Tracking Goals And Pitching To Brands — Before And After Dataspaces
A case study exploring how Dataspaces helps creators track goals and pitch to brands in a more efficient and beautiful way.
The Short Of It
Define Goals
There are multiple ways to define goals and how you track what is successful to you and your business. Defining this early helps creators know what type of Dataspaces they should create.
The Old Way Is Hard
Having to constantly update media kits and track data manually leads to consistently out-of-date information and potentially misleading metrics. You can either choose to create a system where you're always updating, or you can potentially lose out on gigs by sending out-of-date materials.
Dataspaces Help You Worry Less And Book More
By creating Dataspaces that help track and define goals, Moonlight Social was able to stay up-to-date with brands and increase their pitch response numbers by 50 percent.
Defining Goals
There are several different ways to create goals as a content creator. Sometimes they are milestone or “output” based, and sometimes they are “input” based. An output-based goal is basically something you measure typically as a result of another action. For instance, if you have a goal as an artist to reach 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, that would typically be considered an output-based goal. It is a possible result of several other tasks and actions, including creating and releasing music, using social media content to increase awareness around your music, running digital ads, performing shows, landing sync placements for your songs, and plenty of other things that can impact your music streaming listenership.
An input-based goal is more related to a direct action you take. For instance, you may have an input-based goal of “releasing 3 songs in the next three months.” Or perhaps you have an input-based goal of “posting 3 pieces of content per week.” These are goals you can directly control based on completing the task associated with them.
There are pros and cons to both types of goals. For instance, output goals may be a more direct indicator of growth or success. These are benchmarks you’re trying to hit in the same way any company would. However, they’re very difficult to directly control yourself. You can make a rock solid plan to hit an output-based goal and still miss the mark, despite doing everything you set out to do.
On the other hand, input goals are entirely up to you and your team. There’s shouldn’t be anything stopping you from achieving these goals if you’ve been reasonable in setting them (and barring any major catastrophes that limit your ability to perform tasks). This means they’re much more in your control, and subsequently a better measure of your overall effort. However, when you’re ultimately concerned with the bottom line — whether it’s revenue, number of followers, or other hard data — input goals aren’t really going to inform you of that. Sure, the hope is that your input goals drive those numbers up, but at the end of the day they probably don’t really tell the story of the state of your business.
An older example of output goals — the results that you hope to achieve based on defined tasks.
Moonlight Social's Approach To Goals
Before Using Dataspaces
Moonlight Social uses RootNote Dataspaces for two things — data tracking and a media kit for pitching potential brand partners.
Data tracking for content creators is particularly cumbersome and usually involves spreadsheets. For Moonlight Social, it was no different. The band was using Numbers documents and Google Sheets to track things like social media numbers, content created, views, and likes. They were also using a separate spreadsheet to track income generated from different sources.
When it comes to media kits, Moonlight Social was using a Canva document that they could create a link to share. The band started with a template and tried to create a somewhat decent representation of the band’s social numbers, content style, and audience. This was used in order to try and present a clear picture of Moonlight Social’s brand and style to potential companies that would hire Moonlight Social for sponsored content or UGC.
Tracking metrics manually is cumbersome, ugly, and hard to share
The Problems With The Old Way
Tracking data in spreadsheets is cumbersome and time-consuming. It also doesn’t lead to any visualizations without additional effort, and it’s not particularly easy to share or collaborate on these sheets with a lot of team members. Moonlight Social was setting a reminder once per week to go in and update data, a process that usually took a few hours, before then sending the data on to relevant partners.
When it comes to the media kit, it was even more time consuming. Having a static media kit in something like Canva means the information is essentially out of date a day after you create in. In some practical sense, it’s not that big of a deal if the numbers are a little different from day to day. But Moonlight Social was updating the media kit with new numbers every week in order to keep it current. The alternative was to misrepresent what the band has to offer. Another big issue is embedded content. Traditional media kits require you to upload the content manually or offer unreliable embedding options. That means when it comes to showing examples of past content, you’re stuck with a lot more “telling” than “showing.”
After Using Dataspaces
Moonlight Social successfully replaced their old Canva-based media kit with a new Dataspace that stays current. By incorporating widgets featuring certain social data into their media kit, as well as graphs for visual representation, Moonlight Social was able to create a much more compelling and up-to-date pitch for their brand and social presence.
The Dataspace features audience demographic information, social media stat widgets, images, embedded content including a brief reel. The embedded content aspect is huge, because so many companies want to see what you’re about more than they want to read what you’re about.
The Dataspace also features images and logos of past collaborators, quotes from happy brand partners, and additional information about the band.
Moonlight Social also created a separate Dataspace to showcase rate sheets and better explain terms of working together for sponsored posts and user generated content. Now, with a single link, Moonlight Social responds to inquiries with a beautifully transparent outline of what to expect when working in a content partnership.
Thanks to the new Dataspaces, Moonlight Social increased their response rate to inbound partnership requests by 50 percent!
When it comes to tracking input goals, Moonlight Social created a separate Dataspace to more accurately visualize some of the band’s stated goals, including content creation and gigs booked. The Dataspace utilizes a mix of API-based social connections and manual data entry. While the manual entry process is similar to previous efforts involving spreadsheets, this time the manual entry process allows Moonlight Social to instantly visualize the growth in charts, as well as keep a historic record that is more easily shared and collaborated on with other team members.
The Bottom Line
Being able to track and manage data in a timely manner is critical to optimizing your efforts as a content creator. It also helps you establish and evaluate goals. Similarly, being able to present yourself in the best light — while maintaining transparency and efficiency — means you’re much more likely to both land and keep brand partners in the future. Utilizing Dataspaces helps achieve both of these critical components of running a brand that relies on digital content.