What online marketing goals do you need
With the end of the year quickly approaching, you are probably looking to set some online marketing goals for your business. However you may be wondering what online marketing goals you should focus on.
The 3 major outcomes you should be focused on are building your audience, engaging your audience, and selling to your audience. In this post you’ll learn more effective ways to set your online marketing goals to focus on those 3 areas.
How to set online marketing goals in relation to building your audience
One of the online marketing goals you should have for your business is to build your audience. Really this is the key foundation to any business that you are marketing Online. If you don’t have an audience, you can’t get much results.
When you have an audience, there’s a lot of benefits that go with it. One of these benefits is people to talk to. I know a lot of people in the online marketing space struggle because they feel they don’t have enough people to talk to about their business.
Building an audience can eliminate this problem. On top of that, the three key foundations are building your audience, engaging your audience, and then selling to your audience.
It’s pretty hard to engage and sell to an audience that doesn’t exist. This is why building your audience is the key foundation, and should be one of your primary goals for your online marketing business.
There are several different areas you’ll want to focus on and build your audience in as a part of your online marketing goals, so let’s break those down.
The primary online marketing goal you want to focus on, regardless of where else you build your audience, is your email list
You may have heard of it before but the money is in the list. If you haven’t, what this is referring to is your email list.
Some people say email marketing is dead, but I don’t think that’s anywhere close to reality. Sure not as many people maybe open email like they used to, however that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.
One major factor of why building your email list is so important is that you own it. Building your audience on social media is certainly valuable, but you don’t own those platforms.
I know I’ve had audiences of hundreds of thousands that have gone away overnight because of changes with platforms. It doesn’t mean that those platforms weren’t valuable, but it just shows the power of not owning a platform.
An email list though, you do actually own. This is why I growing your email list should be one of your primary online marketing goals moving forward.
There are several options for building an email list I know I’ve been using Aweber for several years. It’s very cost-effective and one that I’d recommend if you’re just starting out.
If you’d like to get your first 30 days for free of Aweber check out this link www.coachmikemacdonald.com/aweber
Advantages of building your email list as part of your audience building goals
Beyond you owning your email list, there’s also a lot of other advantages to email marketing. Nowadays almost everyone has a smartphone, so people often have immediate access to their emails.
One of the most coveted real estate spaces in the world right now is the space on a smart phone home screen. If you can hop into that space you can earn money.
Email marketing is one great way to do that, and secure your spot in that space. On top of this is a lot of leverage with email marketing. This is why building your email list should be one of your online marketing goals moving forward.
Imagine having to individually reach out to a thousand customers or even 10000 potential customers. How long would that take you? Hours? Days? Months? Years?
I’d imagine it take a long time regardless of how many people are on your list. That’s why I email marketing is so valuable. You can create one email and send out a email blast to tens of thousands of people.
Imagine writing one email that promoted a product or business of yours, that led to thousands of dollars of sales. That email may have taken you 15 to 30 minutes to write, but then led to massive results.
There’s three foundations to wealth building. Money at work, people at work, and systems at work. Email marketing is one of the most powerful systems you can put to work in your business.
Tips for building your email marketing list
There’s lots of ways to build your email marketing list, but one I’d highly recommend is using lead magnets. A lead magnet is basically giving away value in exchange for your target market’s name, email, and phone number.
This is one of the best ways to build your email list versus just offering a newsletter. Newsletters are great, but everyone has one, so why should someone sign up for yours versus someone else’s?
This is where it leads magnets come into play. Leading with value that your target market one is going to get you many more subscribers and just a newsletter.
Creating your lead magnet doesn’t have to be tough, just think of needs, wants, and pain points of your target market. If you create a lead magnet that solves those, you’re in business.
If you don’t yet have the tools set up to create your own lead magnets, you might want to check out this free 14-day trial of Clickfunnels to set those up.
In addition to that, proper marketing of your lead magnets is essential as well. I put together a free lead generation boot camp to teach you how to do that. You can access that here.
Use email marketing to build relationships with your audience
Another advantage of email marketing, and why building your email list should be a part of your online marketing goals this year, is you can build a relationship with your list.
All things being equal people tend to do business with those they know, like, and Trust. Sending value-based content to that list on a regular basis can create that relationship.
