The way a brand approaches its marketing can say a lot about what it values and seeks to achieve.
Setting strategic marketing goals, then, is a must.
These goals are the objectives that a business or brand defines as most important. With them, your marketing team can better develop precise strategies and tactics that will have a higher chance of reaching success.
Not only do these goals need to be clear, but they also need to be measurable so that you can track your progress, ascertain which actions work, and identify where improvements need making.
Below we provide seven strategic marketing goals to consider for your business, ways to achieve them, and how to measure them for effect and impact.
1. Drive Organic Website Traffic
In today’s rapidly expanding digital world, consistent organic website traffic is essential to a marketing strategy and to expand your customer base. Without it, you will have a hard time growing your business and meeting your goals.
Organic website traffic involves visitors who find your content or website by way of search engine rankings and not through any type of paid ad. Focus on gaining more of this organic traffic, and you can better reach more of your target audience.
How to achieve this goal
To increase organic traffic to your site, start by focusing on ways to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Once you are ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), you will more than likely see a boost in traffic.
Another way to achieve this goal is to develop a content creation strategy.
For example, start or redesign a blog, establish an editorial calendar, and work with professional writers to help with optimized, high-quality content relevant to your audience.
The writers with WriterAccess can help, providing experience in SEO writing to help you gain more traffic to your site.
How to measure it
To determine how successful your efforts are at driving organic traffic to your site, track and measure website traffic as well as user behavior.
One way to achieve this is through the use of Google Analytics, a free tool that can provide your team with helpful insights into how visitors interact with your brand and which marketing campaigns are most successful.
2. Boost Brand Awareness
Brand awareness centers around the level of familiarity consumers have with your particular brand.
Increasing this awareness is an essential foundational marketing goal, helping you gain a larger target audience over the long term.
Brand awareness also intertwines with trust building, increasing brand recognition.
How to achieve this goal
To boost brand awareness, concentrate on ways to increase your visibility. Start by developing a content marketing strategy that will connect with your target audience.
Follow this up with research on where your target audiences spend most of their time on social media.
Make a plan to meet them where they are and create a social media strategy on which you share your best content. By doing so, you will be making it easy for consumers to learn more about your brand without having to go elsewhere.
Another way to achieve your goal is to spend time developing influencer partnerships and relationships. Influencer collaboration can boost brand awareness in ways that you may not be able to do on your own.
How to measure it
Measuring brand awareness can be a challenge.
However, you can benefit from identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that can provide you with relevant information.
For example, establish KPIs to measure website traffic, social media engagement (e.g., likes, follows, comments), and brand mentions.
3. Generate Quality Leads
Lead generation marketing is essential for building a stronger customer base.
By receiving more quality leads, sales teams can increase their chances of converting those leads into new customers.
While this can be a challenge for many brands, there are a variety of ways to concentrate your marketing strategies and goals toward identifying those leads.
How to achieve this goal
To generate quality leads, use a lead magnet, which is a compelling free resource or special deal that you can offer to your target audience in exchange for contact information. Examples of lead magnets include whitepapers, e-books, checklists, free trials, webinars, or discount codes.
For consumers to freely give up that contact information, however, you need to make sure you boost content quality, ensuring that you are offering potential leads something special that will address a need, want, or pain point.
Landing page optimization is another crucial technique for achieving more leads. It involves improving various website elements that can help increase conversions, such as including a clear call to action (CTA).
You can also generate more quality leads through email marketing strategies, such as enticing them to sign up for email newsletters.
How to measure it
To measure lead generation, establish and analyze specific KPIs that you can monitor on a regular basis. These may include:
- Lead conversion rates: The number of website visitors who complete a specific goal once on your website.
- Lead-to-customer ratio: A metric that shows the ratio of your qualified leads converting to customers over a set period.
- Email open rates: The number of opened emails as compared to how many were actually sent out.
4. Improve Customer Retention
Retaining existing customers is essential for long-term business growth. A pleased customer will return again and again to engage with your brand and make purchases.
They can also help boost your bottom line by bringing in family and friends, and introducing them to your products and services.
In addition, it costs less to retain loyal customers than it does to seek out and acquire new ones, making improving customer retention a beneficial marketing goal.
How to achieve this goal
There are a variety of ways to achieve the marketing goal of customer retention.
A customer loyalty program offers inclusion, making it a special offering for those who already purchase from you. Provide members with exclusive benefits and privileges, such as discounts on new services or products.
Consider personalizing your communications. You can accomplish this goal by finding ways to personalize messages, including in your email campaigns. Extend your efforts into hyper-personalization when possible, extending the individual experience with your brand and making your customers feel special.
