How to Create and Achieve Online Marketing Goals

There are many online marketing strategies to help you build your brand, reach more potential customers and provide better service to your existing customers. Let's look at some ways to create online marketing goals that are right for your business.

Cody

Textbroker Marketing and Communications

What Are Your Marketing Goals?

To get the most out of online marketing, you first need to identify your goals. Without a clear objective, it’s impossible to measure the success or failure of any campaign. In some cases, your immediate goal may be to inform your audience with engaging content. A blog post, video or social media post may help solve a problem or educate your customers on a certain issue.

For example, a real estate agent might publish an article with tips on how to choose a home. A chiropractor may give readers advice on how to avoid back problems. This type of content isn’t directly promotional but serves to build your brand and establish your organization as an authority in your industry. Whatever your goal, you need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine how successful you are. We’ll now explore some of the most important online marketing goals with some guidelines on how to achieve them.

Generate Website Traffic

Everyone with a website appreciates the need for traffic, making this a common goal for all online businesses. Just about every online marketing strategy, whether it involves SEO, advertising or social media begins with generating traffic. To get more targeted traffic, follow these guidelines:

Consider PPC or other paid ads. This can be costly, but it’s the fastest way to get traffic to your site.
Always track where your traffic comes from so you recognize your most beneficial sources.
Seek ways to lower your bounce rate. If visitors are quickly leaving your page, you should find out why. For example, you may be targeting the wrong keywords for your audience.
Create quality content on topics your audience cares about. Do keyword research so you get ranked in the search engines and your audience can find you.
Be active on social media. Focus on the social sites that your customers use the most.
Pay attention to on-page SEO. This includes having fast-loading pages, being mobile-friendly, optimizing images and meta descriptions and using internal links.

Increase Conversions

Conversions are one of the KPIs that marketers value most highly. Conversions occur when people perform the actions you wanted them to. In order to measure conversions, of course, you must first define the desired action. Do you want people to buy your product, book a consultation, order a sample or download a free report? You can measure conversions using tools such as Google Analytics, Moz or many others. If you outsource online marketing, make sure the agency you work with tracks conversions. Here are some ways to improve conversions:

Test as many elements as possible using A/B split testing. Topics, headlines, email subject lines, opt-in forms, page layout and types of offers all impact conversions.
Create offers that address your audience’s needs while differentiating yourself from the competition.
Reduce or reverse risk. Guarantees and free trials help to get past people’s reluctance to try something new.
Establish trust. Make sure your website is secure and looks professional with a privacy policy and contact information.
Encourage customers to leave feedback and reviews. Post testimonials on your website and make sure your business is listed on Google and review sites such as Yelp.

Don’t Forget About Customer Acquisition Cost and Customer Value

One of the most important metrics to calculate is your customer acquisition cost, or CAC. If you don’t know how much you’re paying to acquire your customers, you have no real idea about your actual ROI. The simplest way to measure CAC is to divide all of your marketing expenses by the number of customers acquired in that period. In addition to knowing your total CAC, it’s also instructive to break it down by marketing channel. For example, if you engage in PPC advertising, blogging and email marketing you’ll want to know your CAC for each of these channels.

Another metric to consider is customer lifetime value, or CLV. This isn’t an exact figure but an estimate of a customer’s value during your entire future relationship with him or her. This can help to put your CAC into perspective and avoid thinking in a strictly short-term manner. Here are a few ways to lower CAC and increase CLV:

Lowering CAC goes hand in hand with improving conversion rates, so keep the tips from the previous section in mind. Another way to increase conversions is to retarget website visitors who leave your site without viewing other pages or who abandon their shopping cart.

Setting and achieving online marketing goals requires you to focus on many areas. It’s an ongoing process that constantly evolves as you test different approaches and make adjustments as necessary. As long as you are clear about your goals and aiming your efforts at the right audience, there’s no reason you can’t continue to improve your results over time.

Join our over 53,000 customers worldwide
and use Textbroker for your Content Marketing.

Register for Free!