CHAPTER 4

In It to Win It: Setting Objectives

It’s pretty difficult to score if you don’t have goals, yet many companies approach content and social media marketing as independent channels without clear business outcomes defined. Whether the goal is to acquire new customers and grow revenue or to facilitate public relations, recruiting, and customer service effectiveness, identifying tactical objectives and the steps to reach them is essential for success. This chapter covers setting goals specific to an SEO- and social media–focused content marketing strategy that seeks to increase traffic, leads, and sales as well as to improve media coverage, attract talented employees, and serve online customers more efficiently.

THE ROLE OF SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WITH CONTENT MARKETING

Content is the basis for search and often an outcome of social media engagement. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute offers this definition: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”1 Content marketing investments are often directed toward lead nurturing and prospect education with an ultimate goal to convert into a sale. As an independent tactic, content marketing goals can extend from key points in the buying cycle such as awareness and purchase to the entire customer life cycle, including customer support and advocacy.

Modern search engine optimization requires content and links, of course, but has increasingly relied on social signals as search engines factor the influence of authors, curators, and the rich data that can be found on the social web. The fundamental role of SEO is to help search engines find, copy, and understand a company’s content as the best answer for the things their prospects and customers are looking for. SEO best practices can be applied to any kind of content that shows up in search results, whether it’s a web page, image, video, PDF file, or a local business listing. While SEO is a perfect complement to content marketing and longer sales cycles, many investments in optimization are specifically to generate leads and sales, since search is an explicit expression of a need or want. If a person is ready to buy a product or service right now, he or she can find it through search and can make a purchase within a short amount of time. Most goals related to SEO start with key performance indicators like search visibility and keyword traffic that then lead to inquiries and sales.

Social media and networks are effective for information discovery, just as search engines are. Consumers often move between search and social channels for information that leads them to purchase, and this behavior presents a significant opportunity for companies to be wherever their customers are. Social networks can create awareness, build brand confidence, and influence purchase, referrals, and advocacy. Social media is also a platform for customer service interaction.

In her eMarketer report, Debra Aho Williamson states, “Integrating social media with other corporate activities is a key challenge for marketers, but incorporating it is the only way to be successful, long term.”2 On it’s own, social media as a marketing channel can be hit or miss for many companies, because people don’t tend to join social networks to make purchases. But integrating social media marketing and engagement with search, content marketing, e-mail, and other types of online marketing tactics can result in substantial benefits.

The diversity of business goals for social media investment is significant to the extent that a field called social business has evolved.3 When you think of social media, it’s usually in the context of companies investing in external social media marketing and engagement with prospects and customers. However, companies are also looking inward for ways to use social technologies to foster collaboration, content, and expertise. That same collective intelligence used for knowledge transfer and collaboration internally can also be tapped for external marketing purposes. Companies like Intel, Best Buy, IBM, and Walmart are mobilizing employees to better use social communication channels internally and, in many cases, to connect with customers externally as well.4, 5, 6, 7 Social media–related goals for a company will depend on the extent of the approach. Suffice it to say that business social media objectives also run the course of the entire customer life cycle, from creating awareness to influencing purchase to advocacy.

It’s reasonable to have individual goals for investments in SEO, social media, and content marketing, but I think you can see that these disciplines can work together to achieve an amplified effect on the ability for companies to attract, engage, and inspire customers to action. Now let’s get into some specific goal setting relevant to different functions with in an organization that can best leverage a socialized and optimized content strategy.

IDENTIFYING ONLINE MARKETING OBJECTIVES

Before a business decides how, why, and what content to optimize and socialize, it’s important to take a step back and ask this essential marketing question, “What are we trying to do?” The answer is usually pretty obvious: “We’re trying to get more people to buy what we’re selling!”

That’s the big picture for companies across the board, but practical online marketing objectives will be unique to each company’s individual situation. The role of content works across departments, and although we’re talking specifically about marketing, the interaction between departmental content within a company can actually amplify overall business outcomes. When public relations works with marketing, and marketing works with customer service, and recruiting works with public relations, there can be mutual benefit for each department as well as for the organization as a whole. Some companies want to increase their number of customers; some are more focused on revenue or profitability; others emphasize customer marketing and retention. (See Figure 4.1.) These are all worthy business objectives, and from a content, search, and social media perspective, being able to tie marketing objectives to overall organizational goals is essential.

