Setting objectives

- If there's one critical piece in getting your advertising right, it's about setting the right objectives. In this video, I want to help you understand how you can set, evaluate, and measure your objectives. So here's a basic funnel of the different things that advertising can help you do. Starting at the top is awareness, also known as branding. This is casting a wide net into the world about who you are, and what you do. An example of an objective here would be to increase unaided awareness by 50%, or be in the top three brands a customer thinks of in our category. The next is interest, sometimes known as engagement. This is where someone has registered an interest in you by checking out your site or following you on social media. An objective here would be to generate 1,000 new users to our site, per week, for Q2. Now, once someone's interested, now you have to get them to consider you, or how to activate that interest. An objective here could be increase test drives by 20% in June. Next, and some would say most important, is the conversion, the point when your prospect becomes a customer, so you can generate revenue, so generating 100,000 sales in June is a revenue objective. Last are objectives that target your existing customers to ensure loyalty and encourage referrals, like generate 5,000 new sales through current customer referrals. When you are developing objectives for work, you must be selective. It's extremely difficult to be successful if you try to create objectives for all levels of this funnel. Choose whether you want to have top of the funnel, such as awareness, or bottom of the funnel, like activation, and that will dictate your strategy and your messaging. Next, a great framework for objectives is the SMART criteria. There's a few different versions of this, but I like this one. Ask yourself these questions. Are your objectives specific, as in are they clear, are they measurable, can you track progress against your objectives, are they attainable, do you have the resources to achieve these objectives, are they relevant, so are they relevant to what your business needs and what your customers can do, and are they timely, is there a start and an end point to this activity? Otherwise, how do you measure it? Finally, how are you going to measure against these objectives? Go back to the funnel, and consider where your best data comes from. Under awareness, how many people did your message reach, and how often? That's reach and frequency. Under interest, Google Analytics has great measures for your site performance, social media sites track followers and engagement, and for retail, there's even infrared technology that can count store visitors and predict your staffing needs. Under activation, how many people requested information? How many visited your store, or tried your product? And under conversion, your sales data should track how many customers bought, how much, and how often, and how many were new customers versus returning customers. Under loyalty, for existing customers, you can track their usage, you can track retention rates, and referral numbers. Net promoter scores are particularly good for tracking the likelihood of referrals. Setting objectives and measuring against them is step one of a successful campaign, and remember, investing against everything in the funnel is expensive, so choose your focus points in accordance with your biggest business needs.