8 Goals All Digital Marketing Campaigns Need to Achieve
Digital marketing campaign goals are key to the success of your efforts—when you know what you want to achieve, set metrics to measure your progress, and execute in a focused way, you can expect to earn greater results that drive growth for your business.
But what, exactly, should those goals be?
In 2023, it’s all about being customer-focused. From hyper-personalized messaging to collecting customer data to communicating on preferred channels to building trust with your audiences, digital marketing campaigns must create connections in order to drive conversions and sales.
In this article, we’ll look at 8 customer-focused goals to include in your next digital marketing campaign.
Quick Takeaways
- Improving lead quality is a top priority for digital marketers and boosts the likelihood of sales conversion.
- Digital marketing campaigns must drive action toward conversion with tactics like CTAs and targeted follow-up.
- As third party cookies phase out, digital marketers must shift focus to collecting first-party data.
- Personalized, omnichannel experiences are important to B2B buyers.
- High brand awareness and established thought leadership build critical brand trust with buyer audiences.
Improve Lead Quality
Standard lead gen may be easier than ever thanks to the technology tools marketing teams have at their fingertips—but lead quality is another story. When your leads are high quality, their needs are aligned with your products/services, and they show high intent and potential to make an actual purchase.
Today, even organizations that generate leads at high volume say that improving lead quality is a top challenge—in fact, 58% of marketers say they’re prioritizing it above common challenges like increasing the number of leads or improving lead data analytics.
A problem for many organizations is that they cast the widest net possible with their digital marketing efforts and hope for the best once leads enter the pipeline.
But to really improve lead quality, you’ll need to target your efforts to reach the right audiences (rather than the largest)—those that align with your ICPs and buyer personas, and thus are most in need of what you have to offer.
Convert Leads to Your Pipeline
Your bounce rate is the rate at which users click out of your website after viewing only one page, and often without taking any action. When it comes to lead gen, this means a failed conversion.
Bounce rate varies widely in the digital marketing world (HubSpot estimates it can fall anywhere between 26-70%), and a certain number bounced users are inevitable (usually about 20% for high performing campaigns). But to regularly convert leads and grow their pipelines, companies must actively work to keep bounce rate as low as possible.
One of your top digital marketing campaign goals, then, should be to inspire action and make it as easy as possible for leads to convert.
Ways to do this include:
- Prominent, compelling CTAs that tell users what action to take
- Short forms that take minimal time to complete
- Exit pop-ups reminding users to subscribe to your email list
- Retargeting ads to reach users as they browse elsewhere
- Offering high-value assets in exchange for contact information
These are just a few examples. The point is this: If your campaign doesn’t culminate in earning a conversion, your efforts haven’t really yielded marketing or sales ROI. All digital marketing must be geared toward user action—action that gets them into your pipeline or at least provides the information you need to engage them again later.
Collect First-Party Data
The cookiepocolypse is happening, and as the likes of Google and Apple phase out third-party cookies, your digital marketing plans must include a comprehensive first-party data collection strategy—one that motivates users to share their information directly with your brand.
There’s more to this step than just asking for data. Established brand awareness, trust, and thought leadership are all necessary for business users to voluntarily give you their data (we’ll cover those more in the next sections).
For now, however, it’s important to note the tactical changes required to shift toward first-party data emphasis. Landing page forms, surveys, polls, events, email subscription lists, and social media are just a few of the ways (among others, outlined by Statista below) that B2B brands are incorporating it successfully into their digital marketing efforts.
Increase Brand Awareness
There are certain brands we all just know—we’re talking the Googles, Coca Colas, and Nikes of the world. That type of brand awareness garners inherent trust. In other words, even if we haven’t experienced the products/services ourselves or need them currently, we trust that they are high-quality and reliable.
And while we won’t all meet global corporation levels of brand awareness, one of your digital marketing campaign goals should be to build it within your own niche and with your target audience. If potential buyers recognize your brand when they encounter it during their vendor research, they’re more likely to trust you and eventually choose you over competitors.
In fact, more than 80% of buyers say this type of trust is essential in order for them to consider buying from a brand.
Content marketing is one of the top ways to build brand awareness, as is a strong social media presence and high-visibility marketing tactics like display ads or event marketing.
Brand awareness takes time and consistency to build, so it’s one goal you’ll need to prioritize over an extended period of time before you really see results.
Create Personalized Experience
Hyper-personalization has quickly moved from a nice-to-have from innovative brands to a status quo expectation for consumers across industries.
Salesforce reports that 84% of B2B buyers say that being treated like a person, not a number is important to earning their business. Separate research from McKinsey found that three-quarters of buyers expect personalization and are disappointed when they don’t experience it.
The takeaway: If your digital marketing campaigns aren’t personalized, you’re likely failing to grab the attention of your target audience, and maybe even sending them elsewhere.
And today, personalization must go beyond auto-complete form fields in your email marketing platform. Buyers want to experience personalized engagement at every stage of the pipeline, from the ads they see to the content that’s shared with them to channels used to communicate with them to the services and solutions offered by customer service teams.
Marketing automation tools can be immensely helpful for executing personalization at scale, including more sophisticated tactics like dynamic content. It’s also important to create a culture within your teams that prioritizes personalization and communicates with every customer in ways that make them feel uniquely seen and valued.
Engage Across Channels
If you’re a marketing or sales professional you know that one outreach isn’t enough to convert a new lead—you’ll need to reach them 6-8 times, on average, before they’ll take action. And according to McKinsey, they’re using more than 10 channels to interact with your brand as they complete their buyer journey.
For optimal results, make it a goal to establish an omnichannel marketing strategy that not only reaches leads on multiple platforms but connects those experiences by saving interaction history, following up on previous engagements, and sharing personalized content, product, and service recommendations based on buyer engagement behavior.
Establish Your Brand as a Thought Leader
In the B2B world especially, thought leadership is a central part of establishing brand trust and awareness with key buyer audiences. Business buyers make decisions that can impact their entire organizations, and therefore want to work with brands who are clear experts and leaders in their industries.
More than 80% of B2B professionals—including, notably, C-suite executives who have major influence over final buying decisions—say that thought leadership increases their level of trust in organizations.
You can establish thought leadership by creating content to demonstrate expertise. Go beyond SEO topics and keywords to include things like commentary on current events and news, opinion pieces, webinars featuring internal subject matter experts, and educational ebooks and whitepapers.
Consistently creating this type of content assures your buyers that you have the knowledge and experience to help them implement successful solutions.
Over to You
Achieving your digital marketing campaign goals requires a focused strategy—one rooted in defined objectives, data-driven strategies, and effective audience targeting.
If you’re looking for support getting your marketing messages to the right prospect audiences, RevBoss can help. Our outbound email software and lead generation services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations.
Schedule a quick call with us today to find out how we can help you win more clients.