Plan for Success: 7 SMART Digital Marketing Objectives for 2023

Are your SMART digital marketing objectives ambitious enough?

As we move into the second half of the year, it's important to take stock of where you are as a brand and set specific goals for where you want to be. This is truer for your digital marketing efforts.

Being a playing field that hastily evolves, mid-year evaluations of objectives and strategy realignments are beneficial for maximizing your wins in online marketing. But with much to consider – from search performance, social media, email, or other promotion campaigns – many of you will struggle with prioritization.

Many of you will end up at your wit's end, trying to figure out just which performance metrics impact your overall business goals the most. To help you move on with planning your digital marketing strategy, we've narrowed these objectives down to a few tried and true objectives.

7 SMART digital marketing objectives to set for 2023

Common as they may be, but common they are for a reason. The objectives you'll find below are performance metrics that will guarantee you success as long as you plan for them correctly.

1. Increase website traffic.

Many digital marketers are often quick to dismiss traffic as a vain metric – often questioning what weight is held by traffic against conversions.

But to totally disregard traffic is a view that neglects the bigger picture: Conversions come from nowhere else other than traffic. This is because traffic is representative of the estimated number of visitors your website gets; visitors that you can eventually turn into customers.

In addition to conversions, increasing traffic is also causative to improving search engine rankings. This is because high traffic signals to search engines like Google that your website is credible. The result is better brand discovery and sustainable lead generation for your business.

ADDITIONAL READING: How Not to Do Conversion Rate Optimization: 10 Reasons Your Traffic Isn’t Turning Into Conversions

2. Increase conversion rates.

Your conversion rates indicate how well you are able to capture and convert audiences into leads, and leads into paying customers – an objective that is valuable to every business.

This metric is considered a hard metric because it's one that impacts your overall business objectives directly. So whether you're partnering with a conversion rate optimization agency or working with in-house experts, this is a non-negotiable objective to plan for.

3. Boost lead generation.

Leads are important because they allow you to expand your customer base and grow your business. By increasing your lead generation by 30%, you'll be able to increase sales and revenue. There are many different ways to generate leads, so find the methods that work best for you and focus on them.

4. Improve website usability.

If people can't easily navigate your website, they're likely to leave without taking any action. This is why improving website usability is important - it helps keep people on your site longer and makes it easier for them to take the actions you want them to take. A 20% improvement in usability can result in a significant increase in conversions and sales.

5. Increase social media followers.

Social media followers are important because they allow you to reach more potential customers. The more followers you have, the more people see your content and the more chances you have of converting them into paying customers. Additionally, social media followers also help improve your SEO ranking, which can bring in even more traffic and leads.

6. Increase email open rates.

It's important to increase email open rates because if people aren't opening your emails, they can't see the content or offers that you're sending them. This means that they're less likely to buy anything from you, which can hurt your business. There are a few things that you can do to try and increase your open rates, such as personalizing the subject line or using dynamic content.

7. Increase click-through rates.

If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it's important that you focus on increasing your click-through rates. By doing so, you'll be able to generate more leads and conversions through your website.

There are a number of ways that you can go about increasing your click-through rates, and it will ultimately depend on the type of campaign that you're running. Here are a few:

• Creating attractive and eye-catching ads.
• Using effective calls-to-action.
• Offering valuable content or discounts.
• Testing different formats and placements for your ads.
• Targeting the right audience.

How do you know if you are meeting your objectives

Digital marketing objectives are specific, measurable, and attainable goals that you set for your business in order to ensure that your marketing strategy is on track. Having these objectives in place will help you focus all of your efforts on what's important and work towards reaching these goals.

However, it's important to also track how well you're doing in meeting these objectives. This can be done through various methods such as analytics tools or surveys. If you aren't meeting your objectives, then you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Key takeaways

Setting smart digital marketing objectives for your business is crucial for staying on track and reaching your goals. In this article, we’ve outlined nine+ specific objectives you can set for 2023 to help increase leads and conversions. However, it’s important to keep in mind a few key considerations:

• Remember to be SMART. This is important for tracking your progress and so you don't lose the ball on meeting and exceeding your business objectives.
• Stay on the trail. In case it needed to be said, your digital marketing objectives should also be aligned with your overall business goals. You are setting them to paint a bigger picture – not just a for kicks online.
• Keep iterating. The great thing about digital marketing efforts is that you can tweak them on-the-fly (most of the time). And while the objectives you set have immovable goalposts, you can always revamp your approach to speed up your progress towards your these goals – just keep iterating.

What goals are you looking forward to exceeding by the end of the year? Let us know over on Facebook, X, or LinkedIn.

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