By setting clear digital marketing goals, you and your team will know what exactly is working for your business, track, measure and analyze the performance of digital campaigns.

It is important to set SMART digital marketing goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-senstive.

An example of poorly-defined digital marketing goals will be: “I want to increase website traffic and leads”. On the other hand, a well-defined digital marketing goal will say something like: “I want to increase website traffic by 20% within the next 6 months through Search Engine Optimization.”

So what are the most important digital marketing goals?

1. Website Traffic

What do you do when you want to learn more about a particular brand? That is right! WEBSITE.

Website lets you be present where your consumers are, engage with potential customers, promote content digitally, built trust and have more control over distribution and marketing promotion.

Increasing website traffic should be your first and foremost digital marketing goal

Here are few ways to increase website traffic:

  • Email Marketing: Taking advantage of your email subscriber list is a fantastic way to share content, engage with existing subscriber base and generate traffic to your website.
  • Blog: You are currently consuming relevant content through my blog. This is exactly what i would suggest for your business as well. By having a blog you give people a reason to keep coming back and consume targeted and relevant content.
    Google taken into account repeat visitors, average time spent on website, pages per session and bounce rate to determine website ranking. Blogs are fantastic way rto improve your overall domain rank and generate organic traffic.
  • Social Media: How many times have you come across an awesome blog in your Facebook newsfeed share by a brand that you follow? Well, sharing content on your social media platforms will generate referral traffic coming from social sources and improve your website
  • On-Page SEO: There are more than 200 ranking factors that impact website rank. On-Page SEO tactics include creating high-quality content, writing user-friendly meta description, URL, titles and formatting.

2. Convert website traffic to leads

While it is important to bring traffic to your website, you should realize that 90% of your visitors are not going to take an action such as fill out a form or request for an appointment.

Once your ideal visitor lands on your website, you have less than 10 seconds to showcase the value that you provide and convince them to take an action using relevant content.

Your goal should be to optimize the content, layout, website features, value preposition to make your visitors take an action and convert them into lead.

But why leads?

Once you get a lead, you have more control over how to communicate with your leads, frequency, content distribution and lead nurturing process.

Across industries, the average visitor to lead conversion rate was 2.35%. If you can aim to achieve 5% or higher that would be a good digital marketing goal for your business.

3. Increase Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is calculated dividing total number of desired action by the number of visitors.

You can measure and analyze conversion rate for website form submissions, webinar registrations, e-commerce sales, interactions on key elements on your website and much more.

Here is a simple example of how to calculate conversion rate:

Let’s assume you want visitors register for a webinar on your landing page. Out of 1,000 visitors, you get 100 webinar registrations.

Your conversion rate for the above webinar registration marketing objective is (100/1,000)*100 = 10%

A couple of ways to increase conversion rate:

  • Install Hotjar or CrazyEgg: This should be your very first step in your conversion rate optimization strategy. By using these tools you can track and analyze user behavior, find hot zones on your website, drop-off reasons and interaction rates.
  • Use Behavior Flow Report in Google Analytics: Find out which pages encourage people to stay on your website, pages that perform poor, bounce rate and overall content flow.
    This information will help you identify top and low performing content. You can them improve the low performing content, test CTAs and design elements to increase page performance.
  • A/B Testing: One should realize that conversion rate optimization should be based on data and analytics. By conducting A/B testing, you can test variables such as colors, layouts, elements, CTAs and much more
    Find out which variables deliver better result and implement them on your website.
  • Implement Sales Funnel: Sometimes there is a mismatch between what is offered on the website compared to the expectation of the audience.
    Figure out what the visitors want, what you want to achieve in terms of business goals and how to achieve that goal.
    By offering the right content to the right audience will improve conversion rate and bring your customers closer to the point of purchase.

4. Increase Revenue

Increase sales through digital marketing should be your overarching digital marketing goal since it impacts your bottom line.

Weather you are a product based or service based company, you can set a revenue goal to increase sales by 10%. Your goal will translate to getting more clients/inquiries if you provide services or it will mean increase subscriptions / life-time value of customers / online sales if you provide products and solutions.

Here are few ways to increase revenue using digital marketing

  • Website and SEO: Every business needs to have a web presence and website should the primary more of engaging with your potential customers. A fully SEO optimized website will help you increase visibility, drive more traffic and increase brand awareness.
  • Google My Business: For businesses who have a physical location, Google My Business is an absolute must. It is completely free providing marketers an efficient way to manage business information, map location, reviews, content and much more.
  • Lead Nurturing: Use a marketing automation tool such as Marketo or Hubspot to nurture your cold leads using automated email workflows, newsletters and personalized content.

5. Increase Customer Retention Rate

In order to maximize your digital marketing efforts, it is critical to understand how well you are retaining existing customers, analyze retention rate, and strive to increase customer retention rate.

Acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than keeping an existing customer.

Retention rate is a key digital marketing goal that measures how many customers are repeatedly buying your products or services and stay associated with your brand.

Here are few ways to retain customers:

  • Implement Customer Relationship Management Strategy: Build strong relationship with customers using a CRM system, send personalized content on a regular basis, follow-up on inquiries using time-saving automation tools, provide exception customer service to increase brand affinity and loyalty.
  • Customer Loyalty Program: Many businesses provide perks, benefits, offers to loyal and repeat customers. This is a great way to make existing customers re-engage with your brand and buy products/services to earn points, win gifts and offers.
  • Social Proof: Share customer reviews to demonstrate how your products perform better than your competitors. Encourage existing customers to write reviews on your online platform in return for discounts and offers.

Conclusion: Setting digital marketing goals will inform best tactics that work for your business, analyze performance of your digital campaigns, narrow focus on strategies that deliver maximum impact and increase sales.