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 your Key Performance Indicators, make them SMART KPIs, and align your objectives using our RACE Framework to achieve YOY growth in key metrics for your business
KPIs are a useful way for digital marketers to set expectations and prove that their work is having a positive impact. To outsiders, the success of digital marketing activity can be seen as difficult to measure but this really isn’t the case. In fact, it’s normally easier to measure progress metrics for a digital campaign than an offline one.
The aim of this post is to help you set digital marketing KPIs to measure what really matters at the moment, in a way that all parties can agree on. Smart marketing planning is essential for measuring and tracking your progress, and demonstrating value. We’ll cover negotiating KPIs, budgeting, and how to tie your KPIs into the Smart Insights RACE Digital Marketing Framework.
What are digital…
Without setting clear marketing objectives, you’re basically directionless – and working to achieve vanity metrics that don’t necessarily help you achieve your overall business goals
Digital marketing objectives underpin all marketing strategies. After all, how do you know what you're working towards without clear, actionable, and achievable metrics? Setting marketing goals should always be the priority as they will be the basis of your entire strategy.
By achieving your digital marketing objectives, you’re also helping reach your overall business goals, whether that’s boosting your overall sales or improving awareness of your brand.
Setting marketing objectives is, on one hand, a great way to motivate yourself and your team and work towards achieving better results for your business.
On the other hand, objectives and KPI-setting is about much more than just saying “I want to achieve that and that” – it’s how you can develop a plan or strategy that will help support your vision…
3 steps to creating an insight-driven digital marketing report
Monitoring, tracking and reporting on marketing campaigns is both an essential and valuable process that enables marketers to understand what works, what could be improved, and the overall impact on the business. What are the key performance questions in your digital marketing report that you need to drive your data-driven marketing strategy?
Introducing key performance questions
In 2014, marketing consultant Bernard Marr felt that organizations were often jumping straight into designing indicators before being clear about what they really needed to know. As a response to this ongoing challenge, he introduced the concept of key performance questions (KPQs) to bridge the gap between strategic objectives and KPIs.
According to Marr:
"Formed as a short, forward-looking and open question that directly relates to a strategic objective, a KPQ enables senior leaders to fully understand what…
A successful brand strategy means your business' channels, digital experiences, and tone of voice need to home in on what your key customers want.
We've got marketing training to strengthen your branded consumer goods company's relationships with your target audiences.
In order to build a loyal fan base, your brand strategy and style need to reflect your overall vision for the business. Having a brand strategy that jars with your product/service will put customers off and confuse them about who are and what you offer.
However, integrating your marketing strategy can be hard, especially today in the age of digital disruption where every customer has an omnichannel experience. That's why our complete marketing training covers all the key elements you need to build a strong brand strategy.
The RACE Framework for consumer branded goods
Our popular RACE Framework is a simple, actionable planning structure for marketing leaders looking to streamline their omnichannel marketing strategies and…
'Strategic marketing beyond a single campaign metric': Brand evaluation requires deeper analysis of your campaign KPIs
A single brand evaluation metric such as 'brand awareness' can get a bad press as a marketing KPI. It's easy to see why, after all, just because I'm aware of your brand, it doesn't mean your marketing has been all that successful in driving demand or sales for a product.
To give a trite example, I'm aware of Donald Trump, North Korea and Protein World. It doesn't mean I like any of them. Nor does it mean I'd ever buy from them. Oh and before you say 'You can't buy from North Korea Rob you idiot'- I think you'll find you can.
Strategic brand evaluation runs much deeper. It's time to aim for strategic marketing beyond a single campaign metric.
"Strategic marketing beyond a single campaign metric"
Boosting brand awareness isn't pointless, far from it.…
Monitoring the right KPIs is the best way to avoid spending time and money on something that isn’t driving the expected profit
Is your SEO strategy effective enough? How can you ensure your efforts drive tangible results? What can you do to develop your website performance?
Tracking the right performance metrics, you’ll be able to answer all these questions.
KPIs work as a control system that lets you identify which tactics work and which don’t. What’s most important, monitoring the right KPIs is the best way to avoid spending time and money on something that isn’t driving the expected profit.
[si_guide_block id="107298" title="Read our Business Membership resource – Big book of marketing KPI benchmarks" description="This handy guide will help you improve your return on marketing by applying thoughtful, targeted benchmarks and forecasting to your day-to-day marketing activities."/]
In this article, I’ll highlight 10 critical indicators marketers should pay attention to.
1. Organic traffic
This KPI measures how…
Chart of the day: 71% of luxury brands measure influencer success through web traffic
In recent years, using influencers to market products has become a core part of most brands marketing strategy. But now it has become a key strategy for some of the world's biggest luxury brands. The struggle for many luxury brands is being able to measure their return on investment, as it is hard to single its success down to just one influencer or product.
One study asked both luxury and non-luxury brands how they measure the success of a campaign where influencers have been used as part of the strategy.
62% of luxury brands said that revenue generation is an important measure of success, whereas only 44% of non-luxury brands place value on revenue. For luxury brands 79% measure the success of influencer collaborations through web traffic generated.
Although it is difficult to fully understand what impact influencers have, brands can measure many…
