3 Tips for SMARTer Digital Marketing Planning
A well-designed digital marketing plan is one of the most effective ways to help your business grow and thrive. It provides a roadmap (or Flight Plan) to focus your efforts, utilize your resources effectively, and ultimately move the needle toward your marketing goals.
Unfortunately, one of the significant pitfalls business owners often encounter when creating their plans is vague objectives. Saying that you want to “increase leads” or “get more visitors to your site” is a fair starting point, but after a while, you’ll likely find it challenging to determine if your marketing plan is paying off for your business.
This article will explain why creating specific objectives is critical to success and three ways to make your digital marketing planning work SMARTer, not harder.
Why Marketing Objectives Are Important
Your marketing objectives are like navigation software. They guide you from where you are to where you want to be while providing detailed instructions so you don’t get lost or turned around.
Objectives should be specific actions with measurable outcomes related to your company’s success. Say you wanted to increase your lead by 50%. Great! But how many leads are you getting now? How many of those leads are qualified?
A well-planned objective covers more detail than a target number alone; it will help you measure progress toward achieving that goal and provide you with a timeframe for completion. Plus, it helps keep you motivated to keep moving forward.
Now that we’ve covered why marketing objectives are essential for accomplishing business goals, let’s discuss the three tips for your digital marketing plan.
1. Get SMART
SMART is a business philosophy that’s been around for some time, and we’re big advocates of using it to create marketing objectives. The acronym is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Let’s break that down further.
- Specific—A set objective must be specific. Review your business goals and link them to your key performance indicators (KPIs), which might include increasing leads or sales, generating brand awareness, increasing website traffic, etc.
- Measurable —Measurable objectives allow you to track progress, make changes for the better, and give you a clear picture of success. Numerous digital marketing tools, like Google Analytics or HubSpot, can help you track your progress.
- Achievable (or Aspirational)—Your objectives should be challenging but doable. An overly ambitious objective can lead to disappointment, but something too easy can cause poor motivation. The first step is to use your historical data to benchmark where you are and determine where you can reasonably get with the available time and resources.
- Relevant—Relevant objectives support your business priorities. In the marketing world, so much data is available that it’s easy to get mixed priorities. Sticking to goals that help your business priorities ensures that your strategies and actions stay on track.
- Time-bound (or Timely)—A practical objective must have a timeline. This part helps you pace your strategy based on your resources and creates a sense of urgency to drive your efforts forward. Plus, it allows you to highlight micro-wins along the way.
Every marketing objective should have all five of these parts. Let’s revisit the earlier lead generation example. Your SMART objective could be to increase the number of qualified leads by 50% over the next six months by creating a new scheduling process on your website and promoting it via paid advertising. To ensure you meet that objective, you need tracking for that scheduling process and to know how many leads you’re getting with your current lead generation process.
2. Map Out Micro-Wins
Taking the overall marketing objective and breaking it down into micro-wins will help ensure your strategy moves in the right direction and keep you focused. For example, say your business is currently getting ten leads a month, of which seven are qualified. Increasing that by 50% means aiming for roughly 11 qualified leads by six months.
In this example, getting started will likely involve setting up and testing the scheduling process, trying different ad messaging, and optimizing your audience targeting. With that amount of prep work, you might not see much change for the first month or two. So, a micro-win for the first month or two may be successful testing or improving your ad performance. Then, from month three, you can focus on moving the needle toward your SMART objective.
3. Measure Progress and Results
Measuring the results is one of the most critical parts of a marketing objective and a marketing plan. You need to know what tools you will use to measure results, what KPIs to measure, how often to evaluate these measurements, and who is measuring. If these points are unclear, you risk having inaccurate data or spending resources without anything to show.
As mentioned in SMART’s “M” section, tools like Google Analytics can help with the how. If qualified leads are the focus, knowing how many conversions you receive, your cost per conversion, and whether or not they were qualified is vital. That likely means digging into Google Ads and talking with your sales team. Generally, we look at measurements monthly to get an idea of what is working and what needs improvement. Finally, are you handling these tasks yourself, or do you have an in-house marketing team or agency to help?
SMART Planning Sets You Up for Success
The road to growing your business can be challenging. The digital marketing landscape constantly changes, and it is easy to lose sight of your goals without a clear direction. With a SMART digital marketing plan, you can stay focused on what matters to your business, find small wins along the way, and measure how far you’ve come.
If you need a hand mapping out the way, SEO Rocket can help! Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with us today.
