“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” (Wouldn’t it be nice to know who really said that?)

Despite its ambiguous origin story, I love that quote because its essence is in campaign tracking, analyzing and optimizing, which are keys to marketing success. You watch it, you learn from it, you make things better.

But sometimes I read it and think about people who aren’t good at managing campaigns or, worse, aren’t measuring their campaigns.

How can we unpack this quote for those folks? And how does it relate to the topic of creating objectives and setting campaign goals?

To “manage” a campaign really means to:

  • Know what “success” looks like.
  • Keep an eye on performance.
  • Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, going forward.

That directly relates to “measuring” a campaign:

  • Quantify that success metric. Define success with numbers.
  • Watch the numbers over time.
  • Report back to your bosses in a way that answers their eternal question, “Well, did it work?”

Planning to measure success makes your campaign easier to manage.

One key piece of the planning puzzle is deciding on objectives and setting goals to meet those objectives.

Once you know your company’s mission and what you’re trying to achieve from a larger scale (customer happiness, safety, etc.), you can define your campaign objectives, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Here’s what we need to do.”

Those things can include:

  • Create more awareness.
  • Get into people’s consideration set.
  • Encourage people to convert–buy, donate, vote, etc.

Whichever student of mine in my Fall 2020 class pointed this out to me should take full credit for it: Notice the verbs at the beginnings of those bullets? They aren’t easily quantified. That’s the big difference between an objective and a goal: An objective is more “Here’s what we need to do” and a goal is more “Here’s what we need to do, how much of it we need to do, by when; and here’s how and when I’ll know we did it.”

Wow. Wouldn’t your boss love to know you’re thinking like that?

If you haven’t heard about SMART goals, they’re the best formula for turning your non-quantifiable objective into a quantifiable goal.

Why? Because SMART goals are:

  • Specific (not ethereal or fluffy)
  • Measurable (ah, the magic word, the thing that will make your campaign manageable)
  • Achievable (not completely out of the realm of possibility)
  • Relevant (so, not saying “I need more awareness” but then measuring product sales)
  • Time-Bound (to give yourself check-ins along the way)

If your objective is “new leads, because we believe some leads will become sales,” your goal could be, “Generate 100 new leads in the fourth quarter.”

How is this a SMART goal?

  • “Generate” is more specific than “We need.”
  • “100” is a measurable number…
  • …and may be achievable over a 90-day period.
  • “New leads” are relevant to the overall sales process.
  • And “fourth quarter” means you know what time to check in on your progress.

When you know your company’s bigger mission, and you can clearly state your campaign’s objectives and rewrite them as goals, you’re measuring your campaign, which means you can manage it much easier.