Defining your business goals and understanding how search marketing may help achieve these.

As a business owner or marketing manager this post may be nothing new to you however I wanted to start this series with the fundamentals and work up from there as a strong foundation is the key to future success.

With a strong foundation come clear and precise goals and targets. So let’s get going!

Your Business Objectives

As I hinted at above, understanding your business objectives is a must if you hope to successfully implement and optimize a PPC marketing campaign. Without a clear focus, you will run into many hurdles along the way that would have otherwise not been an issue.

Defining Your Goals & Objectives

So, what is your business model? What pays the bills?

There are many headings that could be included here and certainly many more sub-headings that could be added but for simplicities sake, I’ve summarized to the below list. Which one best fits with your business?

• Brokerage,
• Advertising,
• Information/Services,
• Merchant,
• Manufacturer,
• Affiliate,
• Community,
• Subscription,
• Utility.

Your business model will naturally lead to specific goals and target unique to your business.

What are the primary objectives for your business?

The next step in the process is defining the primary business objectives so that your online marketing strategy can be aligned with business priorities – a crucial, but often over looked step in the process.

All too often business’ launch headlong into the online space with one key goal in mind ‘hits’ (hits – scary I know – so 1998),  and forget the fundamental next step, asking themselves ‘What do we want these visitors to do? (Goals)’, and ‘What type of visitor would do this? (What’s your target market  / demographic)’.

As detailed below, for some businesses ‘Traffic’ or ‘Visitors’ does seem to be the best possible outcome for that business model- eg ‘Advertising sales’, but for many more, the right questions are never asked and as a result their online marketing efforts are never as successful as they could be.

Don’t let this happen to you! Be clear from the start what you are trying to achieve.

So, using the example above lets look at two businesses that derive their revenue from online advertising / banner ads.

Business One is an emerging online content generation / information publishing business with the primary objectives of ‘Growing Audience Numbers and Page Views’.

In this case, using PPC to increase the volume of web site visitors and page impressions will be a key and acceptable goal. As long as they’re also asking themselves how they will grow the number of page views per user over time?

Business Two however which it a more mature online content publisher have slightly more refined objectives and are focused more on ‘maintaining market share’ and ‘increasing audience quality’ than just raw visitation numbers alone.

So while both businesses are in the Information Publishing space each have specific goals in mind for their marketing dollars, and this will impact on how they potentially use PPC as a channel to drive these strategies forward.

Business One, while conscious of traffic quality, and building relationships with their users, are still primarily interested in volume and raw traffic numbers, so they may choose to target a much broader demographic in the hope of achieving a large number of visitors to their site.

Business Two however is a little more discerning when it comes to the quality of their traffic, and the likelihood of new visitors they receive actually converting is key.

What I’ve illustrated here is that the goals and objective we set, even for the same type of business, can be vastly different and are dependent on many factors unique to that business. Eg. the market conditions, competitive pressures, the phase of the business, the maturity of the business itself, and the list goes on.

So if you do think you have what it takes to run your own pay-per-click marketing campaigns, first sit back and think through all these factors.
Once your have a good handle on what you are trying to achieve then the next step, setting realistic and meaningful goals for your campaign, is easy.

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Coming up:
MYOPPC Basics – Defining Marketing Goals and Setting Realistic Targets.
MYOPPC Web Analytics – Only a Fool Forgets to Measure Their Site Traffic.