Trust me, this one’s relatable! How often do you worry that your campaign’s not reaching the KPIs? Oh wait – what’s a KPI? They call it “Key Performance Indicator” and I call it – “Kills Per Index”. In a layman’s language, it is the number that represents ‘how many/ much’ of ‘something’ has been achieved. For example, when you have reached ninety nine thousand people on Facebook out of a hundred thousand, and you wait for the last thousand down – that’s the total kill (strike-off) ratio as compared to the total size of the audience (the index). Pretty basic. By the way, a 100% Kill Per Index looks good on paper; in reality it is tough to achieve the numbers especially if the numbers are hyped and unrealistic.
Now let’s talk about the ghosts. Ghosts are invisible, yet they are there in your mind. Once you believe you have seen one, it kind of, freaks you out because you can’t touch it but the fact that you know you have seen one, it becomes an experience, a knowledge that you can’t unlearn. Now think about this as numbers. If you hate math, you are already seeing ghosts. But if you understand what realistic numbers look like in digital, these ghosts are real. I’m talking about the routes to reach your numbers.
Did that ring a bell? We often put numbers on pre-campaign KPIs after evaluating past performance. But past performance can’t always guarantee future numbers. Even predictive balance sheets have contingency parameters. But when you are running a digital campaign, your contingency parameters can’t have a wide range – meaning, your final numbers might be a little different but a negative difference is a nightmare. So you would ask, Utsav, where’s the ghost?
You see, when you can’t determine how to reach the numbers and overcome contingencies, that’s the ghost you CAN’T SEE! Just like a ghost, you know its there, you can’t unlearn the fact that KPIs need to be reached but you don’t know the route.
Now here’s the solution to this.
1. Don’t set unrealistic expectations for yourself and the client.
2. When you study social media profiles and look at past data, don’t be blinded by recent interactions. Look deeply into how many people have actually engaged with a post.
3. Look at post formats to understand which post types work well for a particular profile.
4. Try to identify a pattern of audience behaviour on particular post types, content and tone.
5. Do a dry run of a ad campaign on a demo account to get accurate up to date audience size and optimise behavioural mix even before you run the campaign for real. This gives you a good idea of end result.
6. During the campaign run A/B tests and experiment with content, tonal differences, timing and of-course your favourite- hashtags.
7. If you think you can reach X amount in a particular index like engagement, you deduct a 20% contingency amount from the expectation. Automatically it gives you a buffer to reach a realistic KPI.
Oh, did I miss number 8!
8. Use common sense. You are dealing with people. At the end of the day all you have to do is solve a problem. If the campaign has a defined purpose and a strategic plan, it’s all good. But if it lacks one, don’t push it, you’ll definitely give in to the ghosts.
So are these ghosts unspoken strategies? Well, may be. But strategies are always tailor made for different situations, different purposes. Trust your gut, use your intellect to read the patterns, understand how different parameters work and you will finally see the ghosts and win over them.