Optimize Your Online Strategy With These Marketing Objectives Examples

Any company that wants to establish a strong online presence needs to establish concrete online marketing objectives. It may seem like a no brainer, yet a recent report by Smartinsights.com indicates that the opposite is true. According the report, over 50 percent of marketers have implemented active digital marketing programs. However, of these, very few set forth clearly defined online marketing objectives.

Houston, we have a disconnect between online marketing activities and online marketing objectives.

The Importance of Online Marketing Objectives

Digital marketing strategizing has evolved far beyond the point of throwing darts against the wall, hoping one will hit digital marketing strategies that work. Today,an online marketing strategy without clearly written objectives is a waste of time, money, and resources. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Here’s some reasons that your online marketing efforts need objectives:

Game Plan to Take Action

Clearly defined online marketing objectives set realistic goals that give an organization direction and focus. You may have an online marketing objective of increasing website visitors, for example, but unless you associate a number with the objective, you are simply wasting time pursuing the objective. Clearly defined goals and numbers motivate your online marketing team and give them a sense of their progress.

No I in Team

Without clearly listing online marketing objectives, you have no way of knowing whether everyone is striving together as a team toward a common goal. Creating written online marketing objectives will naturally divide out different facets of the strategy to appropriate team members. Everyone uses their specialized strengths to offer powerful online value propositions, target audience, and integrate the components of successful digital marketing programs.

Duplication Only Matters in Paperwork

Unclear online marketing strategies often result in confusion among your team members regarding tasking and priorities and, the even greater time-waster, duplication. Two team members, working only a few feet apart, can be plugging away at the same email-marketing blitz, without either one knowing what the other team member is doing. Poorly defined digital marketing objectives often causes duplicate work, which destroys any productivity gained via online marketing.

Getting SMART with Marketing Objectives

SMART marketing objectives set realistic targets by incorporating several essential criteria: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-bound. Is the marketing objective detailed and specific enough to real world problems? Can you apply quantitative metrics to measure outcomes? Marketing objectives must have actionable steps that improve performance. Objectives need to be realistic and achievable.  Finally, SMART marketing objectives cover different periods that marketers use to review and have identified delivery dates or due dates. Three common areas of digital marketing that require objectives are reach, acquisition, and conversion. This article is going to give you some marketing objectives examples that would fall under each of these categories.

Reach

In general terms, marketing reach defines the number of people a marketing message touches. A key performance indicator (KPI) for reach would be the number of visitors to your website or the number of potential customers that become aware of a new product launched by your company. Some examples of reach-oriented objectives include:

• Acquire X percent more website visitors through promoting your organic website on Twitter or Facebook.
• Lower our website bounce rate (the rate of visitors that leave your site without visiting more than one page) to X percent.
• Apply SEO best practices to all of our website pages

Reach KPIs measure the effectiveness of attracting certain traffic to the website. Measurement starts with calculating the amount of targeted traffic that flows into your site; the amount of traffic that interacts with a marketing activity (like a social post); and the percentage of the targeted traffic that stays on the site once they hit it. Reach related objectives are good focus areas for fledgling companies who want to grow their online presence.

Acquisition

Acquisition rates indicate your lead generation rate. Some acquisitions related objectives would be:

• Increase your leads from organic traffic by X percent over the next X months
• Bring in X leads every month across all channels
• Release X number of new downloadable content pieces every month
• Decrease the cost of visitor to lead conversion by X%

Conversion

Conversion is the favorite word in the online marketers lexicon that translates into dollars and cents. KPIs for measuring conversion marketing objectives often involve calculating the percentage of website visitors and leads actually responded to cross selling and upselling marketing messages by completing a purchase. Some examples of conversion objectives include:

• Increase the lead to customer conversion rate by X%
• Increase the average returning customer rate by X%
• Increase the average per customer purchase amount to $X
• Decrease the average lead to customer conversion cost by X%

KPIs and defined marketing objectives are deeply interconnected to one another through three success factors. First, KPIs are incredibly specific and zoom in on a very particular data point. KPIs also involve metrics: from the number of unique website visitors or total number of visits to the number of brand mentions and business searches online, KPIs are concerned with quantification. As mentioned before, SMART objectives need to be measurable. So, KPIs will always satisfy that requirement. KPIs are also often based on a specific time period (e.g., this quarter, or over the past six months), which builds in a “timeline” or “due date for the objective. So, marketing objectives that include KPIs automatically hit 3 out of the 5 SMART requirements, helping businesses of all sizes analyze the effectiveness of their online marketing strategies. Google analytics provides several KPI tools that allow you to measure the effectiveness of different online marketing objectives.

Online marketing receives much of the attention of marketing gurus who have passed the torch from traditional marketing strategies such as direct mail to digitized messages that promote products and services online. Despite moving into cyberspace, marketing still requires companies to set objectives to achieve long-term success attracting new customers and retaining lifelong patrons of their businesses. Online marketing objectives vary, but you can never go wrong trying to quantify and monitor your online marketing reach, acquisition, and conversions using best practices and common KPIs.