FIGURE 4.1 US Interactive Marketing Spend

The mechanics of establishing marketing goals starts with a good understanding of current business performance and efforts to acquire and retain customers. Common areas of focus for an online marketing program that leverages SEO, social media, and content marketing include key performance indicators such as:

• Search visibility
• Social mentions
• Web page links
• Citations in traditional online media and blogs
• Social shares
• Social links
• Visitors to the company web
• Visitors to company social destinations
• Newsletter subscribers
• Blog and social content subscribers, fans, friends, and followers
• Comments and other measures of engagement

Measurable marketing outcomes typically include:

• Fulfillment downloads
• Webinar or other online event participation
• Inquiries
• Leads
• Sales
• Referrals
• Brand advocacy

Having said all that, the simplest thing to do is assess your online marketing strategy for what has worked so far and what needs improvement. A review of your website analytics may show a steady increase in search traffic, yet there may be a significant opportunity to improve the quality of that traffic in terms of leads, sales, and profitability. For example, 10 visitors who spend an extended amount of time learning about your brand and your products are more valuable than 100 who bounce after a few seconds.

To tie marketing goals to overall business goals, think about how well the website is performing currently and what the overall online business goals are for the future. Look at each business goal, whether its focus is revenue, retention, or service, and then decide how that translates to content.

Business goals can be broad, but to create actionable plans to achieve your goals, break them down. For example, if you discovered leads that travel through your sales cycle fairly quickly are more apt to close, you’ll want to decide what content marketing tactics you can put into place that will move leads faster through the lead-generation and nurturing process. If more leads close more quickly, your marketing objectives will be achieved more effectively. In this situation, you may want to target content optimization and promotion toward prospects that fit a fast-buyer profile.

Another example might involve creating a stronger sales message in your content by using resources that better educate and inform shoppers on issues that have slowed buyers in the past. Many efforts in social media marketing omit any effort toward the suggestion of a purchase. Although it’s often a mistake to be too aggressive (or “salesy”) on social networks, it’s also a missed opportunity not to provide a way to continue the conversation in a business context if people want to do so.

For marketing-centric objectives, think about the specific things you want to accomplish through content that will ultimately lead to overall business goals, such as:

• Elevate brand perception
• Establish thought leadership
• Drive customer engagement
• Provide better customer service
• Increase customer retention
• Build a bigger referral network

Once there’s a firm understanding of overall business goals, then you can map them to supporting marketing objectives.

Combining search and social media as channels to reach target markets means that content has to provide relevance according to where it’s found and deliver specific problem-solving value based on what the target audience needs according to their position in the buying cycle. Searchers using broad keyword phrases may be focused on educational or informational-themed content to learn about the category of products and services. To serve those top-of-funnel information needs, our job as marketers is to create optimized content focused on answering those general questions. Content should be useful and compelling enough so that those who interact with it might be willing to share to their social networks. Part of social media optimization means making such sharing easy through the use of widgets that call out specific social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

Customers who are looking for your products and services specifically may be further along in the buying cycle, and therefore content needs to be created and optimized to address those specific information needs to guide the buyer to purchase.

Marketing-related goals for content that rely on search and social media for discovery must consider the overall business goals of the company, objectives that are specific to marketing, and the needs of the buyer whom you are after. Long-term business goals that are mapped to marketing will help keep the program in context of what’s important to the business. An understanding of how to meet customer needs through content as inspiration to buy will achieve the win for all.

ONLINE PUBLIC RELATIONS OBJECTIVES

Now that we have a good framework for defining online marketing objectives, we can explore how public relations objectives can be supported with our optimized and socialized content marketing strategy.

As with mapping organizational goals to marketing, it’s also useful to associate overall business goals to public relations objectives. Think about how online PR can elevate brand awareness, build thought leadership, and inspire customer engagement and retention. Rather than being gatekeepers to stories and news, modern PR professionals are creators and curators of that news. It only makes sense to optimize news content for search demand and to encourage both social discovery and sharing.

Building relationships with influencers and the media, gaining media placements, occupying search results with positive brand content, inspiring brand awareness, and engagement all fall under common PR objectives that involve content. Combining SEO, social media, and content with PR goals means being able to craft and optimize stories that are in sync with search demand and social discovery by bloggers, journalists, analysts, and researchers as well as with customers. A report issued by the Arketi Group indicated that 95 percent of journalists use search engines.8 A study by Cision and George Washington University reported that 89 percent of journalists use blogs and 65 percent use social networks for story research.9 Customers are targets for marketers, so why can’t the media be targets for PR using content optimization and social sharing? Making news content and subject matter experts easy to find for journalists can be a tremendous help for media relations efforts. At my agency, TopRank Online Marketing, we’ve gained anywhere from 5 to 20 unsolicited media placements per month without engaging a PR firm—all through news content that is easy to find in search and that is shared as popular content on social networks.

