One of the strongest pain points in business is the lingering fear that your marketing spend has all gone to waste. When you look at those who have found success, you’ll notice they all have one factor in common: they think long term.

If you approach your digital marketing as an ongoing exercise that’s designed to consistently build equity growth, you’ll be more likely to reach a positive outcome. As soon as you start thinking of your marketing efforts as a ‘quick fix’ or a checklist of tasks, that’s when you’ll run into trouble.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing short-sighted goals, such as driving X number of website visitors or ranking on page 1 for X number of keywords, but take a step back and ask yourself – is this really the most valuable use of your time and money? Will these metrics have a meaningful impact on your business in 3 months, 6 months or even 3 years’ time?

Before you invest in any form of digital marketing, you first need to set goals that consider the bigger picture.

Set the right goals

When you boil it all down, what are you really trying to achieve by engaging in digital marketing? Is it to boost lead generation and make a certain number of sales to hit your revenue targets? Are you trying to consolidate your industry reputation, raise awareness for your brand or demonstrate your capabilities?

While every business will have a different answer, the key to achieving any one of these objectives is to pursue opportunities that will support your end goal. It’s not necessarily about attaining a specific metric or result, but rather identifying where you should be channelling your focus to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success.

This is where a digital marketing agency can help. By combining your knowledge of your business with their expertise, you can work together to create a digital marketing strategy that’s tailored to your needs.

Work with an agency

As the digital marketing landscape is forever growing and evolving, it can be challenging to stay on top of every new development. If you aren’t aware of every opportunity, or don’t know how to leverage the full capabilities of each platform, you may find it difficult to decide what’s going to work best for your business.

Agencies are there to provide you with support and guidance, filling the gaps in your knowledge and keeping you up to date with the latest technologies. They are your eyes and ears in the digital marketing world, and you need to trust that they will make the right recommendations for your needs.

A good agency will take the time to understand your business and your goals to determine a roadmap moving forward, as opposed to fulfilling a set quota of tasks that may or may not impact your bottom line.

Finding the right digital marketing partner can be tricky, but there are ways to gauge the quality of service that an agency will provide, which you can explore further in our previous blog.

Put a plan into place

Once you have a digital marketing strategy that’s tailored to your business goals, you need to determine how to make it all happen, from initial implementation through to tracking your progress and tweaking your approach as needed.

At Distl, we follow a framework called ‘OKRs’ or Objectives and Key Results, which you can read more about here.

We work with our clients to define one overarching goal that represents the ultimate aspiration for their business, for example: ‘to be the number one supplier of our product in Perth by 2025’.

Once we have set the main goal, we define quarterly objectives that will put our clients on track towards fulfilling their aspiration. Within each objective, we set 3-5 key results or actions that will drive progress and help our clients get another step closer to their end goal.

As an example, if an objective was to build brand trust, we could set a series of key results including obtaining a certain number of Google reviews, developing a series of project case studies, arranging professional photography and more

Leverage your marketing budget

If you want to make sure your marketing budget doesn’t go to waste, you need to take a strategic approach that’s focussed on what matters to your business in the long term.

To find out what will work best in your unique situation, get in touch with us. Our digital specialists can take a deep dive into your business and discover the most effective ways to achieve your goals. Let’s have a chat today.