Small Business Marketing Series - Vol 4
This blog post is the third of our Small Business Marketing Series. The series’ aim is to provide small businesses in New Zealand with hands-on practical advice to increase their marketing performance. If your small business requires marketing solutions, get in touch with the team here.
ESTABLISHING MARKETING GOALS AND BUDGETS
How do I set the right digital marketing goals?
Digital marketing goals are designed to move you towards an ideal outcome whether it’s more leads, brand awareness, more valuable sales, or general business growth. However, achieving small business goals can be difficult. In a survey by coschedule.com, 41% of marketers said that they sometimes achieve their goals, with 6% rarely achieving them, and 3% never achieving them. That’s 50% of marketers finding it difficult to achieve their goals.
Ultimately small business owners can summarise what they want with one word – sales. And we think that you’re wanting the same thing. But how can you generate more sales? How can New Zealand small businesses grow? Well, ultimately through designing the right marketing goals that are specific to your business.
In the past volumes of this series, we’ve talked about the importance of applying the SMART goal principles to marketing campaigns. And we should also apply them to what you would like to achieve with your own business. But before getting in-depth, we recommend brainstorming some high-level goals that you would like to achieve without too much depth, to gain a greater understanding of what you want.
Here are some examples:
To increase leads within my industry
To increase sales of my entry-level product
To grow my social media page by 100 likes next month
Once these are complete, you can filter, edit, and refine them in the next section.
Building smarter marketing goals
Go ahead and choose the goals that align best with your brand. Now it’s time to evolve and transform your most important goals. For example, to grow my social media page by 100 likes next month. With the SMART goal process, it may evolve into something like this:
To increase my page likes by 100 on Facebook over the next 30 days. This will be measured through the number of page likes generated through different marketing initiatives to also identify which method is the cheapest and converts the most.
Now that we have your SMART goals, we’ll need to look at your potential strategies and tactics to achieve your goal(s).
Strategies and tactics to achieve your marketing goals
There are numerous ways this could be achieved on Facebook, three examples may include:
Hosting a giveaway
Running a specific ‘Page Likes’ campaign
Hosting a Facebook event
Each tactic has its own pros and cons. You may host a giveaway and generate a lot of page likes, but these may not consist of your target demographic and may not engage with your brand or convert into customers, in other words, they’re likely deadweight (although, there are a couple of reasons for why this method could be useful).
Running a ‘Page Likes’ campaign can be a good idea, but depending on your industry and business type, this may be a more expensive option. For example, some of our clients receive page likes with a low cost-per-like, making the campaigns viable, whereas professional services will have higher cost-per-likes and prove ineffective compared to other strategies.
The goal of this exercise is to evaluate your own potential sources of generating page likes, evaluate their pros and cons, and then decide on one or multiple campaigns to pursue. Now you’ll have a good idea of the required activities for each campaign option.
If you have run similar campaigns in the past, it may be worth gathering their cost history. For our example, we’re looking for estimated cost-per-likes from previous campaigns. This can be found in your Facebook Ads Manager under campaigns. This will provide a gauge on what it will cost to convert a sale for your business. If it seems too high, it’s likely due to your creativity, copywriting, or targeting needing adjustments. If you don’t have previous ad data don’t worry – you’ll gather it as you move ahead with your first campaign. With your cost-per-conversion data, you can clearly work out the cost to attain your target conversion rate for future campaigns.
How much should I spend on my digital marketing campaigns?
When it comes to developing a marketing budget, it can be difficult to decide where to start. One way to develop an accurate marketing budget is by reviewing your historic marketing data.
How much has it cost to generate a lead (CPL)?
How much have you spent to acquire a customer in the past (CPA)?
What channels have seen the lowest/highest cost-per-lead or acquisition?
With this information, we can work out what the best bang for your buck is.
You may find that a previous page like campaigns have generated likes for your page for $2.00 each (this number varies greatly between industries). Then determining the budget required for your SMART goals is simple - $2.00 cost-per-like * 100-page likes = $200 required to achieve this goal.
Another example of budgeting
Let’s say you’re an e-commerce store that sells Christmas trees on demand. Last year in your town, a Christmas tree went for around $75 for a 2 metre tree. Based on last Christmas’ data, you’ve worked out that you converted 1 out of 20 visitors to your site (or 5% of traffic), and it cost you $0.25 per visitor. This is all the information you require to calculate an estimated marketing budget.
Let’s say that your goal is to sell all 200 of your Christmas trees before Christmas Day, and you want to know how much this will cost you to accomplish. We can work this out by taking your past cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $5.00 and times it by the number of trees you want to sell (200). We are left with $1,000 required for your budget this year.
That’s a wrap
Now that you have everything you need to know to determine your own digital marketing SMART goals and budget. Before you go, here’s a little bit about us: We are an experienced Palmerston North digital marketing agency that can help with e-commerce marketing and growth, social media advertising, search engine optimisation, Google Ads, marketing strategy and more. We’ve built strong eCommerce websites, with one of our clients achieving nearly 3x ROI within 3 months. For a free consultation with one of our team members, contact us today.