Why and how you should define goals vs objectives carefully?
I’ve found that goals and objectives are often defined and used differently within different companies or parts of a business and this can lead to problems when creating processes to track and improve marketing performance. This post gives a short summary of the difference between goals and objectives and why it matters!
Typically in businesses you see that objectives are specific, they cover the SMART or SMARTER criteria for objectives which make it possible to set specific targets for a time period and measure against these using sales or analytics systems. That’s the way it should be, I think, this is the de facto standard!
But in some businesses or some student case studies, “goals” are used to refer to specific objectives too. Perhaps it’s not helped that confusingly, in Google Analytics, goals are specific quantifiable metrics which are often used as…
Chart of the Day: Which objectives should be in your digital marketing plans?
"Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.”
So said, Kenichi Ohmae, who shared the Japanese approach to business planning with its idea of “long-term planning horizons”. It's useful to be clear on the difference between vision vs goals vs objectives vs KPIs as the measurement pyramid relating them shows.
With long-term digital marketing initiatives and transformation projects, the same is true, so it's essential that your digital marketing strategy features clear, SMART marketing objectives so that you have targets you can review performance against. Broader goals and vision can be useful too, to evangelize the benefits of digital marketing to the team.
A recent report from Adestra highlights the importance of choosing the right objectives to include within a digital marketing plan structure.
According to…
Choosing the right tools and metrics for ABM success
GIVE ME DATA!
Much like every other area of marketing nowadays, there’s a decent amount of number crunching involved in an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign. Throughout the whole process, you’re going to be learning about your accounts through analysis and measurement.
Figuring out how to analyze in an ABM context and which metrics to manage are two common hurdles that ABMers face when they’re executing a project.
With that in mind, I’m going to go into some of the tools you can use to get you the data you need to make the right decisions - the ABM rockstar metrics you absolutely must measure and what you should do with them. Here goes...
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Analytics
We already…
A case study example of applying the Smart Insights RACE framework to measure customer engagement and marketing success
You probably already use—or at least have thought about using—some form of marketing dashboard to track and manage your analog and digital marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). But how has it impacted your decision-making ability concerning customer engagement? And do you effectively leverage that data to help you manage all the most important marketing factors that drive success for your organization?
I subscribe to the basic premise behind the Smart Insights RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) framework for organizing and tracking digital marketing KPIs as they relate to customer engagement, but I’ve expanded it to include analog marketing activities as well.
[Editor's note: Since Kent Huffman wrote this post, Smart Insights have created a RACE dashboard based on Google Analytics to automatically…
Chart of the Day: An example of the 'Critical few' KPIs
To coincide with the release of an enhancement to our RACE digital marketing dashboard, today's Chart of the Day isn't published research around digital marketing. Instead, it's what I think is a nice, practical example of achieving focus through a marketing dashboard:
The visual dashboard above is a well-known dashboard example, taken from the well-regarded source of sharing approaches to managing Digital Business - the UK government's digital service.
Their article explains that when they're building a digital-by-default service like Carer’s Allowance, their team is continuously designing, testing and releasing changes to the live service to improve it and better meet user needs against critical KPIs of which standard usability measures like completion rate, user satisfaction and time to complete are…
You may be focusing on the wrong metrics and missing the most important KPIs
As a digital marketing professional, you may have once expected that your job would involve a lot of creativity – you’d spend your days creating innovative advertisements, writing engaging copy, maybe even crafting catchy memes. And of course, you do work on these tasks, but unless your company has a committed marketing analytics professional on staff, you also likely spend much of your day surrounded by numbers, working hard to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. All those numbers, taken together, are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Unfortunately, sometimes the numbers piling up on your desk indicate that your marketing strategy isn’t working out as well as you’d hoped. That’s when it’s time to take your ad campaigns and KPIs back to the drawing board.
Here are a few analytics strategies you can try to kick start your…
Focussing on the wrong metrics can be a distraction and a waste of time but there are ways to keep your focus and make measurement worthwhile
When it comes to marketing metrics, do you ever feel like you’re chasing the wind? In the case of false metrics, that’s exactly what you are doing.
False metrics are the metrics that distract you from the metrics that really matter. They’re likely to be everyday KPIs, but they don’t really have an impact on the bottom line.
In the world of marketing, false metrics appear all too often and it is commonplace to hear about the wrong metrics being measured and reported.
Examples of the wrong metrics would be:
Chasing Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter followers
Looking at social media reach
Undertaking an SEO campaign in order to increase traffic to your website.
There is a tendency to just gauge what…
Separating ROI from data noise
Learn what metrics can help you truly understand the value of your spend, and what technologies really deliver on this most important metric.
Small-to-medium businesses are investing in their marketing at jaw-dropping new levels. BIA/Kelsey predicts that 2015 will be a banner year for local media expenditure on the part of these organizations, with investment exceeding $50 billion. Digital investments are at the forefront, with 28% of marketers reducing their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing and search marketing capturing the largest share of online spend at 47%, according to Business2Community. But with so many dollars on the line, how can a business know what investments are really paying off?
Return on Investment is the gold standard that today’s marketers are seeking. But with each new media channel, there is new complexity in the metrics…
8 steps showing how to combine SMART and RACE to set campaign goals
SMART goals are a commonly referenced concept in marketing, to help check that goals are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time bound (i.e. have a deadline). Goals have their place at all levels of planning whether business planing, marketing planning or campaign planning. It can often be the difference between a successful campaign and not. As my previous post on goal-setting for marketing showed, they have huge benefits in:
Empowering, aligning and focusing teams and colleagues
Managing senior management
Giving you and your team a sense of success
Allow you to understand a campaign within a wider marketing activity context
But in practice, it's not easy to select and set goals, they are very rarely obvious especially when you put them against the SMART test. Setting goals requires a numbers of thing's…
5 Steps to empower your team to set relevant digital marketing goals
Budget planning. It comes around every year like clockwork. Most CMOs or Marketing directors are pivotal to business planning in the first place, but even after the business plan is formed business goals need to be translated into useful information for the marketing team to formulate their own plans and marketing objectives. If done well, this is a really empowering exercise for marketing teams and gets people out of their day-to-day job and into thinking about the bigger picture, even excited about the year ahead (good for staff retention). The post below outlines the 5 steps I go through to ensure that the marketing department are aligned and facing the same way as the business leaders, it assumes business goals are set and that you are including your team in creating marketing specific goals…
