When a business invests in your agency to help them grow, you want them to feel like they’ve received great value. This means you’ve got to communicate and plan with your client from the beginning to determine the focus of their campaign, target their ideal customer and measure specific outcomes.
Here’s how to establish and achieve marketing goals that make a positive impact on your client (and keep them coming back to you for more):
1. Establish The Type of Marketing Campaign.
When establishing goals for a marketing campaign, you first want to establish what type of campaign you’re building. There are two main types of campaigns to focus on, brand awareness and acquisition.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness campaigns primarily spread the word about your client’s brand, get more attention, and increase recognition. While increasing awareness isn’t directly tied to revenue and sales goals, it still impacts business growth. After all, the more people who know about your client, the more chances they have to sell.
However, it’s difficult to tie brand awareness activities to sales. For instance, it’s hard to say how many people saw a billboard, or heard a radio ad then made a purchase.
Instead, metrics are tied to awareness goals such as:
- Website traffic
- Social media community growth
- Social shares and or engagement
Acquisition
If your campaign is acquisition focused, then there is a dollar sign associated with the campaign. While both brand awareness campaigns and acquisition campaigns can grow your client’s business, an acquisition-focused campaign will directly impact sales. Common metrics for acquisition campaigns are:
- New account sign-ups
- Number of new subscribers
- Growth of customer base
- Increase of revenue per customer
2. Identify the Ideal Customer.
When working with your client, building a profile for their ideal customer can ensure that your campaign is targeted to the appropriate audience. It’s vital to pinpoint your client’s target customer so you can answer questions like answer marketing campaign questions like: what type of content should we create? Where will we find this customer online?
Through a series of conversations and/or meetings, you can help your client build a profile for their ideal customer(s). You’ll want to talk through specifics such as:
- Background: What is their career path? Their job? Their family?
- Demographics: Are they male or female? What is their age? Income? Education?
- Identifiers: What is their demeanor? What are their communication preferences?
- Goals: What is their ideal customers primary goal? Their secondary goal?
- Challenges: Much like the goals, what are the primary and secondary challenges?
Once you lay out all of the key elements of their ideal customer, you have enough information to create a buyer persona for your client. This buyer persona not only helps drive your current campaign, but can also guide any of your client’s future marketing efforts – an instant value-add for your client.
3. Build Clear, Actionable and Measurable Goals.
Now that you’ve helped your client establish what type of campaign they want (brand awareness or acquisition) and who their ideal customer is, it’s time to build clear, actionable and achievable goals for their marketing campaign.
To set everyone up for success, focus on goals that you feel like your agency can achieve as well as goals that make an impact on your client. A great format to use when establish client goals is to use the OKR method.
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. And objective is what you hope the marketing campaign will accomplish. This is usually a broad goal that is not measureable. Underneath the objective are specific key results that are tied to a measurable achievement (usually a number).
Here are some examples of OKRs for marketing campaigns:
Objective: Grow website traffic
Key Results:
- Post 10 blogs focused on keywords and establishing increased organic traffic
- Write four new landing pages focused on the top keyword
- Increase organic traffic by 20 percent
- Increase new visitors by 30 percent
Objective: Grow brand awareness
Key Results:
- Launch a holiday social media campaign
- Grow Facebook community by 20 percent
- Increase traffic from Facebook to website by 5 percent
- Post three Tweets a day, one Facebook post a day, and two LinkedIn posts a day
Mapping out and planning all of your client work around these three important first steps will help avoid any miscommunication around campaign goals, increase client satisfaction and ensure your clients stick with your agency for all of their marketing needs.