[ModMarketing] How to Set Digital Marketing Goals
Transcript
Without marketing goals, it’s nearly impossible to develop a marketing plan let alone know if the marketing effort is working. Without clear, actionable, and achievable metrics, how does your marketing team know what you’re working towards. Setting goals for digital marketing programs should always be the priority.
This is the second episode in the special ModMarketing podcast series. This series will walk you through how to modernize your marketing techniques using digital, online, thought leadership, and content marketing strategies. These strategies will help raise your firm’s brand awareness, capture new leads, and eventually drive the growth of your firm.
And in this episode, I am sharing how to set your digital marketing goals.
I’ll explain how to begin goal setting, what SMART goals are, goal examples, and best practices.
So, let’s dive right in with how to even decide what type of marketing campaign you’re going to do.
I strongly encourage you to start with your firm’s strategic goals.
A firm’s strategic or business goals are a critical place to start identifying digital marketing goals. The business goals of the firm give you and your marketing team a purpose and define exactly what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts.
Your firm’s strategic plan might have both long- and short-term goals. Some of those goals might not be relevant to the marketing team, but often they are. Some common strategic goals include:
Expand geographically – This includes opening new offices, pursuing new clients, or acquiring firms in new geographic regions. An example could be that your firm wants to expand into the Texas transportation market by winning work with TxDOT.
Expand services – This includes adding new service offerings by acquiring firms, hiring new talent, or creating strategic partnerships. An example of this would be adding new services like interior design or landscape architecture if you’re an architecture firm.
Once you have identified your firm’s strategic goals, you can begin to create digital marketing goals to align. This helps to ensure that your marketing efforts are contributing to the firm growth goals and as a bonus, this often makes it easier to get leadership buy-in to not only the marketing campaign, but for the budget and resources, it will take to complete the campaign.
So, once you know where your firm’s headed in terms of growth priorities, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas of how digital marketing efforts and campaigns can support those priorities. This is where you can begin to flex your creative muscles. This is the fun part – start the ideation process of all of the different types of online and offline marketing strategies.
Once you have those ideas, you’re not done yet. To make them into a viable digital marketing campaign that you’re able to track and report on the results, you have to set some goals. We all know that we don’t really know how we are doing, where we are going, or if we’ve gotten there without some kind of direction and destination.
ModMarketing techniques are no different. You have to set meaningful goals for your marketing campaigns. And, you’re in luck because I am going to walk you through how to put together a goal, then stay to the end to learn how to get your ModMarketing Goal worksheet.
So, let me walk you through setting up a SMART goal for your marketing. You’re most likely familiar with the “SMART” goal-setting technique. This strategy is very popular use in marketing and personal development goal setting. As a reminder, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound. But let’s take a moment to walk through how to apply these to your digital marketing goals.
Specific: Marketing objectives should be well defined. Rather than simply saying ‘more website traffic’ be more specific such as ‘increase web traffic from Texas.’ Ideally, the specificity will align with the firm strategic goals.
Measurable: To gauge the progress of the marketing effort, you need something to measure. This means the goal needs to be quantifiable. So, instead of ‘increase web traffic from Texas,’ the measurable goal would be ‘increase web traffic from Texas by 25%.’
Attainable: When you begin a digital marketing program, it’s often hard to determine what goal is attainable. Sometimes your team needs to start with some number and adjust after a certain period. It’s more important for you to base the goal off your firm’s own data first and then adjust from there.
Relevant: The goals must be relevant to the firm’s strategic goals. For example, if the firm’s strategic goal is to expand into the Ohio transportation market, the Texas website goal mentioned a few minutes ago above would not be relevant.
Time-bound: Giving the marketing goals a deadline ensures that goal will be given the attention it needs to be successful. Often, when there is no deadline, a project or initiative flounders.
Every time you set out to create or launch a new digital marketing campaign, you should go through this goal-setting exercise. Then once the goal is set, it should be clearly communicated to the firm leadership and stakeholders. This gives leadership the opportunity to ensure it’s aligned with business goals and for you to get their buy-in as early as possible.
Now, you might be thinking I don’t even know where to begin. Can you provide me with some examples? And, of course, I won’t leave you hanging.
Here are some common digital marketing goals:
Acquire new leads or contacts. This is a common goal for most firms. Most firms cannot continue to grow without generating new leads, which eventually lead to new clients and projects. Digital marketing can help attract new leads or contacts.
Activate leads and contacts. AEC firms often have leads or contacts in their databases that they haven’t worked on in months, if not years. You can use digital marketing campaigns to encourage engagement, as well as remind past contacts of the value that your firm has provided to other similar clients. The digital marketing campaign can reactive dormant leads and contacts and help keep your firm top of mind.
Cross-selling services. We all know that acquiring new clients is often more expensive than getting repeat work from existing clients. And your firm often provides many services to several different industries. Digital marketing campaigns can be used to educate existing clients on all of the services your firm provides.
Increase website traffic. Digital marketing strategies can be used to increase website viewers, either to the entire website or to targeted landing pages.
Improve conversion rate. This is when a website visitor completes the webpage call-to-action. A popular example is when a website visitor completes a form on a website to get access to a white paper or webinar, also known as gated content.
So far by now you’ve identified your firm’s strategic growth goals, brainstormed several different types of marketing campaigns, and tailored those down into SMART goals but you’re not done yet!
I want you to succeed in these marketing efforts so let’s talk about some digital goal-setting best practices. These best practices are:
Don’t set too many goals. This could spread your marketing team too thin and risk not achieving any goal.
Begin with a pilot or test initiative. Identify one firm strategic goal and begin with that as a pilot initiative. Build the goals and a timeframe around that.
Clearly communicate the goals. When you communicate the goals, it creates a wider understanding of what your digital marketing efforts have set out to deliver and how those efforts align with the firm strategic plan.
Define who is accountable. Identify who is responsible for each goal. Making someone solely responsible for each goal makes it more likely to be achieved.
Don’t skip goal setting. Setting goals can be intimidating when it’s the first time the firm is undertaking a digital marketing program or even a single digital marketing campaign. Don’t let that stop you from setting goals. The goals will help keep the campaigns and marketing activities aligned toward achieving a common objective. They also help to set expectations and motivate your team.
Okay, so here are your action items. Like I said, start with your firm’s strategic growth goals. Get a copy of your firm’s strategic plan or get the growth area highlights from leadership. Then pick one growth area goal to focus on first. Let that be your test or pilot digital marketing campaign. Then, brainstorm different marketing activities – both online and offline – that could support that growth goal. Again, this is the fun part. Pick one or two of those and use the SMART framework to come up with the marketing goal. Lastly, share that goal with your firm leadership. You’ll want to get them bought in and understand what you’re trying to achieve with the goal.
And, to help you with this, I’ve put together a ModMarketing Goal Worksheet. Download this freebie worksheet over on the show notes page – marketerstakeflight.com/72.
And, in the next ModMarketing series, we are going to dive into personas – the who – you are marketing to. Having the goal in place will help you with the who! I want you to have your first modmarketing goal written before we get to that episode.
And, I am here to hold you accountable! Share your goal with me via a DM on Instagram. Find me at lindsaydiven – and tell me your SMART marketing goal. I want to hear from you. Really, go do it. Download the ModMarketing Goal Worksheet, write the goal, and then send it to me in a DM.
Also, you what I always say at the end of my episodes. If you love this episode and you think a friend or colleague would really enjoy it, grab the link, email it to them, and share it with a friend. My goal is to support as many marketers on their journey as possible.
All right, so I’ll see you again in the next episode. Bye for now.
