Whether you are an entrepreneur, work at a small to medium sized business (SMB), or at an enterprise company you will have undoubtedly heard about digital marketing. When creating any strategy it is vital to have KPIs and goals in mind, from there build out how to achieve those goals.
Every marketing campaign should start with the SMART marketing objectives in mind. A quick refresher of these objectives:
S.M.A.R.T Marketing Objectives
Specific
Well defined, clear, and unambiguous goals. Is the objective sufficiently detailed to measure real-world problems and opportunities?
Measurable
Can a quantitative or qualitative attribute be applied to create a metric?
Actionable
Can the information be used to improve performance? If the objective doesn’t change behaviour in staff & customers , there is little point in it!
Realistic
Is the goal within reach, realistic, and relevant to your business?
Timely
With a clearly defined timeline, including a starting date & a target date.
The SMART objectives into Digital Marketing
One of the most important points we highlight to our clients is to ensure that whatever marketing channel they are using, to be cohesive with the design, messaging, and branding. This can get more and more difficult as you operate a multitude of different channels and teams. For example, your billboard ad may have a different team working on it than your website designers. The important point here is to provide each team with the same set of design, messaging, and branding documentation so that they are all following the set of rules.
With that, let’s take the SMART objectives and give a use case example of how it can work for a digital marketing strategy.
Specific
We first must specify the the five “W”’s so that we can understand our objective in more depth.
- Who: Who is involved in this goal?
- What: What do I want to accomplish?
- Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?
- When: When do I want to achieve this goal?
- Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal?
It is obviously important to define the 5 “W”’s at the first stage of the SMART objectives so that we know who to include and what to incorporate into the project. We can also use the information here to fill out parts of the other objectives.
TOP LEVEL GOAL: Increase revenue from the “organic channel” (in Google Analytics) by 50%
Now, let’s answer the 5 questions:
- Who: SEO team, developers, designers, content, sales, & marketing department, and product managers.
- What: Increase revenue from the organic channel by 50%
- Where: Sales from the website
- When: 6 months
- Why: Isn’t it obvious 😉
Measurable
Now that we know our goal, let’s look at what indications can we look at to see the progress we are making as well as how often it should be analysed.
Actionable
At each point of the measurement, you should be able to work out how far off the goal you are, and how likely you are to succeed based off of those stats and adjust accordingly.
Again, with the organic channel, we have to understand at this point that there is no channel that works in a vacuum and that other marketing efforts, including branding, paid, PR, offline, etc, can have an effect on the organic performance. Therefore, when measuring the success of the objective take this into consideration when reviewing what is working and what isn’t. Additionally, when looking at the success, you should also attribute the other channels that played into the success of the campaign.
Every choice that you and the teams make for the success of the objectives, should be planned out in tandem with the other teams so that you are ultimately set up for success. For example, for the content strategy part of the campaign, the content department should be looking to the SEO team for insights on what they should be writing about and what to include, as well as the social team to share out the content once published. Additionally, the product managers and the sales team should be included as well to discuss the funnel once the user lands on the content being produced. Obviously the design and development team should be consulted as well to ensure that everything is aligned.
Realistic
Each department can review what they put into the end product and analyse the results, tweaking elements as necessary once there’s enough data ensuring that what was produced is working as expected.
Obviously, as you build our goal within the 5 “W”’s, you will need to know if the end goal is realistic based off of your current trajectory, the audience size, timescale, and budget. This can be analysed through all channels, both past, and with research into the market.
Timely
This was set in the initial 5 “W”’s, and as such, we know that we have 6 months to complete our goal. However, it is always a good idea to set mini-goals through to the end product, as well as to know beforehand, the longer-term goal once this one was achieved.
Additionally, once the 6 months are over and you’re evaluating the outcome of the goal, it is important to take a step back and look at the big picture. In our example we used an increase of 50% in revenue from organic traffic. That being said, the team taking the lead throughout the project would most likely be the SEO department. However, everyone has their roles to play in the success of the main goal, and as such, they are not the only ones analysed when it comes to the success or failure of the end goal.
