Search Objectives

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Purpose of objectives

Ultimately, the objective phase is about setting clear objectives for your search marketing activity.

The purpose and activities of the objective phase combine to establish clear KPIs that will measure performance. As such, it is essential to keep this interplay in mind as you strategize. Your purposes and your activities should always be linked. If done correctly, your campaign metrics will come through this process as a natural output. If you know what your activities are and what the purpose of each is, the KPIs should naturally occur.

Common objectives

So, within a search marketing strategy, there are some common objectives that you’ll always see and these can be categorized in five different ways:

• Business: You’ll want to know what the overall company you’re working for is looking to achieve in the next year. That may be as simple as: Increase revenue and profits by a certain amount, or it may be something more to do with how they’re perceived in the market.
• Audience: You’ll want to know with whom your business wants to communicate, and where.
• SEO: Which keywords are most important for your brand? And, the reason SEO is in here in particular is, increasing visibility for core products can engender trust within your audience. If they search for a keyword and they see that you are ranked well via SEO, because they know it’s not paid media, that can really help to establish trust, and establish your position as an industry leader.
• Product: You will know who your competitors are. In order to win in search marketing, essentially, you want to know what makes your product unique or superior, and what the strengths and weaknesses are of the competition, whether that’s the products or their services.
• Brand: Are you aiming to raise awareness, improve brand affinity or retention, or are you looking to change how your brand is perceived within the market? If you know the answers to all those questions, you can really feed those into your search campaign.