How to Translate Business Objectives into Measurable Goals

We all know our business objectives. For the majority of the time they are: increasing leads & sales and creating brand awareness. Business objectives are not really hard to figure out. What is hard to figure out is, how to achieve these business objectives within the area of our responsibility and expertise and that too in the most efficient manner.

One of the biggest problems of optimizing marketing campaigns is translating business objectives into measurable goals. We need goals to optimize our marketing campaigns and the goals should be measurable. Because if they are not then we can’t measure our marketing efforts. We can’t declare success or failure.

Let’s say your client’s business objective is to increase sales through his e-commerce website. You have got 100,000 products to sell. Now where you should start? What should you change on the website? Which key issues you should focus on that can quickly improve your sales and conversions?………….in other words what should be your goals?

So you need specific solutions which can solve your problem. In other words you need to create measurable goals to achieve your business objectives.

Process to translate business objectives into measurable goals

Step-1: Determine where you are now

Step-2: Identify the problems that need to be addressed

Step-3: Determine the requirements to solve each problem

Step-4: Determine the possible barriers to your proposed solutions

Step-5: Take action

Step-6: Repeat Step-1 to 5

Determine where you are now

We need a baseline measurement so we know where we are starting from and we can use it later to measure success or failure. For example when I start running a SEO campaign, I would note down the current monthly organic visits and organic conversions to the website. I would note down the organic keywords which are driving the majority of traffic and conversions. I would note down the impact of organic search on PPC, email, display and other marketing campaigns. I would later use this data to measure my efforts.

If the organic visits were 100k when i started 4 months ago and now it is 200k then it means i generated an additional 100k organic visits to the website in 4 months. I doubled the organic traffic. But if I didn’t know what the organic traffic was when i started working on the SEO, I would never be able to say later that I doubled the traffic. That is why baseline measurement is necessary.

Determine the problems that need to be addressed

This is the hard bit. You need to determine which part of the business is under performing and why. You can start by analyzing one marketing channel (SEO, PPC, Email, Display, Social Media etc) at a time.  Compare the past performance of a marketing channel with its present performance. Do competitive analysis to determine missed opportunities.

The marketing channel which has started under performing of late and is one of the major source of revenue/ conversions to your website need to be addressed first. Here prioritization plays a key role. You have identified ‘N’ problems but you don’t have the time and resources to address them all. So you need to focus on those issues which have biggest impact on the business bottomline.

For example, if I am running a SEO campaign, I would first focus on those keywords which have proved to be profitable for my client’s business or which have the potential to generate largest amount of relevant traffic to the website. I would focus on optimizing those products which are most profitable for my client instead of trying to optimize all the 100,000 products.

Remember the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales comes from 20% of the products.

So what you need to do is, to determine those 20% and work relentlessly on them. You can’t sell each and every product of your client in each and every location of your country, so why spread your marketing efforts and resources too thin by trying to be visible everywhere for everything you sell.

Determine the requirements to solve each problem

Once you have identified the problems you need to address first, you would focus on the requirements to solve each problem. Following are the general requirements:

1. Well defined strategy – what set of tasks (strategies) are required to solve a specific problem. For example if my problem is ‘decline in non-branded organic search traffic month after month’ then I need to check the rankings of the non-branded keywords and then aim to improve the search engine ranking of those which are now on the second, third or fourth page through content development and link building.

2. Expertise/area of responsibility – what level of expertise is required to solve the problem and who will be the best person/department responsible for providing the expertise. For example if ‘decline in non-branded organic search traffic month after month’’ is the problem then the best person to fix this problem is the SEO.

3. Tools and support – What sort of tools and support is required? You may need certain tools to carry out your strategy. So you need to identify all such tools. For example you may need certain tools for keyword research, rank tracking, social media tracking etc.

4. Measurement model and KPIs – What to measure and how? What you measure is entirely dependent on your goal. For example if your goal is to measure the performance of ‘non-branded organic search traffic’, you measure things that indicate the performance of non-branded organic traffic like rankings/conversions/revenue of non-branded organic keywords. Choose only those metrics/KPIs which are available to you.

5. Definition of success and failure – You need to determine what should be counted as success and what should be counted as failure. If you set numerical targets for each goal then measuring success/failure becomes easy. For example if we could increase the organic traffic by 25% in the next 4 months then we will achieve success, otherwise we will fail.  Without defining success and failure you can’t measure the performance of your marketing efforts and get optimum results.

6. Deadline – What is the estimated completion time? Without deadlines no goal is unachievable. So setting deadlines is critical to solving a problem.

7. Cost- How much it will cost to implement the strategy? You need to keep the cost into account while solving problems. No company has unlimited marketing budget. So if your strategy is not affordable to execute then you need to re-evaluate it.

Determine possible barriers to your proposed solutions

Below are possible barriers to your proposed solutions which you must consider before you execute your strategy or present proposed solutions:

1. Lack of expertise – For example you want to increase the traffic through non-branded organic keywords but you don’t have skilled link builders or subject matter experts for content development.

2. Outside your area of responsibility – You want to reduce the page load time of your website but this task falls into the hand of the IT department on which you have little to no control or you have issue with the price of the products because you think that products are overpriced and no one will buy them no matter how much SEO/CVO you do.

3. Unavailability of required tools or support – You need a certain tool to track the performance of top 100 keywords but you can’t get an access to it. You didn’t get an approval from senior management to install certain tracking code on the website.

4. High barrier to entry – You are operating in a highly saturated market where big brands have a monopoly. Consequently it is very hard for you to capture search market share.

5. Time constraints – You need to deliver results in unreasonable amount of time because your manager doesn’t understand what it really takes to do your work.

6. Operational inefficiency - organizational hierarchy, bureaucracy, company culture and internal politics all play an important role in not getting things done.

These are not the only barriers. Barriers vary from business to business. So you need to figure out the possible barriers in your situation. Once you have determined your barriers, you need to re-evaluate your strategies and other requirements to solve each problem. For example if you don’t have a skilled link builder, then is there a possibility to outsource link building?

Take action

This is the most important step. If you don’t take any action, you won’t achieve anything.  Don’t spend all of your time in just planning so that you can get that “perfect solution” to your business problems. Perfection is a great time sucker and the enemy of good enough. Over planning and over analysis can make things very complicated and they can keep you away from taking any action. So take action and refine your strategy as you move on by repeating the steps from 1 to 5. Make mistakes and learn from it.

Now it is your turn. How do you translate business objectives into measurable goals? Please share your views and insights.

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