The three main components of goal setting and mapping out a plan of action are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Keeping these in mind as you draft your marketing plan will help you stay on track.

Framework Your Goals the SMART Way

There are plenty of factors to consider when determining your digital marketing goals. The value of documenting those goals will pay dividends in the long run. When goals are clear you are able to stay on track to ensure every marketing strategy deployed, every post published, is delivering to those goals. 

To get started, you’ll need to take a step back and think about what foundation you want to build from. The SMART approach is one of the most widely used marketing frameworks in use. It dictates that your goals should be:

This framework is effective in collecting your thoughts and motivating you to draft a plan of action, but it doesn’t give you an obvious starting point. You may have an idea of what you hope to accomplish, whether it be more followers or a greater ROI, but unless you can measure the effort of every initiative against its success, you won’t be able to track your progress. And if you’re not recording any related data, then you have no way of seeing whether or not your tactics are working.

You need to lay out clear, quantifiable objectives, and then take the time to understand exactly what sort of a lift is going to be required to achieve this. Know where you want to get to, but be sure to map out the best possible route to get there.

Decide Which Goals to Focus On

You may have a lot you want to accomplish in the new year, and if that’s the case, then prioritization will be key to helping you disperse your energy and resources appropriately. There are three main components of goal setting. Mapping out a plan of action to accomplishing each one will give you a more well rounded marketing plan. Those three components are:

• AWARENESS | Awareness has everything to do with your community growth. This is a measure of your brand’s presence and impact, and can be quantified by the number of pageviews your site generates, the amount of time spent on a page, how many social followers you have, and what kind of impressions every tactic you deploy makes.
• CONSIDERATION | Consideration applies to the level of engagement of your community and the process of nurturing a broader or more targeted audience. Consideration is gauged by your contact list, the amount of subscribers your email base has, as well as the rate of interaction with your content. 
• CONVERSION | Conversion is the closing of the sales loop. Whether that’s a completed check out or a scheduled consultation, this is a measure of the customer’s value and serves as a benchmark for future goals.
  

Record Your Success

At the end of the day, you need a quantifiable goal. This way, you can establish milestones along the way. if you don’t have a way of measuring the effort of every initiative against its success, you won’t be able to track your progress or make adjustments. And if you’re not recording any related data, then you have no way of seeing whether or not your tactics are working.