During these times of economic uncertainty, your business needs to make every penny count. That means your marketing activities have to work harder! In short, you need to understand how to set your digital marketing objectives and KPIs.
What you don’t want to do is anything hasty. In a knee-jerk reaction to the uncertainty during the first lockdown, some of our clients decided to pause their digital marketing activities. What that resulted in was an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ situation for their clients and customers – essentially they went ‘off air’ and lost clients and customers as a result. According to analyst Neilson, “brands that go off-air can expect to lose 2% of their long-term revenue each quarter and, when they resume media efforts, it will take 3-5 years to recover equity losses resulting from that downtime.”
Clients who viewed digital marketing as a long-term strategy over lockdown and didn’t even downsize their budget hit the ground running when the world went back to normal, increasing sales and generating more leads. They are now enjoying more success than ever before.
When it comes to digital marketing, think SMART
When planning your digital marketing strategy it is essential that they support your overall business goals. They must be carefully planned and take many different factors into account. And they need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely – in other words, they need to make sure your digital marketing is SMART.
How do you set SMART objectives?
Specific – Your objectives must also be specific in order to focus the campaign and help to achieve the end result. It’s easy to shy away from setting a target when starting a campaign but it helps to keep things in perspective. Software such as Klout is a great way of setting a Social Media objective because it is clear, concise and relevant to activities.
Measurable – By setting measurable objectives, you can analyse certain aspects of your campaign and measure them against what you want to achieve. For example, the objective of “increasing LinkedIn engagement” is not as measurable as “increasing LinkedIn engagement by 50%”. Similarly, “increasing your Domain Authority” is not as measurable as “achieving a DA of 52”. Of course, you will need to use an appropriate measurement tool to track your progress and see how far away from or close to your objective you are. This gives you a much better chance of seeing any possible changes needed in your campaign early on.
Achievable – When setting objectives it is also important that they are achievable by your business. However, do not set objectives that are easy to achieve. Your objectives must stretch your team, meaning they will identify previously overlooked methods to try and achieve them. Setting yourself up for failure is not what you want to do. If you set an unreal objective it might seem as though your campaign was a failure when actually in reality your company could have grown leaps and bounds over that period.
Relevant – The relevance is important because the objectives you have set need to tackle the problems your business is facing. There’s no point in taking steps to increase traffic if you don’t also reduce the bounce rate on your website – which is why you need to ensure your digital marketing is relevant.
Timely – Time is another important factor when setting digital marketing goals. You need to create an end date because it will help you run an efficient campaign as well as assess its success.
Here are a few other examples of what specific digital marketing objectives could look like:
- Increase brand awareness by building your Instagram followers to 500, 5k or 50k
- Increase lead generation through the website by 5%, 15% or 25%
- Maintain an average of 5,15 or 150 enquiries per week over the annual period
Setting a SMART digital marketing strategy is hugely important at any time, but absolutely crucial to help your brand stay visible in times of economic uncertainty. With the right digital marketing tools and clear objectives in place, you will continue to reach your target market, increase your existing customer base by attracting new customers, increase qualified traffic, reach more potential customers which will in turn increase sales.
Need help setting your digital marketing objectives and KPIs? Talk to our expert team about how we could help craft you a bespoke digital marketing strategy today.
Updated post from May 2016
