Know The Difference Between Website Goals, Strategy and Tactics

If you want your website to achieve great things for your business, you need to understand what your goals are, you can then form a strategy and carry out tactics to achieve those goals.  Follow this pattern, rinse and repeat and you will start reaching your goals faster and more efficiently.

Below I've given quick references and explanations about goals, strategy and tactics.

Set Your Goal

A goal should be an observable and measure-able end result for your business.  This could be:

• Increase in revenue by 25%,
• Increase in sales of product A by 10%,
• Increase in membership uptake by 5% etc.

Relevant
Does the goal apply to specific problems faced by your company:

• lack of sales,
• lack of customer awareness of product,
• lack of readership
• Lack of followers in social media?

Your Goal could be to increase sales by £10,000 within two months, this then leads you to the strategy you need to formulate to achieve this.

Research

• How is your industry doing - You only want to put time and effort into something if it can actually be sold and your industry is growing and not declining.  Unless of course you have something that will revolutionise your market space.
• Who is your target audience - Know how you will target your potential customer.  Researching your customers will give you all the information you should need to know - how they buy, where they hang out and the type of language and offers that work well with them. 
• What are the competition up to - Always keep an eye on your competition.

Now Develop Your Strategy

This will be your plan to achieving your goal with a clear deadline. 

Having a deadline is helpful as you will be able to divide tasks down in a calendar format so you know what has to be done and when.

If your goal is to increase sales by £10,000 in two months, you need a strategy which could be to increase visitors to your website and a plan of action which will form your tactics.

What Tactic Will You Use

This is what you actually need to do.

To increase visitors to your website you may carry out the following tactics:-

• Identify keywords you want to target
• Create product page
• Create blog
• Create lots of blogs based around your keyword and product, and link them to your product page
• Share content on social media and get the attention of influencers in your industry
• Undertake search engine optimisation
• Bring existing customers back to your websites new product page with an offer.
• Keep existing customers coming back for more with informative Newsletters, emails or blogs.

Whatever you choose to do, your tactics should get you to your goal.

What You Need To Measure To Know You Succeeded

You have to be able to measure your results to know if your plan of action worked.  The things you choose to measure have to mean something.  There is no point knowing you ranked number one in Google search results if you didn't also measure visitor numbers and/or sales.

Where you can get your data from

• Revenue increase = accounting package, website content manager, sales software
• Goolge Analytics = visitor numbers

It doesn't matter how you do it, as long as you are measuring the results, without those results you don't know if the time and effort put in was worth it, and worth repeating in the future.

In the above example you might choose to measure:-

• Number of keywords ranking in position one, and did they have a direct correlation to increased revenue or increase in visitor numbers
• How many visitors the product page received during the campaign and did it increase compared to previous months
• How many times content was shared in social media, did this increase visitor numbers to the website or increase sales.
• How many sales have been generated
• How much time was put into this campaign
• Was the campaign profitable and worth repeating

Having this data helps you make an educated decision about what part of your tactic worked the best so you can do more of that in the future.

Is Your Goal Attainable

Ask yourself, can you actually achieve this goal? Before you implement anything decide whether you have the skill sets and the time to carry out your tactics and respond to an increase in sales.

If you decide to do it all yourself, make your goal manageable by starting slowly and build momentum as you learn more.  Once you are earning enough you can look into outsourcing the jobs you don't enjoy or don't have time to do. 

If you can't do it all yourself, then get the right people on board:

Web Designer:

Creates a beautiful website

Web Developer:

Creates a great system behind your website so it can do everything you need it to do.

Full Stacked Developer:

Creates a beautiful website and develops a great system behind your website (designer & developer in one).

Website Design Options

• Off the peg designs (content manager and design already there, your brand and content is added to it)
• Themed design (design is bought from a third party, but can be altered to make it a little more unique, your brand and content is added)
• Bespoke (coded and designed from the ground up and will be unique to your business)

Strategist:

They will do all the research needed to come up with a plan of action to reach your goal.  They will either carry out all the work using a team of people.  This can cover conversion rate optimisation, search engine optimisation, developing vouchers, emails, social media and advertising. 

You can also pay a Strategist to do the research, produce the plan and explain it to you.  You can then take the plan and work with it yourself.

Analysis:

Someone who can look at all the figures and give you meaningful fed back.