When you embark on a new marketing campaign it’s very important to know why you’re doing it. Before you even make the first piece of marketing collateral, it’s imperative that you establish goals so that you know which metrics you’ll be looking at and studying. Defining the right goals will take some thought, but your goals need to be very specific and the way in which you will measure whether you’ve reached that goal is important too.
Make Your Goals Specific
When setting any goal, it’s imperative that you are very clear and specific. Instead of saying “I want more traffic” say “I want 20,000 more website visitors each month via YouTube.com.” As you see, this goal is very specific, and even says how you plan to get the visitors. You’re going to use YouTube to get 20,000 more website visitors each month during the campaign and convert 20% of them to sales.
Make Your Goals Measurable
In addition, your goal needs to have a way to measure whether or not you’ve been successful. With the goal above it is both measurable and specific. You can track how many people go to your website from Youtube.com using Google Analytics. Being able to measure your success is an important part of goal setting. Being able to use some way to measure the results helps to know whether your efforts are doing anything. It also enables you to change tactics if something isn’t working, or do more of the same if it is working.
Make Your Goals Realistic
Finally, any goal you make must be realistic. Do you know what it will take to get another 20,000 visitors per month from Youtube.com? Do you know how many people will need to watch your YouTube video in order to get an additional 20,000 click-throughs to your website? What are you going to do to make it happen? Is that realistic? If so, proceed, if not adjust. An important part of establishing goals and metrics is the willingness to adjust as needed.
When you set up your goals, it’s important to also set up the steps that you need to perform to get to the end. In the example above you will need to produce a video that has the potential to get 100,000 plus views. How will you create it, and what will it be about? You’ll need to actively market the video to help it get the views you want. You can do this via your social media, your blog, and via article marketing. You’ll need to know your plan from start to finish to see this through to success.
The most important factor in any marketing campaign is to always be ready for success. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you did get the additional 20,000 visitors, but your shopping cart was not working properly, or your server couldn’t handle the additional hits? Because in all things your goal is more than 20,000 additional visitors, right? You need one more additional goal aside from that one. You want to convert a portion of those 20,000 additional visitors to buyers. So, be ready.