Importance of KPIs – How to achieve your marketing goals

Regularly tracking these quantifiable measures, your company will be able to judge how well it’s meeting its operational and strategic goals. It will provide you with the data needed to give you an indication as to how to perform better as a business and ultimately allow you to pivot when a marketing campaign isn’t working. By achieving your digital marketing goals, you’re simultaneously helping to reach your overall business objectives. 

How to set achievable marketing goals

Splitting big business goals into more refined achievable marketing goals provides clear direction, ensures that your goals are relevant to your vision and places great importance on tracking and measuring results. Using the SMART goal framework keeps your business accountable for this. SMART goals are realistic, quantifiable and focused, helping you to clearly define your goals. SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, aspirational, realistic and time-bound.

Specific: Choose one clearly defined metric you want to improve.

Measurable: Your goals must be quantifiable so that you can measure the content you publish against the metric, for example, achieving an X% increase in web traffic. 

Attainable: Your goals should be based on your own analytics rather than industry benchmarks to avoid either setting your standard too high or underperforming.

Relevant: Your digital marketing goals should relate to your overall business objectives and be achievable with the resources that are available to you.

Time-bound: A clear deadline should be set by which the marketing goal will be achieved. This allows you to measure your results and benchmark these results against previous campaigns. It also helps you to make consistent and significant progress in the long term and avoid procrastination. 

Choosing the right KPIs for your business

In order to choose the most suitable KPIs for your business, you need to determine your goals and then work backwards. For example, if your goal is to develop stronger relationships with stakeholders, then you could start by growing your email list. However, if the metric isn’t something you can act on to improve or effect, then it’s not worth tracking and is more than likely a vanity metric.

Other examples of broader business goals include driving more sales, growing brand awareness and increasing profits. These could then be broken down into more refined marketing tasks such as increasing web traffic, gaining more social media followers and driving more click-throughs on paid ads, each of which can be processed into a SMART goal. In addition to having a detailed plan and set deadlines, regularly reviewing your content and campaigns can help to keep you on track so you can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t. This allows you to make any adjustments throughout the time period to attain your marketing goals.

Setting the right digital marketing KPIs for your company is imperative to the success of your business, especially in such competitive landscapes.