Know what you’re doing from the start

A digital campaign – just as any kind of campaign – needs a clear objective that has to be established from the start to obtain the desired results. And it may sound pretty obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

It really matters because it changes the way the digital platform of your choice shows your advertisement and it changes the way it handles your budget. If you don’t pay enough attention to it, things can become costly.

An objective should be a Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-bound goal. It’s not the same to set “increase sales” as your goal as “increase sales by 10% this trimester in comparison to the previous one”. These are called SMART objectives and they can save you a lot of trouble.

There are a lot of techniques that can be used to set an objective, but I find this one very easy to implement and very useful.

Once you have a business objective, you have to align it with one campaign objective. Any digital platform that you decide to use will ask you to set one before doing anything else.

You have to tell the platform what you want it to do before you can set a budget, a location, or even the images, videos, and texts to be used.

Facebook, Google, and all the others have a pre-established set of goals from which you can choose the one that best aligns with what you need, so it’s a great idea to learn what each one does.

Although each platform has different options and different names, generally speaking, we can choose between Views, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, Downloads, and Conversions.

The Views objective shows your ad to the most people possible, while Traffic shows it to people that are most likely to click on a link that will take them to your website (or anywhere that you decide).

Engagement focuses on getting your post more likes and comments than it normally would. The Leads objective is helpful to get people to send you their information, i.e. their e-mail address to request a quote.

App Downloads is a pretty self-explanatory option. Conversions optimizes for people who very possibly will perform a certain action that is important to you, i.e. add a product to a shopping cart.

What you choose will determine the platform, the budget, and even the format of the ads to be used. If you do it this way, it is almost certain that you will achieve the results that you are looking for.