Online Marketing Goals - What are Yours?

In order to grow your small business you have to be engaged in some sort of marketing. If you're not doing any marketing for your business, it can’t grow. You can actually start losing business because you aren't actively trying to put new prospects in your sales funnel.

Online Marketing As a Tool

Online marketing is a great tool for you to use to gain new clients for your business. The first step is having a website. You just can't do online marketing effectively without a website. Believe it or not I have actually seen some small business owners who think having a Facebook page is the equivalent to having a website. A Facebook page is not a website. It will do nothing to grow your business. A Facebook page has to be used in conjunction with a traditional website for it to be effective. And that website has to have specific measurable objectives. That means you have to know what you want to accomplish with that website.

There are a number of things that you can do to grow your business online. You just have to know how you want to do it. So some of the objectives that you can have with online marketing are:

• Generate leads
• Sell more products
• Create brand awareness
• Provide information
• Create relationships

In order to accomplish your marketing objective, your website should be easy to navigate and guide your visitors to perform a specific action. Your call-to-action should tell your visitor exactly what it is you want them to do, whether it's buying a product, downloading a free report, or picking up the phone to call you for more information. Don't leave it to chance. Tell them a exactly what you want them to do.

Some common website performance issues that I've seen are:

1. Low traffic from target audience.
2. High bounce rates, which indicates that there is lack of engagement.
3. Low opt-ins and leads. In other words, a low conversion rate.
4. A small social media following.
5. Paid ads are drawing a response.

These website performance issues are often the result of not having a clear marketing strategy for your business. There are only 3 goals that you should have:

Online Marketing Performance Goals

1. Attract your target audience. You accomplish this by using SEO, social media, PPC, and offline advertising. You analyze those results by looking at your search engine ranking, the number of impressions you have for pay per click, and how much web traffic you're getting. If you traffic is growing, then there is something wrong.
2. Engage your target audience. You do this by encouraging your visitors to consume your content and providing them with information so that they view you as the trusted authority. You can analyze those results by looking at how long visitors are on your site, bounce rates, social shares, and things like page views.
3. Convert your website visitors into qualified leads, subscribers, and customers. You accomplish this by using Web forms, e-books, free reports, phone numbers, and online chats. And you can measure your results by tracking your conversion rate, your number of phone calls, and how many web form opt-ins you get.

Since the first step to online marketing is having a website with clear measurable objectives and I know that small business owners are very often looking for a way to save money, I recommend having a website that you can manage and update on your own. This is where having a content management system is a perfect solution for small business online marketing.

My content management system of choice is WordPress. The benefits of using WordPress is it's easy, inexpensive, thousands of themes that you can choose from so that you can have a unique look for your website. It is super simple to manage, adding content is really easy and you don't have to be a web designer to be able to add photos or the like.

There are other content management systems to choose from like Drupal or Joomla! But for me WordPress is the way to go. It's the most simple to use and it's been around the longest. It's also the most popular, and it’s very quick to launch. You can have a website up and running in as little as 5 minutes. And it's actually very cheap to host.

If you noticed, I mentioned earlier about measuring your results. A lot of people make the mistake of not measuring their results. I ask them; "How do you know you've reached your goal, if you don't know where you are."