From SMART to SMARTER marketing objectives: Discover how to define marketing objectives, measure your digital marketing goals, and use data to inform your marketing strategy
When identifying specific marketing objectives to support your long-term goals, it is common practice to apply the widely used SMART mnemonic. You will know that SMART is used to assess the suitability of objectives set to drive different strategies or the improvement of the full range of business processes.
By its simplest definition, an effective SMART marketing objective is:
Specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound.
But you will learn in this article that beyond this well-known acronym, there are different variations and nuances which you can apply to practice Smarter Marketing.
What is Smarter Marketing?
The SMART acronym is much more than a mnemonic since it defines a way of thinking about getting better results within business and marketing. This mindset is based…
Set the right goals for digital marketing using the 5Ss
Do your set of goals for online marketing cover all the bases? A good set of digital marketing goals covers a range of different measures to help set, review, and control performance across all digital marketing activities. In this article, we cover the 5S framework which are a simple method to gain more focus on how digital marketing can support a business.
The 5Ss are a great simple framework, as the examples show. It's worth bearing in mind that goals are broader than objectives which we recommend as essential for setting targets and reviewing performance using digital marketing dashboards. If you need to use a more data-driven approach to digital marketing, see these primers or our free template for more examples:
Setting SMART objectives for…
A tutorial covering our recommended process, report, tools and KPIs to grow your business
By the time you read this, it's likely that Google Analytics 3 or Universal Analytics (UA), whatever you call it, will be no more. Switching to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) presents a big challenge for any business that wants to use a data-driven approach to improving their marketing. As the timeline shows, many of us have become very familiar with UA since we may have used it over the last 10+ years.
I'm excited about switching to GA4 since, I've been using Google Analytics since it was first created, when Google acquired Urchin, centreing my consulting, training and Smart Insights learning materials and templates on it as a practical tool to help improve digital marketing using a data-driven approach.
However, the differences between GA4 and UA mean it's a BIG change…
Our recommendations of the best global online marketing consumer adoption and marketing benchmark statistics
Online marketers love statistics about digital marketing. We do too since they enable us to use a more data-driven approach to inform our future investments. They allow us to review the growth in customer adoption of the latest digital platforms and technologies, make the business case for investment in marketing and allow us to benchmark our growth and performance against competitors.
From reviewing thousands of stats sources over the years, I've found that there are a very small number of quality online marketing statistics sites and sources which are updated at least annually and have a representative sample size from different countries. Here we share our experience of ten of the best, most reliable free and paid sources we use to update our benchmarks. Everyone has their favourites, but I thought it would be…
A comprehensive checklist for auditing different customer data types in a CRM or Email marketing system
In today’s world of ever-increasing data availability, volume and variety the challenge to know which data is valuable to you is a key step in starting to build a marketing solution. An often-cited response is that ‘all data is important’ and this may be true, but to help decide which elements are critical in the initial stages of building your solution a method to identify at the value of each type of customer data is key.
In this post, I will look at how to audit customer data based on its type and value. The examples will show why it's important to be selective when reviewing customer data in CRM and Email marketing.
Over numerous implementations of Marketing Database solutions, I have seen many types…
Read up on our latest pharmaceutical marketing strategy recommendations to optimize your marketing plan and convert more customers over the next 12 months
Take stock heading into 2021 after what has been a challenging year for pharmaceutical marketers, healthcare, medical and high-science marketers, and all who work in the industry. The strategic evaluation and forecasting season that comes with year-end means many of you are scanning, benchmarking, and prioritizing to strengthen your pharmaceutical marketing strategies for the coming year.
When getting ready for 2021, before even looking at your strategy it's essential to revisit your planning framework. So, let's quickly take a whistlestop tour of why the RACE Framework is the key to setting up your pharmaceutical marketing strategy for success.
Using the RACE Framework to plan your pharmaceutical marketing strategy
The RACE Framework is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing. When planning your overall marketing strategies,…
If you want to achieve success with your marketing campaign, you’ll have to ensure that your every marketing effort is measurable.
Goals for your marketing campaign can be improving lead generation, increasing brand awareness, boosting your ROI, or anything in between.
Whatever the case, measuring and analyzing your marketing campaign data will provide you with insights that will help you thrive.
This is, naturally, easier said than done. The following measurement and analysis practices will allow you to learn exactly what went right and what wrong with your marketing campaign.
The knowledge you gain this way will improve your future marketing strategies.
KPI Identification for your marketing campaign
If you want to track the performance of your marketing campaign, you’ll first need to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Which indicators you’ll track will depend entirely on your own marketing goals. Over 54% of marketers have the goal of increasing sales leads generated.
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While data-driven marketing is certainly an invaluable tool in any marketer’s arsenal, without any creativity, it’s just more numbers.
In this article, Rik talks about the data overload happening in the marketing community. He offers tips and tools to marketing professionals in bringing creativity back to the forefront and the positive results this can lead to in their marketing efforts.
If your organization has become over-reliant on data, these tips can infuse some creativity into your ranks.
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Technology has provided marketers with unprecedented opportunities to gather data on the wants, needs, and behaviors of consumers — and on a very micro level, at that. So it only stands to reason that many brands would take a much more data-driven approach to marketing.
But overreliance on data can blindside…
Chart of the day: How data give opportunities to grow a business
I think it's fair to say that improving the quality of marketing data isn't a fashionable or sexy topic. Indeed in a recent article by Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever reviewing discussions at AdWeek US he says as much:
"The very unsexy topic of measurement has become a hot conversation
Sorting out the digital ecosystem should be a priority for everyone in our industry. It has been heartening to see this become an increasing focus of conversation over recent months and certainly this past week.
As an advertiser, I want to be able to see one consumer, paid for from one budget, not separated out for online and offline".
In this quote, he is specifically talking about measurement of paid media, but he goes on to look at the importance of customer data more generally across the customer journey.
In…
Chart of the day: Data, analytics, and insight are critical to business success. Insight and data are empowering growth.
Marketers understand the important of data and businesses understand how data drives growth.
The research by Mediasense, in association with Ipsos MORI and ISBA, asked respondents what factors they thought would be critical to business success in 2020. Almost 8 in 10 (78%) thought data, analytics, and insight were the most critical factor.
Content marketing was down compared with 2015 data whilst SEO was found to be one of the least critical factors, but scores for SEO were not as low as Pay per click and community management.
Source: Media2020 report
Sample: 250+ senior marketers
Recommended resource:
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