Also, focus on ways to provide excellent customer service. Consumers today constantly complain about this area of service, so find a way to stand out with your own approach.
How to measure it
Key performance indicators critical for assessing customer retention success include:
- Customer churn rate: This refers to the rate at which customers discontinue their relationship with your brand or business.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV represents the total value a customer brings to your business over the entire duration of their engagement.
- Customer life value: This is calculated by multiplying the average order value by the purchase frequency and the average customer lifetime.
- Repeat purchase rate: This indicates the percentage of customers who make subsequent purchases after their initial one.
5. Increase Customer Engagement
While you want to increase traffic to your site, you also want them to stay once they get there and engage in some way with your brand.
How to achieve this goal
To increase audience engagement, start with high-quality content. This can include various interactive content such as polls and questionnaires, as well as giveaways and contests.
Engage directly with your audience. For example, respond to comments on your social media and blog posts, presenting yourself as responsive and approachable.
If you fail to engage in some way with your target audience, they can bounce off your site or social media quickly, seeking other brands that engage with them in some way.
How to measure it
Measuring customer engagement will depend on your chosen methods. Ascertain what it is your audience most engages with and responds to, so you can provide more of that in future campaigns.
For example, with social media, you can measure the number of followers and interactions, including likes, shares, and comments. From your blog or site, you can measure bounce rate, conversion rate, time on site, etc.
You can also analyze the number of visitors to your website who follow your call to action. This measurement can provide you with information on how well your lead magnet is at creating interaction with your brand.
6. Expand Market Reach
While you may focus on specific products or services to boost business growth, also consider ways to expand your market reach.
Market reach essentially refers to the volume of potential customers who actually see and experience your marketing efforts. You can gain new audiences and this can lead to a boost in business success.
How to achieve this goal
To expand your reach, start with market research. Find additional audiences who can benefit from what you have to offer in some way, and find out where they spend the most time.
Also, consider product diversification.
Product diversification is commonly defined as the offering of a new packaging or line of your service, product, or product division.
It often involves adding something new to an existing product line or packaging a few products or services together as a special offering. You can also offer different versions of the same product, such as different colors, styles, or upgraded features.
Another option for achieving this goal is to form strategic partnerships.
A strategic partnership is a collaboration between entities that can involve the pooling of resources or technology to create mutual benefits.
By partnering with another business that in some way complements your own services or products, you will be exposed to new audiences, which can boost your customer base.
How to measure it
Measuring market reach can show you the size of the extended audience that now sees your marketing efforts. For this, you will need to carefully define your KPIs so that they can provide you with the most benefit.
KPIs to help you achieve this include:
- Market share
- New customer acquisition rate
- Sales growth in new markets
7. Achieve Marketing ROI
Achieving and measuring the return on investment (ROI) of all your marketing efforts is an essential step.
A positive ROI can indicate that your investment has been profitable and successful, while a negative ROI means that the investment has not generated enough returns to cover the costs.
To increase your revenue, determine the best ways to target more consumers at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
How to achieve this goal
Some of the best ways to achieve a positive marketing ROI include performance tracking, budget optimization, and A/B testing strategies.
Performance tracking starts with monitoring, then measuring certain events and metrics, so you can evaluate if your strategies are succeeding. For instance, are viewers clicking through to your landing page or making a purchase? With this data, you can analyze whether your marketing campaigns are effective or not.
Once you have this information, you can then optimize your budget.
Budget optimization involves the process of deciding on an amount to spend on ad campaigns, then distributing that budget across the different ad sets according to what you find in your performance tracking and other measures.
Another way to achieve marketing ROI is through A/B testing strategies.
These strategies allow you to compare versions of something, such as a landing page, email, or ad, to determine which performs better with your particular audience.
How to measure it
To help achieve a positive marketing ROI, define the KPIs you will be tracking and relying on to show whether your actions are successful. These can include the following:
- Marketing cost per acquisition (CPA): A metric that can measure the total cost of a customer taking a particular action that eventually leads to conversion (e.g., a click, download, install, or sale).
- Conversion rate: A percentage of consumers who take a desired action.
- Overall ROI: An amount showing profit compared to the overall cost of a particular investment.
Set Strategic Marketing Goals and Achieve Success With Help from WriterAccess
By setting achievable marketing goals and knowing how you will measure each one’s success, you can keep your brand on track, not only for boosting the customer base, but also for increasing revenue.
With so many pieces to the puzzle that is your marketing strategy; however, you may be struggling with how to get it all done.
That is where WriterAccess can help.
Our experienced writers can help you create the high-quality content you need, whether it’s for your website, blog, social media, email, or other marketing project. Find out more by signing up for our free 14-day trial today.
