Setting Goals for Marketing Campaigns

1. Welcome to the class: Hi. My name is Nikki Parsons. I'm a marketing director with over a decade of work experience. Goals are the basis of everything we do in marketing. It's imperative to understand how to create clear, measurable goals. Too many times, I've seen teams work really hard on a campaign only to see it flop because they lost focus on what they were really aiming for. In this course, I'll take you through some of the basics of goal setting and understanding KPIs and provide you with a goal template that you can save and take away to use again in future. This will ensure that your marketing efforts have a higher chance of success. So if your goal is to understand how to set goals for marketing campaigns, then this course is perfect for you. I hope you'll join me. Let's get started. 2. Fundamentals of goal setting: All of our marketing efforts start with the question, why? Why are we running a campaign? What is the purpose behind what we're doing? The answer to that question should be found in our goals. A goal is something you plan to achieve, for example, increased sales. Goals provide a clear direction and focus for our campaign. All marketing campaigns should be set up by keeping the broader marketing goals in mind. We should always think about what we're trying to achieve and then think about the best way to achieve that, which may or may not be what we were originally thinking. The gold standard for writing effective goals is aiming for smart goals, SMART. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Now instead of just increased sales, we can make that smarter by writing, for example, increase summer apparel sales by 20% in this year compared to last year. This is specific as we have a specific target of 20%. It's measurable as we can certainly measure a typical sales metric like sales. Is it achievable? Well, that depends on the resources and constraints within the organization. That's often the part of the goal most hotly debated. It's relevant if we assume the corporate objectives are to drive $1 billion worth of sales, and it's time bound as we're comparing specifically this quarter to the same period last year. 3. Understanding KPIs: Key performance indicators, more commonly known as the acronym KPIs are a measure used to evaluate the success of something. For example, a measure of team success, goal success, or campaign success. While the goal is the outcome you're hoping to achieve, KPIs represent metrics that measure how well you're doing and how close you are to achieving your goal. They can also help as benchmarks to show you how performance is improving, even if you haven't reached your goal yet. There are many different types of KPIs we'll use in marketing campaigns. Here are some of the most common ones. First, impressions. Impressions are the number of times your ads are displayed. If you're advertising on Linkedin and someone is scrolling past your ad in their timeline, and then another day they see it again, that counts as two impressions. It doesn't really matter if they registered it or not, if it was actually noticed, because if it was displayed on their screen for about 3 seconds, that's how Linkedin goes ahead and measures it, depends on the channel, then it counts as an impression. Next cost per meal, CPN. That's the average cost for 1,000 impressions. And those two metrics are particularly relevant for brand awareness reasons. You want to have your ads displayed to many users and multiple times to keep your company top of mind. Next, we have cost per click CPC. This is the average cost incurred for each click on your ads. It's most commonly associated with Google search ads, and every time you click on a sponsored result, the advertiser will pay a set cost which they bid for that specific click. Then click through rate CTR is the percentage of add impressions that result in a click on your ad. Why are these two metrics important? Well, if your priority for a certain ad is to direct traffic to your website or app, you want to have an eye on the cost per click so that you can try to keep those costs down. Well, if the click through rate is low, you might recognize that you need to optimize your ad copy or graphics to better entice users to click on them. As right now they're being displayed, but not being clicked enough. Next up, we have conversions and conversion rate. Conversions are the number of desired actions taken. AKA purchases, sign ups or another action that you indicate as a conversion event. In conversion rate, that's the percentage of clicks that result in conversions. This is useful to monitor if you're running a campaign in order to drive purchases. Let's say you're getting a good click through rate. You're getting people to your website, but they're not converting. Well, that's not helping your goal as you want them to complete a purchase. And similarly, if your conversion rate is off, then maybe your audience is not properly segmented, or you're using messages that don't resonate with the right target. The last two are cost per acquisition and return on ad spend. Cost per acquisition or CPA is the cost of acquiring a customer through the campaign. You may also see similar metrics with costs per MQL or SQL, marketing qualified ad, sales qualified lead. Return on ADS Spend, ROAS is for every dollar you spend on ads, how much revenue are you making? I go into some of these KPIs in more detail on my YouTube channel. I'll add a glossary article into the projects and resources section, which you can refer back to if you forget what some of these KPI acronyms stand for. 4. How to measure campaign success?: Ultimately, your marketing campaign is successful if it's achieving the goal or goals you defined. You can look to industry benchmarks to help compare your performance relative to other similar businesses. But I'd encourage you to compare yourself most against your own performance. You'll want to take a look at the historical data from other marketing campaigns you've run in the past, or periods where you weren't running any campaigns at all to establish baseline metrics for your KPIs. This will help you to understand your average performance, so you can attribute any major changes to your marketing campaign. If you don't have baseline metrics, then before you launch your campaign, I suggest spending a bit of time to implement the relevant tracking tags or pixels, for example, setting up something like Google Analytics, so you can at least have a little bit of data. Sometimes you'll also have qualitative feedback about the success of your marketing campaigns. For example, in a customer survey or user review. So also ask your leads and customers if the campaign influenced them. I remember once running a marketing campaign that had amazing results. But the CEO wasn't convinced until one of our customers told him directly that he'd recently seen a lot of nice new advertising from our company. Most importantly, don't go crazy, tracking all the possible KPIs you can. There's always going to be room for optimization. Start simple, especially when you're just getting started, pick a few KPIs and focus on those. 