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A Guide To Effective Digital Marketing Goal Setting

A Guide To Effective Digital Marketing Goal Setting

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Setting and Measuring Completion Goals

Completion goals are just as important to measure as any other type of goal. They allow you to see the number of people who complete a specific action or task that you want them to do.

Completion goals are used to measure the success of a specific action or task you want your audience to complete.

Some  completion goals you can set include:

  • The number of people who filled out and submitted a form
  • The number of people who watch a video
  • How many people have purchased a product

As with all digital marketing goal setting, these numbers can be used to measure the effectiveness of your strategy in terms of real-world results.

For example, if you have an e-commerce website, then measuring this is essential so that you know how many sales have been made.

Let’s say your goal at the end of a campaign was to make 500 sales. When you make 120 sales at the end, you know that you haven’t attained your goal. This data would help you and your team brainstorm ideas on how to troubleshoot the problem.

The completion goal you measured would help you assume or guess how to improve the sales in the future. You can probably use the information for A/B testing purposes by comparing different content types or styles to see which one would convert more.

Completion goals can also be used as conversion funnels where each step along the way is an incremental increase in interest level until finally at one point there is an “Aha!” moment and you convert them into customers.

You can also set goals according to customer behavior over time.

As a marketer, you have the ability to impact almost every part of your company’s performance. It all depends on the goals you set for yourself and your marketing team.

It is not just about making a list of all the wishes you have for your company. It’s about what and how you define your company’s success.

Before you set any digital marketing goals, you need to understand exactly why those goals are necessary. It’s like trying a new diet or starting a workout routine. If you don’t know why you’re doing any of that or what you hope to achieve, then we bet that you’ll give up in no time. It’s the same with digital marketing goals. If you don’t have clear objectives, you’ll soon tire out of putting in any effort.

Listing the goals you hope to achieve with your digital marketing effort would help you direct all your efforts, time, and resources into the activities that would yield your desired results.

For instance, is it your goal to create brand awareness, acquire new customers, boost brand engagement, or increase revenue?

Having a clear image of exactly what you want to do would help you put measures in place to make them happen. Setting goals and attaining them would also help you know if your business is progressing or not.

There are different types of goals that you can set for our digital marketing campaign. For your digital marketing to succeed, you need to focus on the KPI goals.

A KPI goal is a measurable and time-bound outcome that aligns with your organization’s long-term strategic objectives. It helps you prioritize your efforts and ensure that your programs are aligned with the organizational goals.

These metrics will help define what success looks like for different teams, as well as give everyone a shared understanding of how they can contribute to achieving business objectives.

So what are these KPI goals? And how would you set them? This post would explain four such goals. They are

  • Completion goals
  • Behavioral goals
  • Engagement goals
  • Conversion goals

Let’s discuss them one after the other.

Measuring Behavior Goals

A behavior goal is a measurable pattern of behavior that your customer repeats over time. For instance, if a customer opens an account and uses it to purchase products 10 times within 90 days, you can track this behavior and make marketing decisions from it.

Customer behavior you can track includes navigation paths, time on site, and what links they clicked on.

It is important to measure and track only the behaviors that are relevant to your business goals.

Tracking customer behavior can help you segment your site visitors into users, first-time visitors, and loyal customers.

When measuring behavior goals, it’s important to not only know whether or not someone performed the action in question but also why they did so. This information will help guide future campaigns and improve your ability to drive results over time.

The first thing you need to do when setting a behavior goal is to define what it is. At a basic level, a behavior goal should be an easily defined action that consumers perform after interacting with your marketing efforts (e.g., “Open our email newsletter”).

These behaviors are usually tracked through analytics software like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture).

Google Analytics comes with a built-in conversion tracking technology that gives you all the metrics you need to track customer behavior. The best part is that it’s not difficult to use. You can run it on your WordPress website with the Monster Insights plugin.

There’s a free and paid version. If your business is in the beginning stages, you can start with the free until your business expands and you get to the point where you need more in-depth data.

You can also build a custom code into each site visit so that all events can be tracked automatically.

Behavior goals are the second type of goal you can set, and they’re also the most difficult to accurately measure. The main reason for this is that behavior goals focus on changes in consumer behavior, which often requires a lot of time to develop and perfect before your metrics will show any kind of significant change—if they ever do.

