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How to Define Digital Marketing Goals and Events
Before you can define your digital marketing goals and events, you must consider organizational objectives. Intentional marketing actions should be directly tied to your strategic goal in order to avoid random acts of marketing.
A purpose-based marketing plan will align all marketing activities with your strategic goal. Perhaps one of the most important activities your team will accomplish is defining what your digital marketing goals are, and which events should be tracked in order to provide actionable insights.
Marketing terms can have a life of their own, so to clarify:
Digital Marketing Goal: a prioritized user action
Digital Marketing Event: a user action
All digital marketing goals are events, but not all events are goals. It’s a rhombus – square kind of relationship. A user can accomplish hundreds of events in a single browsing session. You’ll need to determine which add positive value and deserve to be prioritized.
Creating and assigning goals and events to your content allows you to track visitor behavior and measure the value of each activity that visitor completes. Between landing pages, social media sites, email, blogs and other digital spaces frequented by your user, the challenge is to identify which activity represents engagement that offers useful insight worth tracking over time.
Common Events Worth Tracking
— Newsletter subscriptions
— Memberships
— Bounce rate
— Purchases
These are just a few of the events that may be useful to your organization’s strategic goal. Once you identify these events, those that you prioritize (goals) become the actions you want to encourage each user to take when interacting within your digital spaces. Conversely, once you know which actions contribute positively, you can determine which events contribute negatively. This will focus your efforts to not only boost positive engagement, but also minimize negative engagement.
Digital Goals and Events in Action
Marketing Example
- Strategic Goal = 50% more sales than last year
- Marketing Objective = 10% of all new sales to come from email campaigns
- Positive event: email clicks to online store
- Positive event: email subscriptions
- Negative event: unsubscribing from email
Prioritized events (goals) then become
- Increase email clicks
- Increase new email subscriptions
- Reduce existing subscribers from unsubscribing
In this example, our team needs to measure sales generated through an email marketing campaign. Based on last year’s sales, we can determine the exact increase in sales that are representative of the strategic goal. From there, we can determine the exact sales objective to be generated through an email campaign.
In order for users to access the product via email, we need signups AND clicks. By itself this is an important step, but we don’t simply want to attract subscribers; we want to offer a positive experience that adds value. Which means we also need to intentionally prevent negative experiences that result in existing subscribers choosing to unsubscribe later. This maximizes the return from this particular campaign, and it becomes a purpose-based measure that positively impacts the organization’s strategic goal.
Applying this to each event within your organization can be time consuming, but it’s worth the effort to maximize marketing dollars and prevent wasted effort on behalf of your team. We can help clarify and streamline this process.
Find out how we can work together to identify and document the best marketing plays you can run to get to the next level in the next 90 days. Whether you’re looking to reduce spend or optimize conversions, a personalized marketing playbook is your next best step.
