What Does Marketing Success Look Like?
So you’ve taken on board all the hints, tips and expert opinions from our online Marketing Guide and now, after all your hard work, you have one final question. “What does success look like?”
To put it bluntly, if you’re asking yourself this at the end of a campaign, you’ve already failed. The question needs to be asked before the campaign has even begun. Setting realistic objectives and goals from the outset shapes the development of any future campaign.
Every organisation has unique objectives specific to themselves, but there are others that are universal. At the very least, these need to be considered. These are the key goals I think you should definitely aim for.
Increase Organic Visits
A very important objective. Every website exists to be seen. Every business wants to organically increase the number of visitors and how visible they are to the wider world.
Increase Conversions
What a conversion looks like varies from business to business. It ranges from a click on the “buy now” button to a subscriber sign up. It’s important to understand what a conversion looks like to you. Then do everything you can to ensure the process is effortless for your visitors.
Increase Revenue
An obvious one for pretty much every website online today, from ecommerce sites selling products to content publishers increase ad revenue. Money – as they say – makes the world go round.
Uplift in Social Following
Growing your social followers has now become an important objective in its own right. Business have realised they can use social media to communicate with their customers in a more streamlined and informal manner.
Increase Overall Brand Awareness
This objective should encompass all of your business objectives. Increasing brand awareness through quality content, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, retargeting and so on will help ensure the survival of any business online.
You’ll notice I’ve not included ‘Link Acquisition’ on this list of objectives. I feel strongly that links are an outcome of a successfully executed campaign; they’re not part of the process and should not be used as a measure of success or failure of any campaign. No-one can or should guarantee how many links a campaign will get.
If you are a client and you’ve been guaranteed a set number of monthly/weekly links, you should investigate further. Acquiring a guaranteed number of links can only be achieved by paying for them, which in turn can lead to a world of potential penalisations by Google, not to mention loss of rankings and a decrease in traffic.
In summary, before starting any campaign first ask yourself what you want to achieve. Once you have clear objectives, allocate resources accordingly and – if needed – adopt a multifaceted approach to achieving at least one of the above objectives. Setting up clear and realistic goals at the very start establishes clear benchmarks you can measure against.
Bottom line – you’ll know what exactly what success looks like when it comes along – but only if you decide beforehand what form it will take. Best of luck, and happy marketing!