Back to Basics: Planning Your Digital Marketing Campaign – Identifying Website Objectives

You’ve got your business up and running, discovered who your target market is, and understand that you need an online presence to help promote your business. Things are looking great, and you’re off to a fantastic start for building a website that helps you… Wait – What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with the website? How do you plan on measuring whether the website is performing well, and helping us achieve our business goals? What do you need to do to ensure that our initiatives are bringing a return on investment?

These are just some of the questions you need to answer when developing a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Read on and learn the process required to develop your own rock-solid Digital Marketing & Measurement Model.

This is the first part of a three part blog post aimed at helping you identify where your website can bring your company value.

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What Will a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model Accomplish?

On any important project, it’s always better to lay out a plan of attack than to find yourself knee deep in something you’ve hastily put together, only to realize you need to switch strategies mid-way through. This is exactly the reason your business needs to develop a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model before you just start slapping things together, and hoping you eventually find what you’re looking for.

By having a plan, you set yourself up to track the right things, observe trends that can be crucial to your business, and make improvements as time goes on.

How to Create Your Digital Marketing & Measurement Model

Following the principles of Avinash Kaushik, you can develop your Digital Marketing plan in 5 steps. These steps are:

1. Discover Business Objectives;
2. Describe Measurable Goals;
3. Identify Key Performance Indicators;
4. Set Parameters for Success; and
5. Segment Data for Analysis.

Discover Business Objectives

A good Digital Marketing plan requires a strong foundation with which your activities are based on. To build this foundation, ask yourself what does your business do, and how do you want your website to support your businesses operations?

Below we’ll describe 5 strategies a website may fall under, and you can decide which fits yours best.

Online Information/Support Website

Websites that provide online information or additional support are intended to help customers find information on you or your product, and maintain a high-level of customer satisfaction. These types of websites aim at providing information to your customers quickly and easily, whether it be instructions, or simply store hours and how to get in contact with you.

Branding Website

Branding websites work to promote your company, create a property for your customers to learn more about you, and encourage engagement and awareness. If you can attract clients to your website and expose them to your brand, and have them coming back or sharing it with their friends and family, you’re increasing your customers’ brand awareness and possibly even brand loyalty.

Content Publisher Website

Maybe your business is about creating content and sharing it with the world. If this is the case, and you make your money through ad revenue, you’ll be pursuing a content publisher website. The objective of a content publisher website is to drive traffic to your content, and make money off of the ads your website delivers.

Ecommerce Website

Ecommerce websites are straightforward – You have products, and you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find your products and purchase them online. In this case, the business objective of your site will be to drive product sales. Beyond sales, everything else is an added bonus.

Lead Generation Website

Similar to ecommerce websites, you want your website to support your organization in selling your product or service. However, your product or service might be something that is more difficult to sell online, or something you really need to express the value of before your customers make a purchasing decision. If this is the case, you’ll want to provide the information potential clients are looking for so they can educate themselves, and demonstrate your value proposition. If after going through the site, the potential customer finds themselves interested in your offering, you can then give them the option of submitting their information to get in contact with you. This process helps your website cultivate leads for your sales team who can then bridge the gap between interest and sale, and help in converting them from a visitor into a customer (a process known as conversion rate optimization.) The information can also be invaluable in identifying unseen markets, or for future promotions and marketing campaigns.

What Will Your Website Do For You?

Your website can embody any of the above 5 types of website, or may even be a hybrid of two or more. By understanding what your business does, and how your website helps to accomplish that, you can identify your business objectives, whether it be to provide information quickly (Online Information/Support), encourage engagement & awareness (Branding), encourage frequent visits (Content Publishing), drive product sales (Ecommerce), or to drive contact form submissions (Lead Generation).

After your Business Objectives are identified, you can then move on to implementing the goals you want to achieve to fulfill them.

The Process Has Just Begun

Take the time to deconstruct your business and what you want to achieve with your website. Find out which of the above website strategies suits your needs and helps you achieve your business goals. Once you’ve figured out the first step, stay tuned for our next blog post where we’ll dive into how you can go about deciding which measurable goals will work for your website, and how you can identify the key performance indicators (KPI) that you’ll want to measure to ensure your goals are being accomplished.

Do you want expert advice and support from experienced professionals to help with your digital marketing strategy? At ABORG, we strive to understand our clients’ needs and transform them into marketing initiatives that deliver the results they deserve. Contact us and we’ll be more than happy to help!