Set Your Goals and Crush It!

As we kick off a new decade of marketing, I have recently been thinking back to where we were when I started in this industry in 2010. It was a time of iFrames, likes and followers for goals, and machine learning had not been an overused phrase yet. Ah, the good old days.

Today, in this decade, we are seeing a very different climate, and I don’t just mean atmospherically. In 2020 we will see another nail biting election bringing more rules and regulations to the digital space we live, work and play in. How marketers adapt and grow in the space is something I’m really excited to see, but something that will always be a constant is the need to set attainable goals and prove that we can and have hit that goal once it’s set.

The first question I always ask in any new client meeting is “what does a successful campaign look like to you?” Unfortunately, not many clients have really thought about that before coming to the table with us. Of course they always say something along the lines of “we want to make more money.” Cool, me too, but how can what we provide help you get to that point?

If it is a CPG client, super easy, we’ll throw a shopping campaign at you, hook it into all the places we advertise your products and track the Return On Ad Spend. Poof, done! But if your business has a little longer lead time or longer funnel for the buyer to get through, it’s not so simple so you need to establish a different goal or in most cases, a set of goals.

Awareness: This is a goal we hear a lot when clients may not be well known in their space or are looking to branch out into a new audience. In traditional media, the Key Performance Indicator might have been impressions and that is still a metric we would use in digital but with digital, we can take that a step further. For us, a great KPI for awareness could be length of a video view, a click to a specific landing page, an interest in your next event, or an engagement on your ad or post.

Lead Generation: If your business works on a long lead time, is a large purchase, or may require people shop around, this may be an excellent goal for your next campaign. Social media ads are specialized to make it very easy for a user to fill out a form and request more information directly from the social site and most of the info they won’t even have to fill in because the platform will auto fill it based on their profiles. We can also drive people to a specific landing page with a form on your website to not only get their info that way but also once they are on the site, we can drop a cookie allowing us to remind them about your brand as they move away from your site.

Conversions: The easiest and most exciting goal is a purchase. If you have a product for sale on your website, we can tell you if that purchaser saw your ad on Facebook, clicked through immediately and bought it OR, we can tell you if they saw your ad on Facebook last month then Google a few days ago and finally Instagram then decided they needed it. Each platform would get a bit of the attribution of the sale allowing you to see the most effective platform for your ads. 

While there are many more goal types and KPIs out there, these are just a few that we are experts on at Digital Story. If you’re looking to get a fresh perspective on your goals and how to show success for your campaigns in 2020, give us a call, we’d love to grab a cup of coffee with you and discuss the future of your business!