale of a specific product by 30% during a prescribed timeframe can be an excellent example of an objective.

So, before defining digital marketing objectives, setting clear business goals is mandatory.

4. How to Choose Digital Marketing Objectives

Now that you have all the information about digital marketing and has learned enough about marketing objectives, you can start setting up your objectives.

The first step is to create a long list of objectives after keeping in mind all the important information about your brand, i.e., your mission, vision, and purpose.

Review this list time and again to align it with your business goals. Make a comparison between the first and last list to finalize your objectives.

During this, consider every option you have for the marketing strategy that you think can further your business.

You should complete the following steps to formulate fulfilling digital marketing objectives:

• Remember the mission statement of your business
• Pen down all the marketing objectives coming to your mind
• Make a comparison between your marketing goals and marketing objectives. They must be linked together.
• Devise a marketing strategy
• Check and review if your marketing goals are aligned with your marketing funnel
• Measure, review, and report your progress

What kind of objectives can you set?

You can outline many digital marketing objectives, but here are some examples of objectives used very frequently:

• Promote new products or services
• Grow digital presence
• Lead generation
• Target new customers
• Retain existing customers
• Build brand awareness
• Develop brand loyalty
• Increase sales/profit/revenue
• Expand into a new market
• Grow market share
• Build industry authority

Check if your objectives are SMART

After finalizing your digital marketing objectives, check to see if they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound).

Specific: Your objectives should be specific; otherwise, your team may find them challenging to understand their importance.

Measurable: They should be measurable, having KPIs (key performance indicator) so that you could review and measure your progress.

Achievable: Your objectives should not be beyond the ability and capacity of your brand and team.

Relevant: They must be aligned with the direction and mission of your business.

Time-Bound: The objectives should have a timeline clearly indicating when they begin and end.

Why insist on SMART goals?

SMART objectives give promising results, so make sure your objectives are SMART and worth pursuing. They give you a clear direction and ensure that you get the results you want to see. Moreover, SMART objectives are essential to review and measure your results.  

They ensure that you get the maximum from your digital marketing strategy. If you don’t follow the SMART objective criterion, the chances are high that your digital marketing strategy may fail.

KPIs to Assign to Digital Marketing Objectives

Measuring and reviewing digital marketing objectives is as much important as setting them. For successful measurement, objectives must be assigned deadlines, numbers, and metrics.

The information you would get from these KPIs would help you to review and evaluate your progress. It will also help to make a comparison between strategies you employed earlier.

Take a look at the following examples of KPIs that you can assign to your marketing objectives:

1. Sales growth
2. Changes in profit
3. Market share
4. New customer acquisition
5. Lead generation
6. Lifetime value of a customer
7. Customer spends
8. Conversion rates
9. Social media engagement
10. Measures Design Tests

Use the Ten Measure Design Test to review and measure the KPIs of your objectives.

Truth test: measure what you set out to measure

1. Focus test: only measure what you set out to measure
2. Relevancy test: use the right measure to measure performance
3. Consistency test: always collect data in the same way
4. Access test: make sure that the data needed for measurement is easy to locate and gather
5. Clarity test: make sure that interpretation of results involves no ambiguity
6. So-what test: ensure that data is actionable
7. Timeliness test: make sure that data can be accessed quickly and frequently for action
8. Cost test: measure only if measurement worth the cost
9. Gaming test: can measurement inspire unwanted or inapt behaviors?
10. Performance test: to see how well it is running

CONCLUSION

Research digital marketing agencies before hiring

Do your research before hiring a digital marketing agency. Numerous digital marketing agencies will come in your way online. Try to avoid hiring any digital marketing before getting to know them. Trust your marketing team; they can do it. 

If you don’t have enough human resources, try to do it on your own.  There are countless digital marketing scams, and it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the legitimate agencies and the fraudulent ones.

Therefore, play safe so that you may not fall prey to any online scam.