Three tricks for goal-setting gold

by OnSight | May 2013 | Social Media, Strategy, Web Communications

In order be able to tell whether or not an online campaign has been successful, we need to set some goals. It seems obvious, but so often we see organizations launch an online campaign because they know they’re supposed to, without giving thought to what they want to get out of it or what success will look like.

From the get-go, you should be conceiving of goal-setting as a giant feedback loop:

This requires setting aside time and energy early on in a campaign or project to sit down and think through what reasonable goals are, and to set goals with focus, intention, and buy-in of all the staff and managers who will be participating.

There are two ways to think about goal setting, which are certainly not mutually exclusive when setting up an online strategy:

1. Benchmarks: There are a handful of good sources for industry-wide data around open rates, engagement rates, etc., so that you can get a sense of what to expect. Start here or hereto get some broad strokes. These are good as a starting point for setting realistic expectations for your organization.

Benchmark style goal example: We will send approximately 2-3 emails a month between January 2013 and December 2013, accelerating to at least one email a week in the three months preceding the event. Emails will have a 25% open rate and 5% open rate, and each email will generate 50 new event registrations. We will generate fresh content for two Facebook posts a week and one post consisting of shared/curated content, and posts will generate 10-15 likes/comments/shares each.

2. Results: What is the ultimate goal of the campaign, and how will you know if the online strategy has achieved its piece of the puzzle? Spend some time thinking through not simply the tactics (“We’ll post pictures on Facebook! People will love it!”), but what the actual underlying pointis.

Results style goal example: Our objective is to take advantage of multiple platforms to push shareworthy content throughout the social web, creating buzz about the event with the goal of raising awareness and interest and increasing registrations this year and next year. We also plan to use the social web to disseminate information during the event itself for participants and fans. Our primary strategy is to publish an ongoing stream of interesting content, interact with existing hubs, and utilize fan-generated content as much as possible. We will seek to funnel users from wherever they stumble upon our content to the event website.

Setting goals in both styles can help make sense of the analysis that you should be doing ongoing.

Three tricks for goal-setting gold:
There are three key features to creating a worthwhile set of goals. To be most effective, both as a guide to your tactics and as a benchmark for later analysis, goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Time-oriented.

Specific means we’re staying away from things like “be better at social media” or “make email more interesting.” Keep asking yourself if there’s a way to make the goal more specific, and if being general is a cop out to keeping you from thinking clearly about what a goal actual entails.

Measurable goals give us a way to circle back and track our effectiveness. Not all goals have to measurable – especially if we’re setting Results-based goals like in the second example above – but at least some of them should have specific benchmarks and numbers attached to them so that there’s a way for us to see if we’ve actually achieved them. How do we know if we made our email more interesting if we have no way to measure it?

Time-oriented is just to remind us that goals should cover a set period of time. Again “make email more interesting” is going to be a much less effective directive than “increase click-through rates to 5% on average by December 2013”.

Setting specific, measurable and time-oriented goals focuses the work we do and allows us to track our output and outcomes against a standard set of metrics. Goals should be set – and referenced periodically – for every piece of an online marketing program, including list growth, engagement and donation rates, and social media metrics.

For best success, setting goals should be an integral part of your campaign planning process, not simply stuck on as an add-on after the fact. Without a road map it’s hard to know where we’re going, and nearly impossible to tell if we’ve made an progress at all. Every piece of a campaign — including social media, blogging, fundraising, and list growth —  should have goals attached to it, lest we end up simply spinning our wheels, going through the motions without any shared goal or understanding of what success would look like.

Next post: Measuring Success