SMB owners wear a lot of hats. In addition to the day-to-day function of the business (say, making earrings, fixing pipes or caring for children) they might organise payroll, send emails, do maintenance, manage employees, collect the mail, answer phone calls, take bookings and more.

It’s understandable that digital marketing can fall to the bottom of the list!

When a business owner has a spare two minutes, they might decide to look at their digital marketing. Without thorough knowledge, they jump into the first option they see, and do their best with the time they have. Often, they don’t see results.

But what do you want to achieve through Digital Marketing? More importantly, what do you want to achieve in your business?

Before you can think about exceeding your digital marketing goals, let’s take a minute to set some.

Set Your Digital Marketing Goals

Before you can exceed your goals, or even just achieve them, you need to have goals.

You’ve probably heard of different goal setting techniques. You might even have used some. These very same techniques can be used to help you set goals for your digital marketing.

Have you heard of the SMART method? It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time and can be used to help you structure your goal setting.

A SMART goal for digital marketing could be:

Increase website traffic by 25% by 31 January 2020.

The goal is specific: Increase website traffic by 25%

It’s measurable: You can access data about this through Google analytics.

It’s attainable and realistic (These two are similar): It’s not over-optimistic or unlikely to happen. You might need to do your research to find out what is realistic and attainable for you.

Time: The goal should be achieved by 31 January 2020

Another method is OKR. This method is used by Google and is a slightly more simple way of setting goals.

OKR stands for Objective, Key Results and an OKR goal can be phrased like this ‘I will Objective as measured by Key Results.

Here’s an example OKR goal:

I will get more people to see our products as measured by receiving 25% more website visits/month by January 31 2020.

It’s important that these goals align with your overall business goals.

So find some time (not always a simple ask, we know!), pick a method that makes sense to you and decide what you’d like to achieve. There might be a lot, and that’s ok. If that’s the case, you might decide what is most important to you and focus on that first.

Turning Goals into Strategies

Now you have a well thought out goal, or maybe a few. You know exactly what you want.

But how do you get it?

This is where great strategy comes in. You need a game plan for your digital marketing, and this is where things can get tricky.

Which platforms should you use? Should you do it yourself, or pay someone else? What’s effective?

It can all get overwhelming, so we recommend keeping things simple, at least until you hit your digital marketing stride.

Keep it simple

If you’re feeling inspired by all this goal setting, it might be tempting to jump in and update your website, start posting on Facebook daily and go wild with SEO. Just hold on a minute.

When you go too hard, too fast, it can be overwhelming. Just like training for a marathon, your digital marketing strategy will be more sustainable if you take it in slow and steady steps.

Perhaps your website is difficult to use – make updating it a priority. Maybe you have a great website, but no one is visiting – work on SEO or SEM to get people there.

Break down your strategy into bite-sized chunks so you can keep it sustainable.

What should I do?

Email, Facebook, SEO, Content, Display, SEM, Instagram, Twitter, Apps – These are just some of the digital marketing tools available to you. Everyone you speak to seems to have a different opinion on which one is best, and what you should do.

So how do you choose which is right for your SMB?

It pays to do your research here and to keep your goals in mind. Every tool has different strengths and will help you achieve different things.

If you’re a solicitor, looking for people to book a consultation, what would be your best option? Think about how people behave.

If someone were looking for a solicitor, what would they do? They’d Google ‘Solicitors near me’, right? So, it’d be a good idea to work on SEO and SEM to make sure your business appears at the top of the Search results.

Perhaps you want to get more repeat customers? Email marketing could be a great way to personally reach people who’ve shopped with you before, by sending them loyalty deals or sales.

Or maybe you’re a new business, and you just want people to know that you exist. Facebook advertising can get your brand seen by the very people who are likely to be interested.

Mix and Match

As you continue your journey with digital marketing, you might think about how different platforms can work together.

When carefully planned and thought out, different tools can work together to deliver exceptional results.

You might use social media to create brand awareness, display ads to get traffic to your website and SEM to get people to buy your products. Once people have bought from you, you might then use email to let them know about further deals.

This is what we like to call a full-funnel approach to digital marketing, which means you’re using digital marketing to reach people at every stage of their journey with your business.

Refine your approach

A great thing about digital marketing is that it gives you lots of data to work with. You can see how many people have been clicking your ads, visiting your website or searching for your business.

This can seem overwhelming, but trust us, it’s a good thing. If you place an ad in a newspaper, you can know how many copies were sold, but not how many people took an interest in your ad, or bought your product as a result of seeing it, so it’s hard to know if it was effective.

So use all the great data digital marketing produces to help you see what’s working and what isn’t, and refine your strategy as necessary.

Enlist a helping hand

You might find that doing your own digital marketing is more work than you have time for. In that case, the experts at News Xtend are dedicated to executing strong digital marketing strategies to help SMBs reach and exceed their goals.

Ready to exceed your marketing goals?

You know what to do. Get busy and set some goals, do your research on different tools, then build a strategy in small steps and refine it as you go.

We can’t wait to see you exceed your digital marketing goals!

For more small business news and digital marketing hints and tips, visit newsxtend.com.au.