Choose these 4 Types of Digital Marketing Objectives for Your Business

Digital marketing objectives are a primary feature of your digital marketing strategy because they set out what your organisation wants to achieve. Without them you have little chance of success on the web because you will have nothing to guide your online activities.
In fact, they are an important part of your efforts to meet your customers’ needs – who should be at the centre of what you do in your business. However, digital objectives will differ slightly from offline objectives because of the many and different ways that customers use the web including the channels they access and the devices they use.

So, if you are a bricks-and-clicks business for example, you will be better off with separate digital objectives and offline objectives.
The benefits of having digital marketing objectives are:
• Increased target market focus
• A benchmark against your competitors
• A clear focus on where you are going

Acquisition Objectives

Acquisition objectives are related to visits to your website and this includes traffic sources such as Organic, CPC, Referrals, Social Network, Direct Visits and others. You will see these sources in Google Analytics and next to them will be metrics which will also form objectives for your online advertising.
‘Visits’ is an important metric and should form one of your acquisition objectives. For example, you may want to increase organic traffic volumes to increase its percentage to 20% of all traffic sources.

Conversion Objectives

Conversion objectives relate to purchases, downloads, contacts, registrations etc that take place on your website. You can see these conversions for each of your traffic sources and you can create an objective for your most important conversion type.
So for a key metric like conversion rate you could have an objective like:
“Increase conversion rate by 25% for organic traffic by Nov 2015”

Retention Objectives

Customer retention is essential to online profitability and retention objectives will be some of your most important ones. In analytics you will have engagement metrics like New vs Returning visitors, bounce rate, average time on site and average pageviews. By measuring these metrics, you will have a clearer idea of how good you are at retaining visitors and customers.
An example of a retention objective is to see a percentage increase in returning visitors for all your traffic sources.

Advocacy Objectives

Tracking customer advocacy on the web is difficult, however there are a few activities that you can track. For example, you could have a ‘Recommend to Friend’ button or form that allows users to recommend your products, services, blogs, articles and so on.
Also, positive online reviews are an endorsement of your business and you want to track these to ensure you are meeting the needs of your customers. So, you can have objectives to see an increase in positive reviews or friend recommendations and then have tasks to help you achieve those objectives.

Summary

Whatever your business, it’s important to have digital marketing objectives that set out what you want to achieve on the web. There are a wide range of objectives to choose from and your choice will depend on whether you are an ecommerce business, service business, B2B, B2C or any other.
Do you have a digital marketing strategy? If not, then download the free digital marketing strategy template to plan your online campaigns including your objectives. Or contact me to discuss your plans.