Crafting Strategy Objectives

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Strategy objectives

Reviewing your SWOT table

Before establishing digital objectives, it’s a good idea to review your digital SWOT table. This will refresh your memory about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that you’ve identified within your organization and provide you with a good starting point in determining your business goals and objectives.

It also links the different sections of your strategy document to ensure you are consistent in your approach. This is particularly important when you are presenting your strategy as a PowerPoint, as it adds a sense of cohesiveness to your thinking and your plan.

Setting objectives

The objective phase sits at the heart of the process of creating a digital strategy. Setting clear objectives for your digital marketing activities should be the starting point to build an appropriate strategy.

Your objectives should be business objectives that can be realized through digital marketing. For example, they might be to:

• Increase e-commerce sales
• Drive more leads
• Build audience engagement with your brand

The objective should always be valuable to the business, focused, measurable and timebound.

A key consideration with digital marketing is that there is so much that you can do and so many approaches you can consider taking. You could get overwhelmed by your options, or become overly ambitious in your enthusiasm. Being clear and concise is crucial!

You have got to make use of all your resources in an efficient manner, know where your money is best spent and try to minimize budget waste. For most marketing strategists most of the time, demonstrating return on investment (ROI) is the single most important challenge.

SMART objectives

To help you achieve your overall business goals, you need to carefully craft your strategy objectives. The strategy objectives also need to be defined using SMART criteria:

• Specific: Is the objective clear and singular? Try to avoid multiple results and being vague – for example, “We want more site traffic and positive sentiment.”
• Measurable: How are you collecting and generating data from your activity?
• Achievable: Is the objective feasible given the circumstances and the resources available to you? Can you do it?
• Realistic: Is this objective realistic for the business?
• Time-bound: Can you achieve results within your given time period?

An example of a SMART objective is: “I will improve my retention rate by 1% over a period of six months.” So, if your retention rate now is, say, 70%, you can aim to increase that by 1%. You need to be clear about your baseline status, before you define an objective and set SMART criteria for it.

SMART objectives are important for your organization as they are the success outcomes on which your performance on digital channels will be measured.

Specific

To ensure strategy objectives are specific and aligned to a business goal, you should ask the following questions:

• Who am I targeting?
• Where am I operating?
• When am I active?
• What am I offering?
• Why am I doing all the above?

Once you have answered these questions, it’s important to ensure that your objectives are specific. You can do this by starting each objective with an action verb. For example, if your objective was ‘sales’, it’s more specific if you stated you want to ‘maintain sales’ or to ‘grow sales’.

Measurable

Objectives need to be measurable. You can do this by including numeric or descriptive measures within an objective that define quantity, quality, and cost, where possible. This will allow you to establish whether the objective has been met clearly, whilst also providing more of a focus to the goal.

Consider the following:

• Quantity: How many or how much of something should be achieved?
• Quality: What standard of output is desired?
• Cost: How much does it cost to achieve the objective?

Achievable

You can review whether your objectives are achievable by considering the following:

• Available resources: What resources do you have to help you to achieve the objective?
• Original timeline: Can you meet the objective within the time constraints that have been set?
• Team skills: Does the team have the skills to be able to meet the objective?

Realistic

Compare the objective to how it will support the current business proposition in order to assess how realistic it is. Does the strategy objective align with the broader goals of the organization?

Time-bound

Finally, in order to ensure the objective is time-bound, organizations should assign a definite target date for completion and for frequency of steps which are important to achieve the objective.

It is important to integrate milestones and dates from other projects which may affect your strategy objectives.

Communicating to stakeholders

To help secure support for your strategy, you need to communicate and share information, messages, and the strategy objectives to all stakeholders across the organization.

You can achieve this by following these steps:

• Lay out the vision: Clearly state what is changing and why. Outline to colleagues where the organization is today and where you intend to be tomorrow. Make sure to show them why your vision matters, how it will positively impact the organization and indeed their careers, and how you plan to measure the vision’s success.
• Personalize tasks: Make sure the tasks you assign to each person play to their strengths. When people are set up for success, they are more motivated to achieve it. Be clear with each person about how their work is vital to the outcome. Then set measurable goals and let them know how they will be held accountable. If appropriate, let the individuals take part in defining the work that they will be undertaking.
• Follow up: Stay connected to ensure that everyone is clear about the mission that they’re working toward. Keep an open-door policy as much as possible. If that’s not feasible, consider making yourself available via email or during certain hours of the day. It’s important that employees let you know when challenges arise.
• Address resistance: It is important to address instances of resistance. Small problems have a habit of escalating into bigger ones if left alone. When laying out the vision, be transparent and address any colleague’s concern through open discussion.
• Be prepared to change the course of action: Just as employees resist change, at times leaders fail to realize that the changes being made aren’t always a success. Assuming you have the right workers on the right task, solicit their feedback. You have to be prepared to take the advice they give and adjust your own game plan. Sometimes that means midcourse corrections. Other times, it means scrapping the plan and starting from scratch. That’s not defeat! In fact, it’s the ultimate sign that you value the buy-in your employees have for your ideas.

For example, if you are setting a complex social media strategy for the upcoming year, there may be a number of dependencies within the business that need to be managed to ensure success. You may need to have alignment with the brand team on new initiatives, approval from legal on the creative assets you wish to use, and input from the sales team on any new market trends they observe.

Setting this out early, and assigning responsibilities and expectations to department owners, will make the strategy more successful. If you have full executive support for the strategy, it will also add credibility to the plans.

A strategy should have a timeframe – a deadline or date for completion. Setting a deadline reinforces the seriousness of implementing the strategy. It motivates you to take action. When you don’t set a timeline, there is no internal pressure to accomplish the strategy, leading to time being spent by team members on something else deemed more urgent.