The role of short-term and long-term online marketing goals for your business
It’s impossible to identify a winner or at least to complete a competition if there isn’t a finish line. Namely goals (short- and long-term) make measuring the success possible and help to avoid or amend failure. Implementation of online marketing strategy, like any other sphere of your business, needs a precise set of steps that include short- and long-term goals and objectives.
It may be difficult for business owners to look at their business from a new perspective. In this case an experienced web design, SEO and internet marketing firm can help them to establish marketing goals for all activities of online promotion such as official website, blog, pages in social media, etc. Profound understanding of the matter and the costs of achieving the goals will help to save you time and resources.
The reason you need to set goals for your online marketing
You need to set goals for online marketing and its objectives because they predetermine a purpose and potential result of all online activities. Goals and objectives together make change and adaptation possible so that they can provide a way of measurement to help scale your business marketing efforts The most popular goals must:
- be relevant to general business strategy of the company (For example, “raise web traffic to increase profits of the business”)
- be realistic (For example, “to raise web traffic”)
- have the ability of quantitative measurement (For example, “to raise web traffic by 14 percent”)
- have deadlines (For example, “to raise web traffic by 14 percent by the end of the month”)
You can modify or eliminate tasks that do not support your goals. This frees up time and other resources to focus on activities that do support established goals. This is a cost-effective and efficient way to organize multi-faceted entities such as online marketing.
Establishing and implementation of online marketing goals
First thing you should do is write out all your short-term and long-term online marketing goals which must be laconic, clear, and have only one interpretation. On the next step you should determine the attributes of each goal as what, where, when, who, why, and how. This step helps to assign all tasks to the members of the team who will cope with them in the best way, so every member of the team knows his/her role in achieving the goals.
The difference between short-term and long-term goals
Short-term goals are the goals you want to do in the near future (days or weeks). Long-term goals are those that take a longer time to achieve (several months, a year or several years). Both of them play an important role in success of online marketing.
We can call long-term goals most meaningful and important because they determine directions of online marketing. They often represent general ideas and aspirations, such “Become one of the top-ranking door-to-door moving companies in Austin.” Short-term goals should be considered as supportive goals. These goals usually support big ideas of long-term goals. For instance, “Produce three optimized weekly blog posts about relevant life coaching topics.”
Examples of long-term goals of online marketing
As a small business owner you should make your long-term goals clear. Some examples of long-term goals for an online marketing campaign may include:
- expand the audience on Facebook page to 2000 followers
- increase web traffic by 14 percent by the end of the month
- get 1000 new subscribers for the company’s e-newsletter
- increase company’s conversion rate by 15% by the end of the year
After the establishing of long-term goals you can start to work on setting short-term goals. You can use different ways to determine the most important short-term goals such as internal company surveys or brainstorming.
Some examples of short-term goals for online marketing
Company’s short-term goals can support its general long-term goals, or exist separately. Examples of short-term goals of online marketing include:
- assign social media marketing specialist and determine schedule of SMM (Social Media Marketing) activities
- conduct a research of target audience and make changes in keywords
- improve content of the company’s e-newsletter
- use new and more effective calls-to-action on your web pages.
Every step of setting of short-term and long-term goals should harmonize with your company’s general marketing strategy, goals and objectives. Every task should work in harmony to support your company’s marketing goals and objectives. At ATX Web Designs, we assist new and established businesses in developing short- and long-term online marketing goals. We also provide specific, measurable ways to track your progress. Learn more about how we can help you streamline your online marketing efforts. Call 512-994-0191 or contact us or more information.
