We’ve often discussed the importance of strategy on this blog – you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing for any marketing plans to work. An essential part of this process is goal setting – which occurs on a number of levels as well. Given that we are a full service eMarketing agency I thought it would be useful to chat to our eMarketing Producers, the people who manage projects across online tactics and have to understand, manage and meet clients' needs and expectations with regards to all of them. I snagged some time from the lovely Claire McGuinness and Maijaliina Hansen to get an idea for the over all process.

eMarketing Producers have to work with clients to understand, set and refine goals. “We’re often approached by a client who wants to increase traffic to their site, which is all good and well but one needs to qualify that need – what kind of traffic do you want and what do you want those visitors to do once they reach your site? Is what you need, in fact, 1000 more visitors or do you need 10 quality visitors?”

Maijaliina Hansen

(Ideally) clients would understand their business and their market’s needs. Given that many businesses are still moving to the online realm, eMarketing Producers often have a more thorough understanding of what the various eMarketing tactics can do. It is then up to the client and the eMarketing producer to bring these two things together. “We naturally do a lot of research into our clients and their markets and competitors, we have to collaboratively turn the information we get into goals.”

As I understand it, the strategy is derived from marketing goals and to a certain extent the goals can be derived from the strategy as well. It’s important to lay out, in incredibly specific terms, what you are wanting to achieve, both so that clients understand where they are investing their money and so that all the people implementing the strategy have a holistic understanding of why they are doing what they are doing. Claire's view is that “a large part of project management is the management of expectations, on all sides”.

Claire highlighted that aligning a client’s online marketing goals with their offline goals is quite important – often the one can play an essential role in driving the other. Clients often arrive with a set idea of what their online budget will be, and understanding why those funds have been allocated can help a great deal in establishing what the client feels online should achieve for them.

Claire also likes to ask a few questions at the beginning of any client relationship: 

• Who are you talking to and who would you like to be talking to?
• Do you have a brand positioning? What is it?
• What defines a successful eMarketing campaign for you?

Goals can be set very specifically – do you want to be recognised in line with a certain phrase online? Do you want to make sure that your website brings you 10 qualified leads per month? Do you want 1000 people to download your service guide? Do you want to increase awareness of your new product from 0 to 3000 people in 1 month?

It should then be determined which goals are realistic and which eMarketing tactic will meet them most successfully.

PPC, for example, can be very useful for short term awareness, while the research can feed into a longer term organic search plan. If your marketing goals are set around getting people to sign up to a newsletter in order for you to build a database of contacts, the newsletter sign up and database functionality will bw an important element of the design of your website (see this week’s newsletter article for more on design goals). 

Once the relevant tactic has been chosen sub-goals can be set – the number of click through’s, database sign ups or the conversion rate of site visitors to sales for example. Here each of our team leaders for the various tactics gets involved. This is essential in the measurement and refining of goals, says Claire.

“One thing that’s important to point out is that goals must regularly be refined, it’s an ongoing process. We test all tactics as they are rolled out to see what is working and what is not”.

Once you understand your goals and what you need to track them all data should be collected and analysed to gain a better understanding of what was achieved and what to do next time.

In anecdotes Maija shared about the clients she’s worked on it became clear that every client is unique and so the process will run slightly differently. She said that with clients who made more information available from the get go the process always started off more smoothly, but both she and Claire pointed out that clients very rarely come to them with set goals. 

This is probably because goal setting is one of those topics that is easy to discuss but can be quite difficult to put into practice. You need to really understand who you are talking to and what you can achieve in order to set the right goals. While we all always want projects to run smoothly they can prove challenging and laying out a road map with key milestones is the best way to get as close to perfect as possible. To do this both clients and eMarketers need the ability to take a long hard analytical look at theur brand and convert the resulting insight into goals that will meet their needs.