Application

What is your digital goal? What do you want to accomplish?

Take a few minutes to write it down, thinking through the SMART goal framework. You can use the SMART goals worksheet.

Other key questions to ask yourself:

• What milestones are important to you? (ie. Social media follows; downloads; conversions; signups; etc.)

• How many people do I want to reach through my digital campaign?    

• Who is my audience? This question is absolutely critical and it’s what our next lesson is about! Once you’ve finished writing your goal, go ahead to the next section.

Real-Life Case Study: 

Last year, a  team in Japan decided to run an Instagram campaign starting twelve days before Christmas in order to share about the gifts that Jesus gives His followers. Their vision for students in Japan was that gospel content would be available to them while they sat scrolling through their phones on the train each day.

In order to prepare for this Instagram campaign, they came up with a SMART  goal:

They wanted  20 new people who didn’t already follow their Instagram account to see the posts and engage with them in some way.

This is a good SMART goal because it is:

Specific & Measurable: 20 new people engaged

Achievable: Each person on the team was a part of this and it was a high priority for them. They also had a budget of $10/day for each day of the campaign.

Relevant: They used the social media platform that most Japanese students use and it connected their ministry with the upcoming holidays in a relevant way.

Timely:  The campaign was for 12 days leading up to Christmas, with time to evaluate and follow up afterward.

Once they knew their goal, they were able to plan how to carry out the campaign, which included delegating roles, creating the posts, and having a clear process to run through during the campaign.

Using the analytics feature in Instagram, they were able to find  the following results:

• There was an average of 58.25 likes per post, with 699 likes total.

• There was an average of 36.6 new profile views per day, totaling 440 new profile views.

• Five new followers were gained.

• Most significantly, each post was seen, on average, by 4488 people, totaling 53,863 people throughout the 12 days of the campaign. 

• New followers were recorded and either followed back or sent private messages from the team, or both.

The team’s clear goal allowed them to execute a great digital campaign, far surpassing their original hopes. For only $10/day, 53,863 college students in Tokyo saw gospel content on their phones, likely for the first time ever, and over 400 new students engaged with the content!