Identifying Your Goals When Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy

As the digital marketing world continues to grow, experiment, and improve techniques, it’s time for the industry to think beyond social media “likes”. Receiving inconsequential attention is pointless. The old digital marketing strategy thinking used to be something as simple (and ineffective) as this: get all the attention and somehow go viral. The new digital marketing strategy way of thinking is more like this: engagement is greater than attention.

Your strategy is a plan of action to achieve a desired goal or multiple goals. For example, you might want to generate 25% more leads via your website this year, over last year. Depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals and a lot of moving parts, but coming back to this simple way of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives.

These goals need to get tangible results on your sales and earnings reports, but are your digital marketing strategy goals covering all the bases? A good set of goals covers a range of different measures to help set, review and control performance across all digital marketing activities. Here are some of the key goals you should be identifying when planning your next digital marketing strategy.

Educate your target audience

Your online marketing can help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem, called solution awareness. Your objective is to help people realise that you can take them from the “before” state, in which they have a problem, to the desired “after” state, in which they have obtained a positive solution.

No matter what industry you are in, there is always room to educate, even if you have to get creative. Poll your customers to find out what their pain points are, and strategise ways to educate them on solutions, chances are your leads are having the same pain points, too.

Acquiring lead engagement

Gaining more leads and customers is a primary objective of most businesses. However, without generating new leads and customers, your business will never grow beyond what it is now. You need to bring in new blood in order to scale your business.

The best way to attract a digital audiences is simple: be genuine. This tactic will result in organic and engaged attention. Some of the best interaction comes from content that was not planned; brands that are true to their own mission statement and invest in creating an online personality that is in line with their industry and can develop a natural strategy that will lead to engaging content.

Check out our free guide with 9 Things You Can Do To Generate More Leads for more information on how to grow your business.

Connecting with your audience

Once you have data on your audience, use that data to deploy smart, personalised drip and nurture content that helps you connect through their inbox instead of cluttering it.

Even if you aren’t getting super granular with your data like some of the world’s biggest brands, you can still use even the simplest data, such as name, birthday and geographic location, to create personalised communications that delight your audience.

Customer retention

Once you have paying customers, you want to do everything you can to retain them. There are many reasons retaining customers is a more profitable investment than continually acquiring new ones, as returning customers tend to spend more overall. Part of the reason for this is due to the fact that every sale made going forward will yield larger gross margins because the purchase cost is no longer measured against any buyer acquisition costs.

In defining this goal, marketers can look at the increase in average purchases from the existing client base as well as engagement measurements. Given the importance of retaining those customers, marketers should consider retention goals critical to the success of digital marketing strategy. Marketing technology and data can be used to create retention strategies such as personalisation, retention emails, and loyalty programs that can make hitting the strategy goals much more manageable.

Whatever your overarching goals may be, you need to know how to measure them, and more importantly, actually be able to measure them by having the right digital marketing tools in place to do so. How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goals, but it’s vital to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.