Everyone is doing digital marketing these days, or at least it seems so, but now we need to start thinking strategically and that’s why we decided to talk about strategies and objectives. Because almost everyone can publish content into social media (yes, almost… some dudes are still on touch phones but let’s not get into that), but digital marketing is definitely not just about publishing content although it does have a lot to do with it.
So let’s begin with the basics, as the Digital Marketing Institute says…
The thing about digital marketing: it’s a bit of a trial and error process. (digitalmarketinginstitute.com)
Yes, it is sort of trial and error but it can also be about intelligent guessing most of the time. Sometimes things will work out as planned and sometimes you will get surprises, but that’s part of the journey and we as digital marketers sure enjoy the ride though we have to be focused on results. More on that later.
First things first Buyer Persona
So the first thing you have to do is “understand who buys your product and why they buy it”. That way your marketing strategy will be effective, there’s no way around this first part.
So in Step 1 of our digital marketing framework we will build buyer personas that will help us understand and identify who your target audience is, but more than that, we want to know what drives them in the morning, what is essential for their daily life, what are their digital watering holes to get information about their needs. Understanding those needs and how we can solve those problems with what we offer for them.
After many years of trial and error We’ve built a digital marketing strategy framework that does just that. We will guide you through the framework so everything will work out as close to planned as possible.
Our digital marketing program strategy is designed to drive more prospective buyers to your website and social media assets, convert these prospects into leads, and those leads into sales. This strategy is a plan of action for achieving your digital marketing goals. Let ‘s dive in.
Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan?
The Most Effective Strategies
According to Smart Insights , the most effective strategy in 2018 was social media marketing, followed by content marketing, and the least was data management, with SEO being somewhere in the middle of it all.
Email and video each constantly stand out as effective ways to market almost any product through any industry, though in the chart listed with Smart Insights, it’s not as powerful as content or social media marketing.
The path to more leads
So, do you want to drive more leads for your business from digital channels like search engines, email marketing, and social media? This is how we do it…
Our framework breaks into three critical phases:
Attract More Prospects
Gain more website traffic through content marketing (blogging), email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click marketing (PPC), and social media. We encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for future conversions. PPC can include advertising on search engines, as well as social media and other platforms.
Convert More Leads
Once you have more traffic on your website, you need to convert the traffic from an anonymous website visitor to an identifiable lead. We do this through irresistible downloadable content offers (like ebooks and webinars), lead nurturing via email helping those leads understand how we solve their problems, doing A/B testing for different contents thus measuring what works better, and producing compelling videos.
Close More Sales
Having lots of leads is no good if they don’t close. We empower your sales team with new tools and data to help them close more of the leads we send. Giving you more information to help you decide when is the correct time to contact the leads and when it is still time to wait.
We will use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels are important to you.
Examples of digital marketing strategies include a social media campaign that includes partnerships with influencers, a content marketing strategy that uses online guides to drive leads, or a growth marketing strategy that uses social media and email to build customer loyalty.
So know you know the three parts of our framework, but how are they structured? How can you set up those parts and integrate them into your Marketing Strategy? Read on!
What are Digital Marketing objectives?
If you want to go on a treasure hunt, you need to have a map, don’t you? Similarly, you need to have a clear set of objectives that you want to achieve. Without a vision, a plan is nothing but a waste paper with no value. You need to ensure that you set your marketing objectives that are achievable, specific, manageable, realistic and time-bound. Once you have set your objectives, it will give you a clear idea where to head. There are many advantages of having marketing objectives in advance.
How do you set SMART digital marketing objectives?
Firstly, your objective needs to be relevant to whatever digital campaign you are about to begin. There’s no point in setting an objective if your campaign won’t help you achieve it. The relevance is important because the objectives you have set need to tackle the problems your business is facing.
As well as being relevant, you must also set an objective that is measurable, so you can analyse certain aspects of your campaign and measure them against what you want to achieve. For example, an objective of increasing twitter engagement is not as measurable as increasing visits to the website in 15%from the previous month. Here you would be able to measure your progress using software 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.
Another important factor in setting goals is time. You need to give this objective an end date because it will help you to run an efficient campaign. Remember to use time tracking and project management tools to improve your follow up and measure how your milestones are going before it’s too late!
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 leap and bounds over that period.
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. We mentioned visits to your website above; this is a great way of setting a Website objective because it is clear, concise and relevant to activities. Here are a few other examples of what your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time- bound) digital marketing objectives could look like:
Increase your brand awareness by building your Instagram followers to 1000.
Increase lead generation through the website by 10% based on the previous period.
Maintain an average of 10 Facebook Messenger enquiries per week over the annual period.
Setting SMART objectives is therefore really important to your digital marketing campaign, and the goals and objectives you set must take these factors into account in order to be an effective and efficient use of your time and money.
Are you looking at building a Digital Marketing Strategy ? Speak to our team here at Seiren and see how we can help build a strategic campaign with some effective objectives to grow your business.
Get in touch by email at contact@seiren.co
Digital Marketing Objectives for each phase
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 your brand 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 USD.
Convert:
Decrease the bounce rate of your brand category page by 25% year-on-year for the month.
Close:
Increase the conversion rate of your brand 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).
We’ve taken a SMART 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.
More examples of Smart Objectives
Here we will leave more examples of Smart Objectives that you can start using for your own digital marketing strategy. In what phase would you place each one? (Reach, Convert, Close?)
Achieve 100 contact us’ conversions via organic search traffic by the end of the financial year
Reduce bounce rate from pay-per-click traffic to below 60% across all ads by October
Increase average order value of website sales to $35 USD per customer by the end of the quarter.
More examples of smart objectives.
Measuring digital marketing objectives
At this stage, you should consider how you will track and measure how well you have met the targets set in your objectives. You can define the further in the tactics section of your plan.
When determining the digital marketing objectives for your business, you must establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reveal the benefit that digital marketing has on your bottom line.
Increase trial signups: If you are a SaaS company, a key performance indicator is likely how many trial signups you get per month.
Once you know what your digital goals are, then you can define what your main Key Performance Indicators are which map on to these Digital Goals e.g. for reducing cart abandonment rates the Digital KPI should be the abandonment rate goal tracked in your analytics software that tracks how many users enter the funnel (proceed to checkout) and ultimately get to the end of it (complete checkout and payment).
Review and Refine
After your marketing plan has been written down, it’s imperative that you start to measure with a regular frequency the advances made in each of your KPIs, that way you will have a clear view of what is working (or not) and you can make the necessary adjustments to make everything perfect.