Last week, Lana explained the importance of developing a strategy for your content. Today I’m going to focus on the value you can provide for your team and your client when you have established clear goals at the outset of a campaign. Here are the top 5 things you can do...
1. Tie it back to ROI
If you want to expand on the content production that you currently provide for a client, you’re going to have to prove that the work you’ve done is positively affecting the client’s bottom line. Often, someone other than your day-to-day contact will be approving additional content strategy and budget. If you can demonstrate that your content is designed specifically to achieve the business goals that they’ve set, you’ll have enough work in the pipeline to last you a long while.
2. Reach the right audience
If potential customers are consistently facing confusion with an explanation of what a product is or does, then you can set a goal to address this. To accomplish this goal, you can create content to address the audience who is positioned early on in the purchase funnel. If you didn’t take the time to review business goals before creating content, you might have decided that it would be a good idea to produce a visual asset that compares and contrasts two products on your website. But the bulk of your audience isn’t ready to buy - they still want to know why they should even consider buying. Understanding your goals will help you reach the right audience.
3. Measure success
Setting a goal establishes a benchmark against which a campaign’s success can be judged. If you set out to increase conversions by 5% and you ended up increasing by 7%, that’s a 2% quantifiable difference that you have won for your client! When it comes time to ask for more budget (see above), you’ll have solid wins on the book when it comes time to review the work you’ve done.
4. Make improvements
If you set a goal for a campaign at the start, you can track progress at every stage of the campaign’s life cycle. If the piece is wildly overperforming, well - congrats! You can go back and share your success with your client and the rest of your team. If the piece is underperforming, it can be fixed! Where is the piece losing traction? What adjustments can you make while the campaign is still live to save money and help push numbers in the right direction?
5. Manage expectations
You would never go to a client and excitedly report that a campaign did really well last month with no data to back it up, would you? If you don’t set a goal in the beginning of your campaign, there’s no way to report on whether the work you did brought success for a client or not. Have a conversation about expectations before you run a campaign - if client expectations are unrealistic for the time frame you’ve set, explain why. Share why you think the numbers you’ve come up with as a goal work well for this specific campaign.
How have you benefited from completing a goal setting exercise before launching a campaign? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
