MAGIC, Part 1: Goal (Or, what exactly are we trying to do here?)
(If you missed the Intro to MAGIC article that precedes this one, here's the link. Also, I forgive you.)
MAGIC is meant to be a collaborative framework; I’ve always found creative campaigns and content pieces are better when you have multiple people thinking through the project from the start. Can this be done asynchronously? Of course it can! One of the key outcomes of using the MAGIC framework is creating a document to serve as a single source of truth. That way anyone can familiarize themselves with the particulars of a project at any time and begin to meaningfully participate quickly.?
But I’ve always found brainstorm sessions exciting and their results often to be greater than the sum of their parts. Whether you’re all in front of a whiteboard in an actual room (my preference) or working remotely via teleconference and looking at a shared document, bringing together a team to conceptualize the campaign is key.?
Start by writing this on your whiteboard or at the top of your document:??
Message:
Audience:
Goal:
Imagery:
CTA:
Now bring your focus onto the first pillar of the framework: Goal.?
“But wait!” you might be saying, “The first word on my whiteboard is clearly Message. Why aren’t we starting there?”?
Technically, you would be correct, and my engineer friends assure me being technically correct is the best way to be correct. But this is marketing, and there's just as much art as there is science. Here’s where I confess that in its earliest stages, this framework had Goal at the top of the page.
Goal is the best place to start because it leads to strategic thinking instead of tactical reaction.?Thinking strategically is critical to prolonged and consistent content marketing success. If you’re creating individual pieces of content ad hoc, it has a certain “running on the treadmill” feel - you’re doing the work, but it’s just keeping you from falling down. You’re not actually getting anywhere you want to go.
Focusing on a greater goal instead of a specific message or topic is much more likely to lead to successful campaigns and the creation of several pieces of interconnected, actionable content.
So why not put Goal first on the whiteboard? It ruins the acronym, obviously! MAGIC is easier to remember and it has a certain delightfully nerdy quality to it. Ultimately you want your team to buy into this system and remember the five pillars every time they start something new.
(Fun fact: GAMIC is actually also a word! It means “sexual” in a very biological sense, as in gametes - quite literally cells able to fertilize or be fertilized. Would that work for our purposes? Kind of! We’re conceiving brilliant content ideas here after all. Does it have the same ring as MAGIC? No, no it does not, and we don’t want our friends in HR getting the wrong idea. Let’s bring this digression to a close and get to the good stuff, shall we?)
Brainstorming Around Strategic Content Goals?
At the beginning of any brainstorm, you have to think big. Zoom out as far as you possibly can and go over the broad strokes that you might assume everyone in the room already knows, then zoom in bit by bit. Invariably, you’ll find something not everyone knows (or agrees on) much sooner than you expect.?
Even if there’s never an audible “oooohhhh, I get it now!” uttered in the room, trust me, this happens. There are many among us who aren’t particularly comfortable admitting when they don’t fully understand something or know what to do next. This process of starting big and then zooming in shows the clear progression of your strategic thinking and creates institutional best practices. That’s MAGIC doing what it does, bringing your team together, creating clarity and maximizing your collaborative output.?
(Note: you don’t have to do this every time you’re creating a new piece of content. Not every social media post or infographic needs a big picture conversation. That would get tiresome fast. You should do a “campaign level” brainstorm regularly, however; whether that’s every six months, quarterly, or monthly is up to the cadence of your content calendar and your team’s productivity.)?
Let’s dive into an example.?
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You’re in your weekly one on one with the Big Boss. You sit down across from her and she affixes you with that look across her desk; you know the one I mean. She holds you with it for a few moments, and then leans back in her chair and takes a big sip of coffee.?
“We can’t keep relying on new business to hit our revenue goals; we need to ensure retention and maximize renewals. Why don’t we start a newsletter?” she says. “I just signed up for the newsletter from my favorite coffee shop, Brews Traveller, and it’s delightful. Also I get a free cup of coffee every two weeks.” She holds up the coffee cup to show you.
You sell software, of course, but that’s hardly the point. The boss wants a newsletter, and she wants one for an excellent reason - revenue!
So you gather your marketers and uncap your favorite dry erase marker, and get started on your MAGIC. You write:?
Goal: Improve retention with a customer newsletter
Boom! That’s definitely a goal. We can move on to …?
“How is a newsletter actually going to do that?” asks Candace, in her usual pointed and incisive way. “I get and delete a lot of annoying newsletters.” (Ever notice how all people named Candace are smart and generally on top of things? It’s true.)?
Great question, Candace (as usual). Now your brainstorm begins. For a few minutes you toss it around the room.?
Quickly your team reframes the question into: What do customers need to hear from us on a regular basis to ensure they’re maximizing the value they get out of our product?
Time to update that goal. Don’t erase the old one, create a stack so you can see your thought process. Under the original, now you’ve written: Highlight and reinforce our products’ value.?
Great! But before you can even jauntily underline that new goal a few times for effect, Stefan pipes in with, “We only have so many case studies, plus a newsletter just talking about how great we are would get old pretty quick. What else are we going to send them?”
More brainstorming occurs, and the room fills with creative electricity. Even Greg the Quiet Intern gets into it. Now, off to the side, you’ve got a list that looks like:?
“Um, wouldn’t it be good to have, like, some interactivity?” says Greg the Suddenly Less Quiet Intern. “You know, make it more of a conversation somehow, uh, to get them engaged.”?
You look over at Candace and see her nodding thoughtfully, perhaps grappling with a newfound appreciation for Greg. Your team adds to the list:?
Together you look back at the second goal, and everyone can see it's a little behind. You update it with:?
Goal: Use newsletter to regularly engage customers and reinforce our value as partners in their success
Now we’ve got a goal that gives us an organizing principle, and helps us to be strategic in our future customer-centric content creation calendar. Along the way we've created a great list of potential content types to get us started. There is content that is time-specific with obvious deadlines (product updates/feature launches, conference calendar, company culture events), multi-phase projects that will need their own calendars (research studies, surveys with results), and short drop-in segments to add as they occur (media hits, industry news, tips and tricks).?Suddenly that content calendar is filling up.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves: more importantly for our purposes, we also have a thread to follow to refine our Message and establish a clear Audience, the next two pillars in MAGIC.
Stay tuned thanks for reading! Please like, comment and share.