This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

Goals

A key piece of information that you’ll want to know for our Naked Campaign is what our goals are (this is typically the first thing that we set up on a regular client engagement). Having goals is critical because that is what lets you know whether you have actually done good work or not (all of us at Fight have worked on award-winning projects that never actually accomplished what they should have).

Given that we’re a high-consideration good, and that windows of opportunity with the potential clients that we hope to reach are rare, our primary goal is to get people to subscribe to the ongoing content that Fight produces. This content comes primarily in the form of a blog (which you are currently reading), and our company Twitter account. So the primary goal can be stated as:

Goal #1: Increase the number of people subscribed to Fight content

As a secondary goal, if we can’t get people regularly engaged in our content, we at least want more people to have heard about Fight and know what it is that we do. That goal can be stated as:

Goal #2: Increase the number of people aware of Fight

Metrics

You may notice that for Goal #1 there is no specific amount that we’re trying to increase subscriptions by (which we would normally establish for a campaign like this). This is because this will have been the first real marketing push that we’ve done for Fight. As such, we will be looking to establish a baseline from which we can measure future campaigns. We’ll do this by both looking at what the total increases that we’ve gained through this program, and looking at the increases versus the cost to get those increases so that we can compare that with other approaches down the line.

Of course, we have a starting number of people subscribed to our RSS feed for the blog and our Twitter account, so this is what we’ll be building on.

For Twitter, as of the writing of this article, we have 176 direct followers. We are also on 16 lists which have 82 additional followers combined, for a total of 258 followers on Twitter.

We only recently started running our RSS feed through Feedburner, so it’s not clear how many people are actually following us this way, but a 7 day rolling average shows about 18 subscribers as of this writing (we use a 7 day average because Feedburner numbers vary heavily from day to day).

For Goal #2, we’re also setting a baseline, but things are a bit trickier. If we were operating from any kind of real budget, we’d do periodic surveying against our target audience to see what the uptick in awareness was, or we’d do surveys of people exposed versus not exposed to see what the lift was, but these are outside of the scope of our current budget, so we’re going to have to measure awareness by proxy.

For this goal our proxy metric will be unique site visitors during the campaign, averaged over 30 days. We could use ad impressions here, but for our purposes, they’re a pretty weak indicator of awareness, so we’ve opted to assume that if they actually click through to the site, they have a base level of awareness. Google Analytics tells us that our baseline is 534 unique visitors in the last 30 days.

So there you have it. In upcoming entries, we’ll show you the ads that we are running, the keywords we chose for AdWords, and we’ll look at some A/B testing on the landing page. And, of course, we’ll update with stats as we get them in, and let you know what changes in approach (if any) we’ve taken based on that information.

We’d love for you to jump into the conversation below. I’m guessing no small number of you have suggestions for how we should proceed, or what we should have done to begin with. Let us have it! And if you have questions about how or why we’re doing something, we’re happy to provide that info as well.

Tune in next time!