Not everyone that joins your list will immediately be ready to buy from you. People go through a roller coaster in life, so timing may not be right when they first hop on your list.
However, once they are on your list, you can continue to market to them over and over. As you provide continual value to this audience, when timing is right, they come to you.
This is yet another reason why email marketing, and building your list should be a part of your online marketing goals this year.
Finally use email marketing as a way to drive free traffic
Finally another great benefit to email marketing is driving traffic to your website and offers. As your email list grows, you can send a significant amount of traffic to your site and offers.
Still do this in a way that provides value and build relationships, and you’ll have lots of visitors to your site daily. Every time you create new content, you can send people back to your website to view it.
You could certainly run ads to your content, which works, but it also cost you money. This is why email marketing is important, because you can send an email out to your list and drive the same kind of traffic to your site as an ad.
I’d suggest sending your traffic to things like a blog or even YouTube videos or combo both. If you are doing this, another powerful option is the P.S. line in your email.
The bulk of your email could be value-based, and new content you are sending to your audience. The P.S. line at the end could be an offer, or simply something you want to drive traffic to.
Don’t forget the P.S. line, as it’s a very valuable aspect to ever email you send out. So don’t neglect email marketing and building your email list as a part of your online marketing goals this year.
Have building your audience on social media, another benchmark of your online marketing goals this year
I talked about some of the downsides of building your audience on social media, but there are many upsides as well. If you’re building your social media audience in addition to building your email list, you should be fine long-term.
There are a lot of advantages to building your social media audience, and this is why it should also be a part of your online marketing goals this year. Building your audience on social media is a great way to drive traffic and generate leads for your business.
One social media platform I highly recommend spending time on is YouTube. YouTube is one of the largest search engines in the world next to Google. This is a big advantage for social media.
Other social media platforms are great, but a lot of the time you make content once and it’s gone forever. With YouTube marketing you can create content once, and it can continue to work for you forever.
This is the power of evergreen content on social media. Building up your base of evergreen content should be another online marketing goal you focus on this year.
Two forms of evergreen content to focus on building as part of your online marketing goals
YouTube is one major source of evergreen content you should create, the other is blog posts. The downside to YouTube is you don’t own it, the upside is, it is searchable and evergreen.
With blog posts you both own it, and they are searchable. I personally recommend combining YouTube and your blog posts. This means you embed your videos in your blog post.
You can also create YouTube videos that drive traffic back to your blog post. This is a great ecosystem to grow your business through social media. So creating content in this fashion on a regular basis, should be one of your online marketing goals this year.
If you’re new to blogging and not sure where to start you might want to check out my recent post on how to make money blogging. If you’re not new to blogging, or want to take it to the next level I’d recommend taking this blogging course. Access it here.
The next major focus of your online marketing goals should be engaging your audience better
I talked about it earlier, but if you don’t have trust, and rapport with your audience, it’s going to be very hard to bring in more leads and sales. This is why engaging your audience should be another benchmarks to add to your online marketing goals this year.
The better you can engage your audience, the more trust and rapport you’ll have. Then the more likely they will sign up and buy from you. There are several ways to engage your audience, but the ideal option is to create value based content that serves them.
As the old saying goes “service too many leads to greatness.” Implementing that idea in your business is essential for engaging your audience.
There’s a lot of different ways to engage your audience, but ideally you want to use video marketing as a part of it.
Video of the fastest way to build trust, report, and credibility with your audience. This also helps develop a relationship very fast as well.
When people can see you on video, they can hear your voice, see your mannerisms, and get a better understanding of your personality. This helps build a relationship very quickly.
The better relationship you have with your audience, the more income you’ll make through that audience. This is why engaging your audience more should be a foundation to your online marketing goals.
How often should you engage your audience?
At this point you may be wondering how often should you engage your audience and what daily, or weekly, goals should you set for yourself. Everyone builds their business differently, but I would suggest creating content at least once a week for your audience.
Anything less than that and people start to get disengaged with your content. Obviously something is better than nothing, so if you’re just getting started, and have no time, at least create something on a monthly basis, but weekly is ideal.
The more often you can engage and interact with your audience the better. There are several strategies you can use for this but live video Is another marketing strategy I highly recommend.
