Almost every marketing proposal and brief include one or more of the following meaningless goals: drive awareness and increase engagement.

Of course we want to drive awareness and/or increase engagement. What is marketing if not one or both of those things? The point of marketing proposals are to allow the thinkers on the team to collaborate and then give those ideas outlined to the doers on the team. Proposals, like most endeavors, are garbage in – garbage out. The more vague the objectives and strategy the more vague the results will be. So let’s how we can boil down “awareness” and “engagement” into unique actions that we can measure and get better results.

Objective #1 Drive Awareness
Awareness to who? Certainly not everyone. Moms with kids? Traveling businessmen? Baby Boomers? Teenager jocks? Go one step further and say “Drive Awareness to ________.” Then the doers can measure themselves against how well they are reaching that desired audience. Age and gender reporting are easily accessible in AdWords from the Google Display Network.
Also by using the myriad ways to overlapping contextual, interests one can measure the CPM and CTR of getting in front of the coveted demographic.Targeting new customers or return customers is also a consideration – how well can you reach past purchasers of product x who might have an affinity for the new product y? Remarketing lists can also be a useful tool to measure awareness. Getting the message in front of visitors who browsed certain categories or similar products can be counted as success. All of these tactics drive awareness and give you ways to measure how well that awareness was achieved.

Objective #2 Increase Engagement
Engagement is subjective and web analytics tools are inherently unable to measure the kind, positive or negative, of engagement and are left to only measure the degree of engagement. Measuring the degree of engagement is going to be unique to the experience of the site. Maybe it’s the amount of contest submissions, tweets, comments, video plays, likes, it all depends. There are a few standbys however: loyalty, recency, length of visit and depth of visit (all located under Audience > Behavior in Google Analytics. With all of these metrics see what the site average is and then use that as a baseline to achieve against.

So instead of being meaningless, an example objective on a marketing proposal could say:
“Drive awareness to our target 25 – 35 mothers with children who are trying to save time and increase the value of quality time spent with their families.”
Or
“Increase engagement by reaching more than X contest submissions while driving X new visits through user generated social shares.”