Set Your Goals And Targets
“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”
-Yogi Berra
Corporate marketing methods have evolved over time, but the last ten years have seen an explosion in the use of video as a primary marketing tool. This is the second in a series of posts about the production of effective marketing videos. The aim of this article is to introduce you to the second step in the planning process: goal setting.
Target Audience and Video Types (a quick refresher)
In our previous post, we covered the topic of the target audience and being aware of the customer journey. We identified specific stages in the customer journey and matched each stage with an audience type. Here’s a quick review:
Stage I: Awareness (Audience type: Consumers that are not yet aware of your company or organization and products/services)
Stage II: Consideration (Audience type: Consumers that may or may not be aware of your company or organization BUT are actively searching for similar companies and/or products/services)
Stage III: Action (Audience type: Consumers that know your company or organization and are ready to make a purchase or join decision)
Stage IV: Support (Audience type: Current customers and members)
Feel free to click here to read up on this article: Customer Journey and Audience Types
The Next Steps: Setting SMART Goals
So, now maybe you’ve figured out which type of video you need based on the stage and audience type. Great! That means it’s time to move to the next step in production planning: setting goals specific to your audience. Remember, marketers need more than quantity of content to run a successful campaign. Without setting what we call SMART goals, marketing teams often over-spend and under achieve.
Every stage of the customer journey (i.e., awareness, consideration, actions, support) will have its own set of goals. The ultimate goals for most marketing campaigns are to focus on “big victories” like increased sales and revenue growth. But there are so many variables impacting sales and profitability. That is why the best way to ensure your marketing video is having the desired impact is to set specific and measurable milestones.
We like to call this 'Attaining Small Victories'. The big victories, increased sales and profits, are actually the result of a series of small victories. Your small victories require specifically targeted goals.
Something all marketers should be aware of is the SMART Goals framework. This way of framing up goals has proven to be extremely effective in developing and implementing video goals for marketing campaigns in every kind of industry.
So, let’s take a look at this framework.
SMART Goals Framework
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Every goal you set for each video should contain all of these aspects.
Here’s an example. What if the goal for your upcoming marketing video is that it will increase the popularity of your products? The next thing to ask yourself would be, “Is this a SMART goal?” Let’s see what the goal would look like in the SMART framework:
Specific goals should be clear and concise. So, in looking at the goal, “increase the popularity of your products” there is vagueness. Which products? What do you mean by popularity? The example goal is not specific.
Measurable goals should be quantifiable and trackable. With our above example goal there are a lot of questions. Increase popularity by how much? How do you measure popularity? Therefore, the example goal is not measurable.
Achievable goals should be realistic and attainable. After we define what popularity means and how it's measured, only then can we set achievable milestones that represent small victories for the campaign. That makes our example goal unachievable because we don't have enough information to measure success.
Relevant goals should be closely related to the mission and goals of your business and to market and industry trends. The example goal is too vague to be called relevant.
Time-bound goals are confined to a specific period of time. The example goal is not time-bound. There is no start or stop period that provides a measurable and reportable period of time for the goal.
Ok, so now that we can see our example goal is NOT a SMART one…. let's re-write it.
First, let's make it specific. We'll focus on a specific product: iPad Pro
Now let's make it measurable: We'd like to see 1,800 'likes' on Twitter. Last quarter our iPad Pro marketing video received 1,500 'likes' on Twitter.
Let's make sure that it's achievable. A 20% increase in 'likes' appears to be a reasonable goal. After reviewing historical data, we see that a 10-20% increase would be a very good result. Many marketers set goals that are too aggressive (e.g., a 100% increase in 'likes') which leaves little chance for success. On the other hand, we don't want to set easily attainable goals (e.g., a 2% increase to 1,530 'likes'), either. Create a challenge for the team. Remember: big victories are often the result of lots of small victories!
Now let's make sure that our goal is relevant. We'd like the 20% increase in 'likes' to come from a specific group: business users. Increasing the popularity of a product is an important goal, but it is better to set a goal that is more relevant to your business. In this case we know that business users are more likely to purchase our product, so let's focus our goal on that audience.
Finally, let's make the goal time-bound. Maybe it looks something like this: Q2 of this year. We will have three months to reach our goal of 1,800 'likes'. We will also have two (or more) adjustment points (i.e., end of month 1 and end of month 2) where we can make changes to our video if the numbers are not moving in the right direction.
Now we have a SMART goal. Here's a comparison of our original goal and now our new SMART goal:
Original Goal: Our video will increase the popularity of our products.
New SMART Goal: Our video will increase the popularity of our iPad Pro series with business users by receiving at least 1,800 Twitter 'likes' during the second quarter of this year.
As we recap, the original goal was too vague, and it would have been difficult to tie your marketing video to any specific business success. The new SMART goal, however, gives your teams an opportunity to achieve small victories and show progress towards the many big victories ahead.
What's Next?
So, now we know to be clear and concise with our goal setting. We’ve also found our audience type based on the customer journey. What’s next in the planning phase of your video campaign? It’s now time to tie everything together with analytics.
Be on the lookout for our next post on analytics by checking back in over the coming days. Thanks for reading.
To learn more about effective marketing video production click here.