5 Essential Tips for Setting Digital Marketing Goals

Setting digital marketing goals is essential to the sustainability of any business with an online presence. Without a detailed plan, you might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack in the dark. And as a business owner, you must remember that a poorly set digital marketing goal is just as bad as not having any at all.

This post explains how to set strong digital marketing goals and five essential goals for any business.

What Makes a Good Digital Marketing Goal?

The best digital marketing goals are achievable and relevant to your business’s overall health. These goals leverage your resources to produce a tangible way of generating leads and reinforcing your branding. The best way to define a laser-sharp, results-driven goal is to follow the SMART method.

How to Set SMART Goals

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. When these aspects guide your goal setting, you’re more likely to see results. Let’s discuss each element of these goals.

Specific

You should be able to clearly define your digital marketing goal down to the smallest details. Any participant or outside consultant should be able to comprehend your goal just by reading it.

For instance, “I want to increase my social media traffic” differs from “I want to increase my organic website traffic by 20% over the next quarter.” The specificity of the second statement gives your goal structure and direction.

Measurable

Measurable goals follow directly from specific ones. In the previous example, achieving an increase in organic traffic from Google search requires being able to measure it. The goal should be attainable but also offer a reliable way to measure its progress.

Judging the success of any goal hinges on the ability to compare data. In our example, you can use analytics tools to measure your traffic. Similarly, any goal you set should yield data you can record and use for benchmarking and decision-making.

So, when you’re setting the goal, think, “How will I measure this goal’s progress?” If you don’t have a method or tool you can use, you need to tweak the goal.

Actionable

Business owners must be solution-oriented regarding their digital marketing goals. Defining an actionable goal comes from finding solutions that are within your reach. If the path to a goal breaks the budget or requires skills your team doesn’t have, you need to consider alternatives.

Relevant

The goals you set should be relevant to accomplishing your overall business goals. Don’t let your competition drag you into a meaningless marketing pursuit. For instance, stick with that goal if your analysis shows that organic search traffic drives your revenue. Your competitors may run costly ad campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you should. 

Alternatively, you can always scale up if you run a test ad campaign and notice good results. The point is not to devote time and money to unnecessary pursuits that don’t serve your brand.

Timely

Your goal-setting should include a time element. You should consider and include the length of time necessary to acquire all knowledge and resources to achieve. 

Again, let’s go back to our example goal. When trying to achieve a 20% increase in organic search traffic in six months, you need to account for the additional time needed to gain knowledge and take preliminary actions. 

In other words, you have to be realistic about how long a goal will take to achieve. Don’t set goals that are either too simple or impossible to reach.

5 Tips for Setting Digital Marketing Goals

With the tools for goal-setting, the next step is to define the basic categories to focus on. You can modify the following essential marketing goals according to your business needs.

1. Establish an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

More than ever, search engines are rewarding websites with content that is highly relevant to users. Your efforts must center around providing helpful information that your prospects find useful in solving their problems. The days of throwing a bunch of keywords into your posts are behind us – and that’s a good thing.

SEO content marketing helps you achieve your goals by bringing in qualified leads and boosting your website’s SEO. Strong SEO means the content will work for your business for years. 

To keep visitors once they get to your site, you have to write engaging content. Make it a point to use language that is clear and direct. Readers will stick around longer if you keep your sentences short and break text into paragraphs. 

Monitor your analytics for bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed per user, and other vital metrics. 

2. Remember Community and Relationships

The most effective businesses create loyal communities around their brands and relationships with their customers. Brand engagement skyrockets in a robust group environment. Social media and email marketing are great ways for businesses to build community and strengthen relationships. Email builds trust and allows you to continue providing valuable information on an ongoing basis.

Your business can build loyal followings through story-telling, special offers, and product launches that create suspense. 

Creating community takes time. Knowing how to prosper from what you build means creating goals. Your numbers will increase when you support your goals with a concrete strategy. 

Think about the emotions you want your brand to evoke in your audience. Plan how you intend to communicate your message and set your path to success with measurable steps.

3. Apply SEO Best Practices

A lot of what you’ll be doing with your digital marketing will be creative work. But there is a degree of work you need to do that might not be as exciting. For many business owners, SEO falls into this category.

The more you fine-tune your SEO and follow basic best practices, the better your website will perform in search engine rankings. Examining everything from your web hosting provider to your blog post tags is instrumental in attaining the top spots.

Your SEO goals can include:

• Reducing site loading speed
• Getting more backlinks
• Reviewing your internal links
• Achieving higher rankings for older pieces of content

4. Conduct Regular Digital Marketing Evaluations

Setting a goal and checking back in a year later is a recipe for disaster. A lot can transpire when you leave your online presence unattended and without evaluation. Checking your progress regularly will help keep you on track and allow you to make necessary adjustments.

A monthly digital marketing evaluation is a good start for broader goals. Monthly evaluations can give you sufficient time to gather data and make changes for things like online sales and SEO. Paid ad campaigns and content metrics may require more frequent revisiting.

The key to getting the maximum benefits from your evaluation is proper record-keeping. Every once in a while, lightning will strike with your digital marketing. You may create a viral video or write a post that generates more leads than ever. With diligent record-keeping, you can reverse engineer your success, identify key elements, and reproduce it in the future.

You also should review your content annually to determine what worked for your business, what didn’t, and what you need to update for the next year. An annual review helps you look at the more extended data and recognize trends to guide your goals for the following year. 

5. Activate and Monetize Existing Leads

Business owners know that the key to growth is the generation of new leads. But the lifeblood of your business lies in your existing customer list. 

Leads in your funnel need to be encouraged to move from the online shopping cart to the checkout. That’s why it is important to grasp the volume of qualified leads your business produces.

To better understand how to do this, you can create experiments. Divide your clientele into segments and apply an A/B test. Create two different ads or email campaigns that you can serve to different customers. The goal is to determine what works and what doesn’t in activating dormant, existing leads.

Taking Action to Boost Your Digital Marketing

Businesses are a labor of love. Most entrepreneurs are actively involved in the daily tasks required to keep it running. That’s why keeping up with a robust content marketing strategy is not always possible.

With Google assigning a high value to businesses that regularly post valuable content, it may seem impossible to keep up with a high-output schedule. The best alternative to redirecting your precious time to content creation is finding a knowledgeable partner that can do it for you.
Content Journey helps businesses reach their digital marketing goals. With the knowledge to boost your online presence, the company offers strategic planning with all packages. You also get monthly analytics reports and all the research necessary for reaching your goals. Check out our packages today and book a call to learn how we can help you reach your business goals.