Web Marketing - The Good and Bad Objectives

For most of the meetings I go, the prospects are unclear about what they want to achieve through Web Activities. The common answers are 'Sales' 'Traffic' and 'Leads'. 

It takes lot of brainstorming to establish what you want from all the marketing activities. Let's look at the good and the bad objectives.

I have discussed many aspects of SEO and SMO or Web Based Marketing in my other blogs you might want to read. Please follow the link: 

           https://vizibleonline.blogspot.in/

Before even hiring an agency to do your SEO/SMO or Brand Rep Management, you need to sit down and discuss the objectives internally. Why do you want to do Web Marketing? Why do you want keywords to work for you? What kind of engagement do you want from the prospects? Now, figure out what will be your parameters for Failure and Success. There can be several outcomes of this discussion and they can be categorized into good and bad objectives.

Good Objective:

• Our target customer is someone who searches for specific terms related to my Service or Product. We want our company or product to appear everytime they search with these keywords. Good Objective!
• We need more sales and For that we need more leads. We think SEO will do the job for us. Fine, great.
• We want to increase the number of downloads of our mobile app. Also a fine Objective.
• We need Reputation. We have some bad reviews, although we have worked on them, they are still showing on top of some fantastic reviews our customers have given. Fine. You want or need to regain your reputation, and this is a good objective. Those are all good Objectives.

Bad Objectives:

• Traffic Traffic Traffic. But why would you do that? Why do you want to ask everyone to visit you, leave an inquiry, become a lead and go dead? Terrible, terrible goal. Traffic can never be a primary goal. However, after a period of focusing on the customers you want and based on your analysis you observe that traffic is something that's bringing you more revenue, just go for more traffic.
• We need to Rank among the top 10, The most cosmetic objective of all. Data indicates that people mostly do not click the top ranking results. For research - Yes, to buy something - No. they would scroll down and look for a cheaper option. This is not a goal which will engage people. Yes you may want to feel happy about, but there is nothing you will get out of it.
• Kill Competition. This will kill your competitors but not drive your customers to you. This may lower down revenues for competitor but is not going to make you money. 
• Page Rank/Domain Authority/Trust Factor. This is a thing of the past. Vizibility is present. If Domain Authority or Page Rank was the only factor for people choosing a company, there won't be competitors or fair trade.

Setting clear objectives is the first step to strategize your marketing activities. SEO companies will promise you the sky with their special techniques, but believe me, there are no special techniques. Everything is in plain sight. It takes time, effort and continuous monitoring of the data to improvise and narrow down your focus on the target customer.

Once you know where to focus, your work becomes easy. Till then, it's hard work..