Setting Objectives for a Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Why should you set objectives?

Setting clear objectives for your digital marketing activity should be the starting point when building an effective digital strategy. These objectives should be business objectives that can be realized through digital marketing. So, your objective might be to increase ecommerce sales, drive more leads, or build audience engagement with your brand.

Business objectives are usually categorized as:

• Awareness or consideration
• Conversion or sales
• Retention

Let’s now look at some examples of these in practice.

Awareness or consideration campaign

In its awareness campaign, Heinz wanted to reach a young audience on social media. It used brand ambassadors (#HeinzMasterz) to highlight its range of products and enticing flavors, and show how to create appetizing meals using Heinz products. There were several HeinzMasterz:

• Cultural cook, fusing recipes from different cultures
• Scratch cook, using simple, cheap recipes
• Vegan creator, targeting vegans
• High-quality meals made easy, showing how to use Heinz products for quirky recipes
• Easy family-style meals, showing how to use Heinz products to add variety to family meals

Posts were tied around seasonal eating, such as summer barbecues, Christmas, and Halloween. The campaign saw a 15.5% increase of awareness on TikTok, and a 32.5% increase of awareness on Instagram. Overall, the campaign reached 18.5 million people, with more than 9,000 recipe shares on TikTok. And the Garlic Black Mayo sold out!

Conversion or sales campaign

PetCulture, an Australian pet-care company, encouraged people to get involved in its campaign to promote pet-friendly policies in workplaces. Followers signed the PETernity PETition to raise awareness of the significant role that pets played in workers’ lives.

After signing the petition, people were directed to the website, where they could explore the product range and enter personal information to get customized recommendations.

The campaign led to the following impressive results:

• 449% increase in purchases
• 350% increase in conversions
• 193% increase in memberships
• 2584% increase in website traffic increased by 2584%
• A dwell time of 2.87 minutes

Retention campaign

Starbucks launched a campaign to reward loyal customers and increase retention and repeat purchases. Customers could become members of the Starbucks Rewards program via the app, and receive benefits such as easier ordering and paying, free in-store refills, and discounts and giveaways.

By 2021, 21 million people had signed up for the Starbucks Reward program!

Using these objectives as your starting point, you can then begin to build out your digital marketing strategy and assess its effectiveness.

• For awareness or consideration objectives, focus on increasing audience reach.
• For conversion or sales objectives, look at your commercial success.
• For retention objectives, seek to increase customer engagement.

The biggest challenge for digital marketers is that there is so much that you can do. This is why it is so important to be clear and concise. You have got to use all of your resources in an efficient manner. Know where your money is best spent and try to minimize budget waste.

Measuring success

Brand success can be measured in terms of conversion (sales and leads) and awareness or consideration and retention (engagement).

Don’t make the mistake of just looking at direct sales! Business performance can also be measured in leads and engagement.

It’s important to know what metrics or KPIs are most suited to measuring the success of your overall strategy, as well as the different channels that make up the strategy. For example:

• When PPC and SEO are used as conversion channels, you can measure their performance in sales or leads delivered.
• When email and mobile apps are used as customer retention channels, their performance can be measured in customer retention, repeat use, engagement, leads, and sales.
• When display and social media are used as awareness and consideration channels, they can be measured in reach and engagement.

When you understand what the measurement and goal of a channel is, you can use diagnostic metrics to evaluate success even further.

Examples of metrics used to diagnose success include:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per lead (CPL) for conversion channels
• Sentiment and awareness for customer engagement channels
• New versus returning users and increased sales or conversions for customer retention channels