There are many ways to do this from Facebook live, to periscope, to zoom calls, Instagram live, webinars, and more. Regardless of what way you implement live video, I think it’s a valuable aspect to add into your business.
Live video is really the closest way to actually being in person with you, plus it’s more time-effective for you as a business owner do a live video versus meeting in person.
I used to do a lot of in-person meetings to do presentations, which were great, but they ate up a lot of time. Travel time to the presentation, setup before and after, as well as travel time back home, ate up a lot of my day.
This doesn’t mean you abandon offline presentations or meetings, but you can replace a lot of them with a zoom call or live video. This allows you to grow your business faster, and leverage your time.
So be sure to add live videos to your online marketing strategy and doing them consistently as a part of your online marketing goals this year.
Make selling goals for your online marketing business
Last but not least, you want to have sales goals as a part of your online marketing goals this year. Not to say sales goals aren’t important, but often when you focus on building your audience goals, and engaging your audience goals, your sales goals work themselves out.
One thing I find holds people back, is they set massive sales goals for the year, but don’t set daily, weekly, or monthly goals. Having a big goal is great, but without little goals in between, it’s hard to stay on track and motivated.
The game I play to keep myself motivated it’s called Club Super 8. Basically what this means is you set some type of results-based goal for each month.
For example you may set each new customer a value of 1. So if you get eight customers for the month you’ve reached Club Super 8. You might have different levels of packages you sell, so maybe the ultimate package is worth three points.
Whatever the case may be for how you allocate points towards your Club Super 8, make sure when you hit it you reward yourself.
What’s cool for this is you can use this strategy not only for yourself, but your sales team as well. When you hit Club Super 8, “Treat Yo-Self!”
Decide something fun you want to do, or something to reward yourself with. For me I often buy video games when I hit my club Super 8. This is a great fun way to stay on track with your online marketing goals each month.
Set Daily, weekly, monthly online marketing goals for sales
Now you want to set daily weekly and monthly sales goals for your business, but if you don’t hit them don’t beat yourself up. Ideally a more effective way to stay on track and motivated is to set activity goals for yourself.
When you set activity goals, the numbers can work themselves out on their own. Often I find business owners struggle because they only focus on results not the activities they’re doing.
Building your business is going to require you getting through a learning curve. Focusing on activity goals and help you do that. Your habits will make you or break you, and having the right activity goals will grow your online marketing business.
Focusing on results is great, and you should pay attention to them, but if all you do is pay attention to results, it can become dis-empowering.
This is why I feel having activity-based online marketing goals can be more important than specific sales goals. All out massive action creates massive results, so make sure you are doing that activity steps, and sales often work themselves out.
Avoid the online marketing goals killer – New years resolutions
You may be reading this post at the beginning of the year, right before New Year’s, or some other time. Regardless, one killer to your online marketing goals, and a trap many people fall into, is New Year’s resolutions.
It’s great to get motivated at the beginning of the year and to want to get better results than last year. However, a big problem a lot of people run into is they wait until New Year’s resolutions to take action.
There’s never a perfect time to build your business and go after your online marketing goals. The time is now!
Stop waiting around for all the lights to be green before you take action. Decide that now is the beginning of the year for you. Don’t wait until the new year starts to start reaching your goals.
Set yourself up with a good foundation and take action now, versus waiting around. Start building momentum for yourself today versus waiting for some magic time to get started.
Action is the only thing that creates results, so don’t wait around for some magic day to take action. New Year’s resolutions are good, but why not just make today the start of your new year.
Procrastination is one of the major killers of reaching your online marketing goals. So take action today and start building your dream business.
Did This Blog Help You? If so, I would greatly appreciate if you could comment below and share on Facebook
Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald
Email: [email protected]
Considering Starting a Home Business?
Check out my Work With Mike Section
“I help coachable and teachable professionals become Financially Free and Live Full Time! Helping you create a better tomorrow through a better you!”
P.S. If you aren’t generating leads for your business it’s because you don’t have a system in place to do it. CLICK HERE to set up the exact system I use to Rake In Quality Targeted Leads Daily
If you enjoyed this post, What online marketing goals do you need, please retweet and comment below