Yet, taking the time and putting in the effort to measure them would ensure that you know exactly what to do to improve customer behavior towards your brand. It’ll also help you improve customer engagement with your brand.

Measuring Engagement Goals

When we talk about customer engagement, we’re talking about how much they interact with your brand in terms of likes, shares, comments, and so on. Engagement is a very important goal in your digital marketing strategy. Not only does it help expand your reach, but also creates meaningful relationships with your customers.

There are several ways you can measure engagement as part of your digital marketing goals.

The total amount of time spent on the site by users, how many pages are visited by users, or the frequency with which users return to your website or app.

Engagement is not simply a measure of time spent on your site; it also takes into account how much time the user spends on each page and the frequency with which they return to your site after visiting for the first time.

On social media, engagement comes in the form of tweets, likes, comments, and shares. In emails, customers engage with your brand by opening your emails, clicking through, and even sharing the mail.

If the data proves that you’re not reaching your engagement goals, there are many things you can do to improve your engagement.

Consistently sharing valuable and shareable content, hosting contests and giveaways, using interactive questions, and finally, making your communications as personalized as possible, are tricks that would help you improve your engagement metrics.

Using these factors together gives us an idea of how much interest our audience has in our content by looking at their behavior over an extended period of time. It’ll also give you insights into their interests and what products or services they’ll enjoy in the future.

Measuring Conversion Goals

In marketing, conversion means transforming a visitor into a paying customer. It also means turning a normal site visitor into a lead or client.

Conversion goals are the reason you’re running an online advertising campaign in the first place. One survey conducted by Hubspot found that the main objective for 43% of marketers is to increase revenue. It makes sense, because if you don’t want revenue, then I guess you wouldn’t start the business.

They help you understand what people are doing on your website and why they’re there.

By tracking conversions, you can see if your ads are driving the right actions and making a difference.

A conversion is a completed action that you want to measure as an indicator of success. For example, when someone signs up for a free trial, makes a purchase, or upgrades their plan, it means they’ve taken one of those actions that you want them to take. When someone visits your store page but doesn’t convert, it means they weren’t ready — maybe they weren’t ready to buy or maybe they weren’t interested in what you were selling.

Conversion tracking lets you see how many people took your desired action after seeing or interacting with an ad so that you know which ads perform better than others.

Measuring conversion goals is easy and straightforward, but it’s also important because it helps you understand the ROI of your marketing efforts so that you can optimize them for greater success in the future.

Conversion goals can take multiple forms. They might be as simple as an email sign-up or a product sale, or they could be more complex like getting people to book an appointment at your salon or go through with a purchase at an online retailer.

In all cases, understanding which actions lead up to these conversions will help guide future decisions about media channels and other aspects of your digital strategy. It all boils down to setting those goals from the onset.

Concluding Thoughts on Effective Digital Marketing Goal Setting

As you can see, creating digital marketing goals is a multi-step process. And it’s a vital one. If you’re going to succeed in digital marketing, you need to clearly define what your goals are and how you’re going to achieve them

For some brands, that may mean focusing on creating better content. For others, that could mean a focus on increasing their social media followers.

Whatever it is, it’s important to communicate your goals clearly so that everyone on your team knows where they stand.

Overall, there are five main reasons to set digital marketing goals. They help you achieve your overall business goals by providing an effective framework for your digital marketing campaigns, they allow you to analyze your results more clearly and make changes where necessary, they create goals that can be duplicated in the future as you expand, they’re easy to set up and measure, and they give your team a direction to follow.

We strongly believe that following the tips above would help you set your course for the year. Think of it as a way to keep yourself organized and the things you need to do in order to accomplish your marketing goals.

Keep in mind that many of these items can be added to your long-term marketing plan so that you have something to reference when the year is half over and it’s time to adjust your strategy.

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Written by Robb Fahrion

Robb Fahrion is a Co-Founder and Partner of Flying V Group. Robb has helped over 350+ companies build their businesses online and is responsible for building Flying V Group into one of the premier marketing agencies in the United States. Robb and his team have managed over $10M in marketing budget and continue to accelerate the growth of clients' businesses. A love for business and competition is what fuels Robb to create dynamic marketing plans to help his clients grow exponentially.

September 6, 2022

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