Facilitating social sharing of optimized stories will help increase awareness and further sharing among a community of interested participants. Today, every person is empowered to publish, so PR objectives related to optimized and socialized content marketing should consider more than just traditional online media, including the blogosphere and individual consumers who can tweet, update, comment, rate, and influence their own networks.

Your PR objectives should have at their root the same concept that drives search engine optimization success: a focus on the expectations of the audiences and how to serve as a valued resource for them.

The focus for most PR initiatives is to create awareness and influence, so imagine how you want your business to be perceived online. Establish objectives that all tie back to your original business goals with an underpinning of influence in mind. If you want to attract more customers and grow revenue, you should influence those who can help make that happen by making it easy for them to find your useful content though search and social media.

Of course, on the web, the currency of influence is content. So creating objectives that make news content more easily discoverable through search is a prime way to spread your influence. Analysts, journalists, and even some bloggers find newsrooms a useful resource for finding past media coverage, press releases, image assets, executive bios, company history, webinars, white papers, case studies, and other information helpful for researching stories. Content that lives in a newsroom can be optimized for better visibility both on search engines and for sharing on social networks.

Using online clipping services, web analytics, social media monitoring, and other social platform–specific measurement tools, the effect of optimizing and socializing PR content can be tracked and evaluated for better performance. If you’re not currently tracking the SEO and social media impact on online PR, then base forecasting and goal setting in part on data from your current website analytics and blogging activity. Use the data you have to create a baseline of measurement for expected search and social media traffic. Set goals for key performance indicators (KPIs), such as mentions on blogs, social engagement with favorable brand mentions, and search referred traffic to your online newsroom. At the same time, estimate the impact those overall PR objectives could have on increasing search traffic through content like optimized press releases, images, video, social content, and other online news content. In many cases, you’ll simply have to develop a hypothesis of what could happen based on whatever data is available to you and then implement social media and search optimization tactics to start collecting performance information. With actual data being collected, you can make refinements to optimization and social media tactics as well as to your forecast of the impact they’re having.

HR AND RECRUITING CONTENT OPTIMIZATION OBJECTIVES

Establishing marketing and public relations objectives represents the bulk of opportunity with optimized and socialized content. Buying products and writing news stories aren’t the only reasons people search for information that companies provide. Another area of consumer and business communications to consider for optimization and social sharing is recruiting. Proper staffing is essential for companies of all sizes. The costs of finding, hiring, keeping—and even losing—an employee can be significant. Consider these statistics:10

• The total US market size for recruiting is approximately $124 billion.
• Talent acquisition spending rose 6 percent in 2011 over the year before.
• An average of $3,500 was spent on new hires, with most of that money going to search agencies and job boards.
• Large companies paid an average of $1,949 per hire.
• Small companies paid an average of $3,665 per hire.

It’s clear that hiring is a lucrative business for companies that provide those services, but if you don’t have the luxury or the money for staffing agencies or professional recruiters, you’re most likely interested in keeping those costs down.

Enter the use of “socialize and optimize” in recruiting. The objectives you set for incorporating search and social might look like this: If your company is spending $10,000 per month on recruiting and talent acquisition costs (like job listings), then an objective of spending that same amount but with some efforts allocated to keyword-optimized job listings and social media promotion might carry a forecast of a 5 or 10 percent increase in qualified applicants.

To elaborate, say you’re an investment firm with an institutional sales job opening in Austin, Texas, looking to accomplish this objective. In addition to the regular job boards and advertisements you use to spread word about your latest job openings, you can optimize your job description for location as well as company or skill set. Leveraging that optimized content on search engines will help those perfect potential employees find and connect with you, potentially reducing your need to engage with job aggregator services.

Another example might involve a desire to improve the quality of candidates you find so you can limit the training costs associated with new employees. You might create an objective to target 15 more highly qualified candidates per month who more closely match the sophisticated job skills your technical positions require. This could lead to efforts of finding more “silent candidates” (i.e., those who aren’t actively seeking a new job but who would be perfect for what you need). While those candidates might not be looking, their social networks might pass along the job opportunity.

