With SMART objectives everyone is sure exactly what the target is and progresses towards
it and, if appropriate, action can be taken to put the company back on target. Typical exam-
ples of SMART objectives to support goal-setting for Internet marketing strategy include:
achieve 10 per cent online revenue contribution within 2 years;
migrate 40% of customers to online services and e-mail communications within
3 years;
achieve first or second position in category penetration in the countries within which
the company operates (this is effectively online audience or market share and can be
measured through visitor rankings such as Hitwise or Netratings (Chapter 2) or,
better, by online revenue share);
achieve a cost reduction of 10 per cent in marketing communications within 2 years;
increase retention of online customers by 10 per cent;
increase by 20 per cent within one year the number of sales arising from a certain
target market, e.g. 18–25-year-olds;
create value-added customer services not currently available;
improve customer service by providing a response to a query within 2 hours, 24 hours
per day, 7 days a week.
Specific digital communications objectives are also described in Chapter 8.Frameworks for objective setting
A significant challenge of objective setting for Internet marketing is that there will
potentially be many different measures such as those in the list above and these will
have be to grouped to be meaningful. Categorisation of objectives into groups is also
useful since it can be used to identify suitable objectives. In this chapter, we have already
seen two methods of categorising objectives. First, objectives can be set at the level of
business effectiveness, marketing effectiveness and Internet marketing effectiveness as
explained in the section on internal auditing as part of situation analysis. Second, the 5S
framework of Sell, Speak, Serve, Save and Sizzle provides a simple framework for objec-
tive setting. A further five-part framework is presented in Chapter 9.The balanced scorecard
Some larger companies will identify objectives for Internet marketing which are consis-
tent with existing business measurement frameworks. Since the balanced business
scorecard is a well-known and widely used framework it can be helpful to define objec-
tives for Internet marketing in these categories.
The balanced scorecard, popularised in a Harvard Business Reviewarticle by Kaplan and
Norton (1993) can be used to translate vision and strategy into objectives and, then,
through measurement assessing whether the strategy and its implementation are suc-
cessful. In part, it was a response to over-reliance on financial metrics such as turnover
and profitability and a tendency for these measures to be retrospective rather than look-
ing at future potential as indicated by innovation, customer satisfaction and employee
development. In addition to financial data the balanced scorecard uses operational
measures such as customer satisfaction, efficiency of internal processes and also the
organisation’s innovation and improvement activities including staff development. It
has since been applied to IT (Der Zee and De Jong, 1999), e-commerce (Hasan and
Tibbits, 2000) and multi-channel marketing (Bazett et al., 2005).CHAPTER 4· INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY
Balanced scorecard
A framework for setting
and monitoring
business performance.
Metrics are structured
according to customer
issues, internal
efficiency measures,
financial measures and
innovation.