5. Demonstration: How to set clear goals: I've put together a project template, which is linked in the projects and resources section. This template is not only useful for your skill share final project, but you can use it as a resource to help you whenever you're setting up new marketing campaigns and need to think through the goals. What you aim for also depends a lot on what resources you have available in the project. What your budget is, how many team members are assigned to work on the campaign, and what tools you have available. Let's fill in this template with an example that I'll demonstrate. All right. We're here in our marketing campaign goal template. We have four sections to this template. What is the primary goal of this campaign? How smart is this goal, what KPIs and relevant data should be tracked and project resources. We'll go ahead and zoom in so we can see this a little better as we're moving. So I've prepared an example already for us to use. In this case, we are an EC store. And we're selling primarily clothing. Every year, we launch a new summer apparel collection, and we do a campaign associated to really boost the sales of that campaign. Very similar to our last year's goal. In this case, we're going to have a goal of launch the new summer apparel collection, on April 1 and achieve a 15% increase in revenue compared to the previous year's collection. By September 30. Right. That's our plan. Lunch this new collection on a specific date, and we have a concrete amount. We want to increase compared to the previous year collection, by a specific end date. Let's work through our criteria here how smart is this goal. In this example, and I would also encourage you to do the same, really write out the detail of why it's spa achievable, relevant time bound. Don't just say yes, no. When you're better at this or you have more practice at this, you can just say yes, no, or you could truly delete this section from your document and just leave yourself a question to remind. But the reason I say that is when I've been coaching people on how to make marketing goals, they very often go, Oh, yes, it's specific, yes, it's measurable. And then I question them and I say, great, where in this goal, is it specific, then they're lost or they say, you're right. It's maybe not specific enough. Really follow the process in the beginning, it will get you in the good habit of getting that intuition for what is a smart goal. Here, I would say, yes, it's specific. We have a concrete amount, 15%, we're aiming for. Also, we have a specific collection. We're targeting. We're focusing on maybe. Measurable, yes, because we can use sales reports to track the progress. If we didn't have our sales numbers, we'd have probably bigger issues in this company then how to write good goals. Achievable. This one, I always tend to jump down to the project resources and answer these four questions first before coming back. Let's see how much budget we have. We have $15,000 budget for this project. We have three people in the project, Angela and Diogo. And we're all going to spend 20% of our time on this project. Obviously, we're not full time on this project, but we're going to spend maybe a day a week looking at this campaign or making graphics and things for this campaign, optimizing things for the campaign. Tools we have available, sales force, mail chi for e mail and we're using the Google Suite. By that, I'm not just talking about Google ads and things like this, but also we're using Google Drive to save our documents. Those are the tools we're using. We don't know if we're going to need all of these tools right now. It's just getting the lay of the land of what we have at our disposal. Anything else to note? Well, although we're all basic with the Adobe tools, we're not freelance designer, so we're not graphic designer, so we actually want to hire a freelancer. We'll need to hire a freelance graphic designer, for some of the work, not for everything, but for some of it, for sure we want an expert. Based on this, we have a lay of the land of our project resources? Then to answer the question of, is this achievable? We want to think, Okay, what was the last year's campaign results and how much did we spend and what were our project resources for that? What's the lay of the land right now? Have we just done recently a big campaign? Are we going to be able to have the same level of success? What does the market look like right now? Do we increase our prices? Are we expecting that to have an effect? All of these types of questions, you have to ask yourself and there's no set list somewhere you can find, you just need to understand your business and think through the logical questions that either a customer could have and things that could affect them in our case, making a purchase and helping us achieve this revenue. Let's say we do all of that effort and we come to the conclusion that yes, considering our past campaign data, we believe with the project resources, we can achieve this increase in sales. Relevant. I would hope that this goal is relevant because most businesses have the desire to increase their business revenue. Yes, as our main business goal is to increase annual revenue. It's not always the number one focus, particularly for a quarter, but in this case, it's always a goal for the year. Time bound? Yes, we have a clear start and end date for data collection date for data collection and comparison. I think this is also important to note because how would this goal be? If instead, I just stopped it here and I removed by September 30, launched the new summer apparel collection on April 1 and achieve a 15% increase in revenue compared to the previous year's collection. If I did that, how would that be? Would we know exactly when we're comparing this to? Would we think to ourselves, h, well, we should take the results from the whole year last year or compare it to the whole year this year? Does that mean we can't really determine if this campaign met its goal until I don't know, January of the following year when we have all