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Objectives and Strategies

This is the portion of site planning that can either make or break your deployment effort. This is the foundation for success… or failure.

I once had a professor in ad school teach me a very important lesson: you can have the BEST creative in the world, but if your objectives and strategies suck, your efforts are wasted.

Simply put, objectives are WHAT you plan to achieve and strategies are HOW you're going to do it. So, in true action plan format, I’ll now present you with another round of analogies!

Objectives

Ok, say you're building a website that sells golf clubs. You've already established that your target audience is 40-65 year old males in the middle and upper-middle classes. Now what?

Your preliminary objectives will state modest and attainable goals for your site and your audience.

So, let's say you want to:

• Generate $500,000 in sales within the first 24 months of operation
• Generate 2,000 unique page views per day within the first 24 months of operation
• Establish a unique brand presence and brand awareness within the first 24 months of operation

Now that you've got your objectives, how will you see to it that these goals come to fruition? You guessed it! Strategies!

Strategies

This portion generally caters to marketing and advertising vehicles, as these will be your primary methods for generating a response from your target audience. So, with that being said, let's say our primary strategies are as follows:

• Purchase a 24-month flight in Golf Digest that consists of a well designed, well written and well placed ad that notifies the market of your existence
• Purchase specific keywords through Google that target specific search queries (with a maximum bid of .25 cents per click)
• Start a golf-specific blog that is sponsored by and affiliated with your website
• Create a Twitter/Facebook/Social Media presence to allow a more extensive opportunity to connect with your audience

Although purely for the sake of example, we can now actively see how objectives and strategies work hand-in-hand and how they can determine the performance of any given brand. If you give extra attention to this portion of the deployment process, success is almost inevitable.