Set Your Targets. Hit Your Mark.

Let me just be very clear at the outset, if you haven’t set your conversion goals, your project will fail.

And I’m not talking about the big, soft, fluffy goals like, “more traffic”, “more business”, and “new customers”. Frankly, those are the goals of every single site in business. If you’re building a marketing strategy around goals like that, I wish you all the very best.

No, what I’m talking about are real, workable, measurable goals.

How much more traffic? 10%? 20%?

Do you know what those bumps could mean to the bottom line?

Does more business mean bottom line revenue? Is it a percentage in growth? Does it relate to a particular product or product line?

You’ve got to do the work of gathering your numbers. Once you can set a firm target, it’s much easier to build strategies. And there’s no reason you can’t still be aggressive when you are setting numbers, but just ground them in reality.

If you set out to get two million dollars in new revenue for the year, but last fiscal year your site did $370,000 in total, you know you’ve got a big hill to climb. It’s going to take some pretty significant efforts to make that leap.

Could be, you’ve got a budget of $120,000 for the year to allocate to digital efforts. Your board has also mandated that you need to bring in revenue of $500K on that spend.

What’s critically important is that both scenarios present real targets. Marketing strategies built towards specific goals have a much better chance to be successful. What makes these targets to important though, isn’t just in the initial strategy. The real value of targets becomes much more apparent during the active management of the campaigns. With firm targets in place, there are markers to constantly measure against.

With data checkpoints, it’s much easier to make course corrections on a monthly and quarterly basis, rather than waiting for the end of year and getting revenue reports handed over from the Accounting departments.

It’s all about using small slices, of Big Data, to make smart choices that drive change and growth.

And this is something that’s been in our blood for years now. Learn more about how we value data in our Big Data Whitepaper. Set your targets. Hit your mark.