What Is A Primary Goal?
A primary goal is to increase the number of website visitors who take the desired action on a website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.
How Can You Define Your Goals?
The marketing world is ripe with jargon, and goals are no different. You might come across terms like:
- Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable indicators of progress toward the desired outcome.
- Objectives and Key Results, a framework designed to track progress towards your desired outcomes in a collaborative fashion
- And more.
Here’s a secret: all of them get to the same point. Your goal, quite simply, is the objective that your marketing is designed to reach. Ideally, it’s agreed upon by all stakeholders, from executive leadership to the teams working on the execution of a campaign.
Why Setting Your Primary Goal Matters in Marketing
Goals are at their best when they’re hierarchical. That means multiple micro goals are set under the umbrella of a larger macro goal that becomes a direction-setter, especially for larger teams and multiple organizational levels.
The primary goal should be the KPI most of your testing and optimization are focused towards. Even if that primary goal occurs at multiple touchpoints after the marketing lift of the website, the primary goal becomes the guidepost under which every other goal or KPI lives.
The primary goal is also shared across the different divisions. It allows your marketing and sales teams to align, and report in a more unified fashion through executive leadership. Examples include sales, subscriber growth, and customer lifetime value.
How Your Micro Goals Connect to Your Primary Goal
Of course, marketing campaigns are too complex to only be measured by a single goal. In addition, especially when engaging in CRO, you might not have enough data to optimize for a macro goal in a future that’s many touchpoints away. This is when micro goals enter the equation.
Micro goals describe smaller milestones that lead the user on a path to accomplishing the macro goal. Ideally, they span the entire user journey, enabling you to measure all communications alongside that journey. We use an ACE framework for setting our range of micro goals, ensuring that they touch on awareness, conversion, and engagement measures on their way to conversion.
A framework like ACE also allows you to keep your micro goals targeted, ensuring that everything you measure connects directly to improving performance. That includes measuring how the demand was created and captured, like podcast downloads, LinkedIn impressions, demo sign-ups, website chat requests, or pricing requests.
Micro goals can be quantitative (like conversion rate and trends or comparison to an industry benchmark) and qualitative (like user responses on how they heard about you, what triggered their purchase, or pain points). Ideally, they’re a combination of both, adding more comprehensive context to your macro goal in the process.
Aligning Business Unit Goals with the Primary Goal
Finally, micro goals can also benefit the business by building more relevant performance indicators across departments and business units. Unit-specific goals, ranging from sales to marketing or even between email and PPC within marketing, allow every stakeholder to have objectives against which they can orient their work.
Ideally, these micro goals all orient themselves against the primary, revenue-connected goal. They build all, ensuring that every member of the organization works on the pieces relevant to them that need to happen in order for the larger goal to be achieved.
And that’s how we get back to conversion rate optimization. Both your primary and micro goals can play a vital role in measuring your marketing efforts and optimizing your messaging and channels in a way that allows your business to thrive. And you don’t need to set these goals on your own, either. Get in touch to start a conversation about relevant goals for your business and begin the KPI creation process.
