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Study Notes
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You should establish digital objectives to help you achieve your overall business goals. Digital objectives need to be SMART:
An example of a SMART objective is: “I will improve my retention rate by 1% over a period of six months.” So if your retention rate now is, say, 70%, you can aim to increase that by 1%. You have to be quite clear about where you stand now - your baseline, before you define your objective and set SMART criteria for it.
Be aware of the need to communicate and share information, messages, and the objectives of your plan to all relevant parties across the organization and secure support. This can be achieved if you follow these steps:
Ask the following questions to ensure objectives are specific and aligned to a goal:
You need to ensure that your objectives are measurable. So include numeric or descriptive measures within them that define quantity, quality, and cost. This will allow you to establish whether or not the objective has been met clearly, whilst also providing more of a focus to the goal.
Ensure that objectives are achievable by reviewing:
Compare the objective to how it will support the current business proposition in order to assess how realistic it is. Does the goal align with the broader goals of the company or department?
In order to ensure the objective is timely, businesses should assign a definite target date for completion and for frequencies of steps which are important to achieve the objective.
It is important to integrate milestones and dates from other projects which may affect your objectives, to ensure they are timely.
A goal should have a timeframe – a deadline or date for completion. Setting a deadline reinforces the seriousness of the goal in your mind. It motivates you to take action. When you don’t set a timeline, there is no internal pressure to accomplish the goal, so it gets put on the back burner.
Within your established timeframe, ask yourself:
Satarupa Banerjee holds an MBA from Cranfield University and an MSc from University College of Science and Technology. She has extensive experience across numerous industries including insurance, retail, healthcare and banking. Currently, she heads Direct Marketing Products in Direct Line Group where she has delivered several CRM campaigns. In the past she has also held roles as Customer Value Strategies Manager, Change Manager, and Sales Performance Manager.
Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module focuses on using strategic planning to drive marketing activities that will enable a business to win a competitive advantage. It covers assessing internal capabilities and addressing skills gaps, benchmarking, information gathering, SWOT analysis, evaluating digital channel tactics, and strategy implementation. It also covers documenting a digital strategy using SMART criteria and knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness of a digital strategy using KPIs, targets, and marketing analytics.