How to Set Realistic Digital Marketing Goals for Your Business?

When you own a business in New York City, it’s essential to make sure people know your brand exists as there’s competition literally right around the corner. In 2021, that means having a solid digital marketing Goals. While it may sound obvious, it’s much harder in practice to develop a realistic and attainable plan. If you’re ready to start the new year with a new plan of attack, make sure you have the tools and short-term goals necessary to carry out your digital marketing plan.

Long-term, Annual, and Campaign Goals

When you’re first creating our digital marketing goals, the best way to start is by examining where you ultimately want to be. This is your long-term goal or goals, and it can span as long as five years or longer. Do you want your company to focus most of its marketing on digital within the next three years? Are you hoping to up your traffic from digital marketing by 45 percent within four years?

From there, you’ll need to determine what annual goals you can set to get your company where you want it to be. For instance, do you want to up your digital marketing outreach by four percent by the end of 2021? These annual goals can change every year, but they should be milestones on the road to reaching your long-term goal. Related to these goals are campaign goals.

Whenever you run a campaign, you do so hoping to reach some outcome. Think critically about your short-term campaigns. If you’re running a series of interactive ads on your social media platforms, who’s your audience? How long will those ads run? How many people do you want them to reach ultimately? You can use your campaign goals to reach your annual and long-term goals.

Defining SMART Objectives

When creating marketing plans, many companies use SMART goals to help break down and manage longer-term expectations. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. If you’ve heard of this acronym before, it’s because it is a time-tested, effective way to accomplish any goal.

Specific

For long-term goals, be as specific as possible. Don’t just say you want to increase digital marketing outreach. Say by what percentage. That’s true with annual and campaign goals.

Measurable

How will you know if you’re on track to accomplishing your goal? Have “better” digital campaigns isn’t measurable. You need to know the keep performance indicators, or KPIs, to help measure your progress.

Attainable

You’re not going to double your client base on your next campaign run. What’s a realistic, attainable goal based on your company’s size? Shoot for that instead.

Relevant

SMART goals need to be relevant to overarching business goals and a larger digital marketing strategy. Keep your focus in line with what you are trying to achieve with your digital marketing.

Time-based

Goals only work if you have an end date in mind. If your goal is to get a new client, add “in the next week,” as it isn’t nearly as helpful if it takes you a year to get one client. Set a time frame in place so you can plan accordingly and reevaluate your strategy if you’re not getting to where you want to be.

A Detailed Example of Digital Marketing Campaign Goals

You can use SMART goals to create any marketing campaign. As an example, say your company is trying to create an e-commerce digital marketing campaign. Your ultimate goal for the campaign is to grow your email marketing list to produce more leads. Your SMART goals may look like this:

Specific

Your campaign will generate 25 new email leads for new clients.

Measurable

You’ll track engagement through SEO links and keeping track of campaign engagement data.

Attainable

The campaign will run on various websites and social media platforms, targeting audience members as defined prior by your company.

Relevant

Your business is growing but has noticed that you’re not getting a lot of lead generations from current clients or other techniques. You think an email campaign will help solve this problem.

Time-based

You’ll run the campaign for two weeks and count any leads that come from that campaign within a week of its ending.

Bonus Section: Thumbrules To Follow While Setting Digital Marketing Goals

We have already extensively discussed some of the points that one needs to remember to set quantifiable digital marketing goals. 

However, setting goals is so much more than that. As a result, this bonus section would effectively discuss four thumb rules you need to remember to set proper goals. 

Understand What The Business Needs

The foremost thing you need to do while setting up digital marketing goals is to know what your business needs. Do not do things for the heck of doing things. Set goals that will help your business grow.  

Chalk Up A Strategy

The next thing that you need to do is to chalk up a strategy. Trust us: your marketing strategy is your biggest weapon in your arsenal. Therefore, be sure to prepare a strategy for your goals. Do not give your employees a target. Give them a methodology to set that target. 

Be Real

We have been saying this from the start. Regardless of what you want to achieve, being authentic is the key. You cannot expect positive results out of an unrealistic goal. Hence, you must pull up your socks and set specific and achievable goals. 

Set Specific & Measurable Goals

The final tip is to set specific and quantifiable digital marketing goals. Goals that can be measured and monitored. Therefore, refrain from setting ambiguous goals that cannot be tracked. This will only reinforce a toxic work culture.

Start the Year of Strong

When you own a company, it can be easy to understand where you want your company to be. However, it’s much more difficult to define the goals and expectations that can get you there. If you’re finding it hard to establish your SMART goals, consider working with an advertising agency options in NYC to help you define campaign, annual, and long-term goals. Having help in planning and execution in such a competitive market will put your business a step ahead of the rest.

Additional Reading:

• What is Digital Marketing? Is it the same as Advertising?
• What Digital Marketing Options Should Medicare Supplement Companies Consider