Arts Marketing Ireland: Developing your Digital Marketing Plan with goals that are actionable and measurable.
1. Primary Objective:
Every creative or cultural organisation should have an overall (high level) primary objective set out in their marketing plan. Often this will relate to your organisation's mission statement.
For example if you were an Online Art Magazine, your primary objective might be: “For the Magazine to be the mostly widely read online art magazine in Ireland”.
2. SMART Goals
It’s not good enough to merely state your cultural organisations primary objective. To be able to achieve your aims effectively you need to be able to break your objective down into a number of defined goals which can be actioned within a set timeframe. These will be based on your own personal understanding of your cultural organisations strengths and weaknesses. Your smart goals should feed back into achieving your primary objective.
The SMART Method:
Specific - The action you are taking is well defined. Eg. “Grow Instagram followers”
Measurable -What will success look like? Set an amount Eg. 50 followers per week
Attainable -make sure your goal is realistic and something you can achieve with the right work & budget
Relevant -Your goal must feed back into to the overall aim of achieving your cultural organisations primary objective
Timeframe -Set yourself a deadline (or you’ll never get anything done!)
An example of a SMART Goal to achieve our fictional Online Art Magazines primary objective might be:
“To increase website traffic by 2000 followers a month by December 12th 2019”
3. Actioning & monitoring your SMART Goals
In digital marketing the journey toward achieving our objectives should be defined, actionable, measurable and controlled. After you have clearly defined your required actions using the SMART method. You now need to map your actions out in a matrix whereby each action is linked to a specific metric for control & monitoring. We call these metrics KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).
Examples of KPI’s could be: Website traffic, Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Impressions, PPC, Short URL Click, increase in followers, google analytics, twitter analytics (Any tool that allows you to monitor and measure your ongoing success)
Mapping and monitoring your success will help you to maximise the ROI (Return on investment) from your marketing activities. Remember that when working out your marketing plan for your cultural organisation you are always under the triple constraint (the project management triangle) of time, scope and budget. You must think about how best to apply your time and resources with the triple constraint in mind.
An example of a matrix to action and monitor your goals might be:
Primary Objective: “For the Magazine to be the mostly widely read online art magazine in Ireland”.
SMART Goal: “To increase website traffic by 2000 followers a month by December 12th 2018”
Example Matrix to Action, Monitor and Control:
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