By separating objectives according to the situation, such as creating a cost savings of a certain percent or a decreased investment in outside recruitment services by a certain percent, you can then plan for and create the appropriate optimized content marketing tactics that will help you reach those goals.

CUSTOMER SERVICE OBJECTIVES

By now, your optimization objectives are firing on all cylinders. You’ve created a stream of search- and social media–friendly content that’s relevant for attracting new customers and great visibility in the media. The best new candidates in the country are finding your job openings, and your business is humming along. But wait, it could get even better. You could add even more value to your business with another audience: your current customers.

Optimizing and socializing content meant for existing customers is not usually on the radar for companies that invest in SEO or social media marketing. However, consider these example goals:

• Reduce customer service hours by 10 percent, providing a reduced expenditure of $20,000.
• Increase online customer care visits by 20 percent, thereby reducing calls to the customer service center by 10 percent.

These objectives can be met by making your customer service information easier to find through both search and social media, keeping in mind that these audiences are looking for information after they’ve already purchased your products or services. There’s tremendous benefit in keeping customers happy and satisfied with your customer service. Optimizing knowledge base, frequently asked questions, or public customer support content might be a golden opportunity to do just that.

For example, let’s say you manufacture and sell universal remote controls. There are numerous products on the market and most all of them aren’t what many people would consider user-friendly. The types of calls into your call center may be time- and cash-consuming. Imagine that an eight-minute call costs $32.50 in personnel and technology costs. Perhaps on average you receive 300 calls per day asking four common questions.

Now imagine that you’ve done a little homework to identify that there’s a notable amount of search activity for support information about those products, and you either optimize or create and optimize an online help center to address those common problems. Taking the burden off of your customer service center saves time and money, and, in addition, you’ve created goodwill and trust by solving problems present in all remotes—not just yours.

At the end of the day, whether you set marketing, public relations, customer service, or recruiting objectives, all must be accountable to your overall business goals. KPIs and success metrics comprise more than just collecting data. They involve the application of careful analytics to understand progress toward your goals. Whether it’s search or social media channels that drive traffic to your content, you’ll be able to identify both channel-specific and overall goals to help your business become more successful.

We get into the nuts and bolts of measurement and analytics in Chapter 14, but in the meantime, let’s get on to the next step in your journey toward an “optimized” state of mind—creating a content marketing strategy and road map.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. Joe Pulizzi, “What is Content Marketing?” Content Marketing Institute, accessed December 2011, http://www.junta42.com/resources/what-is-content-marketing.aspx.

2. Aho Williamson, “Marketers Spending More on Social Media for the Wrong Reasons,” eMarketer, December 27, 2010, http://www.emarketer.com/blog/index.php/marketers-spending-social-media-wrong-reasons/.

3. Michael Brito, “The Book,” Smart Business, Social Business, accessed December 2011, http://thesocialbusinessbook.com/the-book/.

4. Jeanne Meister and Kate Willyerd, “Intel’s Social Media Training,” Harvard Business Review, February 3, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/intels_social_media_employee_t.html.

5. Robin Wauters, “Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @Twelpforce,” TechCrunch, July 21, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/best-buy-goes-all-twitter-crazy-with-twelpforce/.

6. Drew Neisser, “Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business,” Fast Company (blog), September 11, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1779375/move-over-social-media-here-comes-social-business.

7. Jack Neff, “Sleeping Giant at Walmart Wakes—Its Vast Workforce,” Advertising Age, November 28, 2011, http://adage.com/article/news/walmart-motivating-mobilizing-workforce/231210/.

8. “Social Media Tools, Online Search Key for Business Journalists According to Survey By BtoB PR Tech Firm Arketi,” Arketi Group, June 15, 2009, accessed December 2011, http://www.pitchengine.com/arketigroup/social-media-tools-online-search-key-for-business-journalists-according-to-survey-by-btob-pr-tech-firm-arketi/13743/.

9. “National Survey Finds Majority of Journalists Now Depend on Social Media for Story Research,” George Washington University, January 21, 2010, http://www.gwu.edu/explore/mediaroom/newsreleases/nationalsurveyfindsmajorityofjournalistsnowdependonsocialmediaforstoryresearch.

10. Karen O’Leonard, “The Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011,” Bersin & Associates, November 2011, http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0cc0qfjab&url=http%3a%2f%2ftalent.linkedin.com%2fregister%2fdownloadprocess.php%3fid%3d78&ei=biuet-wuaokziqkc0_gzdg&usg=AFQjCNEY3VRkuO2fkN-3qSGhmIZ1ZLn5og.