Setting digital marketing objectives gives you something to aim for in the long and short-term. If set using the SMARTER mnemonic, achievements become clear, defined and achievable.
SMARTER Digital Marketing Objectives
Bad example: Increase revenue from the online shoe shop.
Good example: Increase sales of Nike shoes 20% year-on-year in October on the online store.
- Specific – Ensure that your objectives are exact in what they set out to achieve.
- Measurable – Ensure that your success in reaching this objective can be measured against a specific metric.
- Achievable – Digital marketing targets should be realistic and something you can actually do. Few things are worse than beating yourself up about not hitting the numbers you set out to achieve.
- Relevant – Is what you’re measuring actually important and relevant to the goal at hand? If not, then reconsider your priorities and look at what will make a bigger impact on your business.
- Time-driven – When do you want to achieve your objective by? Putting a deadline on your objectives can help focus your mind and efforts.
- Emotion- You made sure your goal was relevant, so now let’s add in an emotional element to stay committed. Make this exciting by visualizing the end result. WHY you want to achieve this and HOW the final result will make you feel?
- Re-evaluation-By re-evaluating your goals periodically, you build flexibility into the system. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply analyse: What worked? What didn’t work? What you could do better?
Digital Marketing Objectives
Now that we’ve looked at SMART objectives, how do we specifically apply this principle to digital marketing? If we divide digital marketing into 3 core sections – Attract, Engage & Convert – we can set SMART objectives for each part:
- Overall objective – Increase sales of Nike shoes 20% year-on-year in October on the online store.
- Attract – Generate 300 new visitors in October at an average CPA (cost per acquisition) of £4.
- Engage – Decrease the bounce rate of the Nike category page by 25% year-on-year for the month.
- Convert – Increase the conversion rate of the Nike shoes by 15% year-on-year for the month.
These objectives are Specific (each is detailed), Measurable (each has a metric), Achievable (the numbers aren’t obscene), Relevant (each supports the other to achieve the overall objective) and Time-driven (each needs to be achieved by the end of October).
While S.M.A.R.T goals strategy can help you make a headstart in ensuring your budget goals are tangible, the emotion and re-evaluation keep you in check with your progress to then scale and grow it further.
We’ve taken a SMARTER objective and broken it down into the 3 key focuses in digital marketing, giving us something clear and defined to focus our efforts on. You’ll be surprised how motivating it is to have SMART objectives to aim for, and the sense of achievement and progress you’ll make is well worth taking the time to set these objectives.
1 comment
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