the results? That's why it's important many times to put a cutoff date as well. It's really clear in this case that the data collection period starts then and ends then, and so we can really compare that to the previous year. Because also maybe the previous year, the campaign started a month later, and therefore, we think we could waste surpass this goal and we should aim for actually 20% increase because we're starting the campaign a month earlier. All these types of questions. I know maybe that sounds like a lot, but you'll get in the habit of this as you start to really think through. I think that's why you're going to benefit from having a goal template because it will just allow you to think through all of these points. The last part is what KPIs and relevant data should be tracked. Sorry. You can go ahead and add rows here or remove rows. I would probably aim for two to three KPIs. That's why I have this here in the template. In this case, there's definitely a piece of data we're going to need, which is going to really tell us if we made this goal, which is total revenue. It's not really a KPI, but it's a data point. How much revenue are we going to achieve it? How do we know if we're going to make a 15% increase in revenue? Well, we need to know what it was last year. Last year, let's say the campaign made half 1 million, and in that case, doing the math, 500 k and a 15% increase. We would say that we need to make $575,000 on this campaign to meet our goal. Another KPI that we could aim for in this case, would be conversion rate. I think this would be important to keep in mind because we want to make sure we keep a similar conversion rate or improve the conversion rate compared to last year. Last year, let's say the campaign made a conversion rate of 10%. That's important because it starts to help us know how many people we need to get in that funnel so that they convert and actually make the purchase. Let's say we aim for a 10% conversion rate again. These are good conversion KPIs. I think the last one would be return on ad spend, definitely worth us keeping in mind. Remember that is for every dollar we spend, how much money are we making on that dollar? Typically an average over all industries. Remember each industry is different, each company is different, would be around 40%. Let's say we made 41% last year. This year, maybe we're going to go actually for 38%. We're going to go for slightly lower, and that may be interesting for you, but the return on ad spend might decrease even though the conversion rate stays the same and that's due to several reasons. One, an increase in marketing costs. Because if our cost per click or cost per impression increases, we might spend more on advertising without necessarily increasing the number of conversions. Another reason is typically, the more we spend on our marketing campaigns, the slightly lower returns we're going to get. That's because we might start reaching a less targeted or interested audience, because even though our initial audience might target the most likely converters, as we start to expand that and we start to have more people in this funnel we tend to have slightly less interesting people also added to this funnel, which can lead to lower returns. Obviously, the quality of the traffic as well that we're attracting to our e commerce site in this case, might not be as good as the initial targeting helped us with. And also other factors. Maybe the competition is different this year, and they're now also advertising on some of our keywords if we're doing Google search ads, or the market is a bit more saturated. That's why you also have to get a sixth sense for some of these KPIs and go, Yeah, what am I aiming for? Can I increase my ROAS? You could absolutely. But is that typically likely? No, it typically goes a little down. Maybe the best way to compare this is people understand this about social media as well, if you have a big social media following, you tend to have lower engagement rate. When you get millions and millions of followers, you tend to have less percentage of those followers commenting and sharing and liking, still got a huge amount, absolutely, but you get less percentage. Similarly, when you have a really small, maybe Instagram or TikTok account of the few people who follow, they're all really your friends and they really know you and they will comment on everything. Maybe that's a good way to compare this to. Back to our goal template then. I think with these two KPIs and this one piece of data, we can definitely keep our campaign focused on meeting the goals. Total revenue is obviously the ultimate measure of if this campaign is successful if it meets its 15% increase. But by monitoring the ROAS, I can ensure that the advertising spend is yielding a profitable result. That allows me to better allocate resources even during the campaign, for example, if our Google ads are getting a poor ROAS, we might shift the remaining budget to more work with micro influencers if that's really working well. Conversion rate will help us to ensure that when we do get leads into the funnel, for example, to come visit the website, that our messaging is resonating with them and we're not losing them too much during the process, that they're still the right target audience. With that, if I zoom back out, our goal template is complete. All right. Now it's your turn. You have the blank template available in the projects and resources section. You now need to fill it in with either a real or imaginary goal. This will give you a chance to practice using the document. Please do let me know on the project you submit if this is a real project, and then I can try to be more detailed with the feedback. I look forward to seeing how you get on. Good luck. 6. Closing & Next Steps: Thanks for joining me in this short class on how to set goals for marketing campaigns. If you're interested in joining me for another class, then I can recommend that you watch the introduction to audience segmentation course. When doing campaign creation, we usually start with the goals, and then very linked to this is the question about who we're targeting. That's definitely a natural next step if you want to explore this topic more. If you're interested in learning more about marketing, project management or leadership in general, then please follow my skill share profile to get notified of any future new classes as they're released. You can also follow my blog or podcast for more tips and tricks. Lastly, I just want to thank you again for taking this course. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you again soon.