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    Digital Marketing Strategy Part 3: Developing Digital Objectives

    2
    min. read
    Digital Marketing Strategy Part 3: Developing Digital Objectives

    Let’s not forget that digital marketing is just a series of digital channels that you can use to achieve your marketing objectives, so your digital marketing objectives are going to fall out of your marketing objectives.

    Last week we spent a lot of time understanding the marketplace, our competitors and developing our SWOT and key areas to work on (Read part 2 of our digital marketing strategy series here and part 1 here).

    This week it’s time to start developing digital objectives. So, how do you go about defining your digital marketing objectives?

    Digital Marketing Strategy Part 3 Developing Digital Objectives

    Step 1 - Define success

    I am a huge fan of having fun in business and this includes celebrating success… particularly with a fine Central Otago Pinot Noir or a bottle of French Champagne!  To do this you need to know what success looks like.

    Having an objective of increasing sales from the website is great but it’s not a true success measure… Is one more sale enough to be cracking the champagne? Or do you need 150 new sales? And within what time frame?

    The key to making sure that you are celebrating the right things is to set SMART objectives.

    Table 1

    Your digital objectives stem from your business & marketing objectives, so look at your business and check if you have SMART objectives for:

    • Sales forecast - sales figures, number of new customers wanted?
    • Customer service - how can you improve the service to customers?
    • Communication - providing information to customers?
    • Reducing Costs - saving time & increasing your business efficiency?
    • The wow factor!  - adding sizzle to make your business stand out from the crowd?

    Now take a look at your digital SWOT from earlier and establish SMART digital objectives to help you achieve your overall business goals. The key thing in developing digital objectives is that they are relevant. Can they actually be delivered through the digital channels?

    Many businesses fail to achieve their digital marketing objectives because they have not been realistic about what can be achieved in the online environment.

     

    Examples:

    Table 2

    Read blog: Building a Customer-Centric Digital Strategy written by Hamish Nuttall, founder of Naked Bus

    Step 2 - Benchmarking

    At the time of developing your digital objectives, it is also time to look at what you already have and how it is performing:

    • How many visitors come to your site?
    • How many people buy from the site?
    • How many people visit the site to get information that means that they don’t need to call your business?
    • How many emails do you send? And how many people click through?
    • How do you rank for the key search terms on google?

    There are many, many metrics in digital marketing and not all of them are useful. Think about what is important for you as a business in terms of achieving your goals. Take stock of how you are performing right now and use this as the baseline that you can measure increased performance against. Next, think carefully about how you will measure your journey towards your gaols. What will you need to do / implement to measure your progress?

    One thing to think about is how much detail do you need to report on? Often companies report on very minute detail when a general understanding of the trend is enough to understand whether you are moving towards achieving your goals. Think about how much time it takes to do the measurements and does it justify the means to the end? There are also many tools out there to automate the measurement process – don’t recreate the wheel!

    Next week we’ll be moving onto the exiting stuff – the strategies & the tactics

     

    Other parts in this series:


     

     

    This blog series is written by Debra Chantry.  Debra is the owner of Ventell, a Strategic Consultancy focused on growing businesses profitably through business coaching, business and digital strategies and governance.