How to set goals for your social media marketing
And make sure they’re achievable and trackable
One primary reason businesses avoid investing time and effort into social platforms, and don’t gain ground with their social media marketing, is because they can’t tell if it’s working or not. That one question: “is this working?”seems to cripple the momentum and confidence they had when first starting out. This paralysis is often the result of not setting a clear direction to guide your efforts in the first place. Fortunately there is a way to answer that question with certainty, and improve the performance of your marketing each and every month.
Understand how to structure your goals
Objectives and goals are terms often used interchangeably. While they are similar, there is a subtle, but important, difference. A goal is a short, clear, yet broad, statement that describes a desired outcome. A goal will be a general description of what the final result will look like. For example, “get more traffic”. Objectives are very specific in contrast. They are the conditions that must be satisfied in order to achieve your bigger goal. Objectives are actions.
Simply put, a goal is where you ultimately want to be, and objectives are the steps you take to get there.
So here’s how we do it…
Define your goals
What does the end game look like for you? What do you want to ultimately accomplish? At a high level, most, if not all, of your social media goals should fall under one of 3 main outcomes:
- Sales
- Awareness
- Traffic
Once you know the primary outcome you want to influence, here are a few more specific, common goals you may try to achieve using social media as a marketing channel:
- Increasing website traffic
- Raise brand awareness
- Raise product awareness
- Establish your company as a leader
- Attracting more customers
- Generate leads
- Make more sales
- Build a network or grow a marketing list
- Engage or connect with your customers
- Grow followers / subscribers / likes
- Post or engage more frequently
- Build brand loyalty and/or brand preference
Okay that’s great, but how in the H-E-Double-hockey-sticks do i do that? Depending on what your ultimate goal is (and you can have more than one) we have to read between the lines a little bit here and pull out the real meaning so we can take action on it. This makes it a bit more real when we lose the buz-words, and marketing-speak, and focus on the heart of the goal. For example, if you want to…
- Grow your audience and expand your reach. Your translated goal would be to connect with a lot of people on many different platforms.
- Connect with your customers. What you really want is to gain their trust, build relationships and create goodwill. So give big value in advance of a sale, without asking for something in return.
- Raise brand awareness. In that case, you really want to get your brand’s message in front of a lot more NEW people. You can increase the frequency of the content you publish, or create ways for them to see your stuff through different social platforms to reach different segments of your ideal audience.
- Attract new customers? You really need to position yourself as an authority in your respective field, and align your content and solutions (products/services) with the problems or pain points your customers are experiencing.
Simplifying what you really want to accomplish is half the battle. Getting clarity here will allow you to see the path and be able to put action steps in place to get there. Speaking of action steps…
Create SMART objectives to achieve your goals
Action!! Once you decide on your goals(s), then you can attach the appropriate SMART objectives to realize them. Without being specific about your objectives, you run the risk of making them harder to track and adding to your frustration. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for:
- Specific: Your goals should always be clear, simple and defined.
- Measurable: Attach a metric to your goal so you can measure your progress. It could be reach, new website visitors or leads.
- Achievable: Can you actually achieve the goals you set? Make sure you’re being reasonable with your expectations.
- Realistic: You should have the resources to achieve your goals. For example, it is possible to gain 1000 new likes in 30 days. But do you have the time and resources to meet that goal?
- Time sensitive: Your social media goals should always have a time frame. Making sure you set a time-frame that’s reachable, but not too far out, will give you just enough urgency to get it done.
An example GOAL could be to “Increase Revenue”. An example of a SMART objective to support that goal could be something like: “increase sales by 15% in Q2”. It doesn’t have to be crazy difficult. Just use the guidelines to make a set of objectives that get you where you want to go. So now that you know what you want to accomplish with your social media efforts, you can begin to audit the content you already have, and create new content assets, to move you closer to those goals.
Align your content with your goals
Content strategy should always come before social media strategy. Social should support your content marketing strategy, and is an integral part of it. Knowing how you need to position yourself to reach your target customers before you share on social, will make your social efforts that much easier. Knowing where your goals fall into the journey a buyer takes with your company is critical so you can provide the right messaging at the right time. This allows you to speak to what they’re going through, address their questions, and resonate with the issues they are concerned with at that stage. In simplest form, your goals will fall under one of the three phases of your customer’s “buyer journey”:Awareness (discover): Goals under the awareness phase would be anything to let your customers know that you’re here, and that you have a solution to their problems. Raise brand or product awareness, get new facebook likes, email signups, etc. Customers just becoming aware of you or your products, require a different type of content that if they’ve known of you prior. We call this the “top of the funnel”. So for awareness, you’d use content such as:
- paid advertisements
- research reports
- ebooks
- whitepapers
- calculators, etc.
Consideration (research): If you need to differentiate your company from a competitor (and who doesn’t) you will likely have “consideration” goals. You want to show your potential customers that you can solve their problems by showing them you’ve done it before for people just like them. Content you could use for the consideration phase, or “middle of the funnel”, would be:
- newsletters
- testimonials
- how-to articles
- in depth ebooks
- interviews
- feature guides and fact sheets
- whitepapers
- comparisons
- product demo videos
- webinars
- podcasts, etc.
Decision (sale): Everyone selling anything has goals in this phase, or should if you like money or helping your tribe. This is where leads become customers the “bottom of the funnel”. Someone makes the decision to use your products or services over that of your competitors. To push them over the edge, and get that purchase decision, you can use content like:
- webinars
- trial downloads
- case studies
- product comparisons
- videos
- product literature
- demos, etc.
Why do you need to worry about content on social?
Your content is the reason people follow you or like you social media. Content can be status updates, images you post, tweets, videos, blog posts, etc…anything you create, share and post on the internet is your content; and it all shapes your voice and brand message online. What you share, and how you share it, tells your customers what kind of company you are. Each piece of content you share should have one or more of these core purposes:
- Entertain (games, quizes, funny videos or memes, polarizing or shocking content, etc.)
- Educate (ebooks, blog posts, slideshares, infographics, webinars etc.)
- Inform (statistics, checklists, press releases, news articles, weekly digests, reports, etc.)
- Inspire (video case studies/testimonials, inspirational memes, tell your story, etc.)
In the end, everything you create should somehow lead back to your blog because it is the foundation, the HUB, of your online content. You want to direct your social media traffic here because it’s where you talk about yourself, your products and services; and it’s where the conversion happens. We talk more about content marketing for social media later in this series, but basically you need to think about where your content fits within your customers journey with your company; and what information they will need to move down your sales cycle (their buying cycle). This way you can create purposeful content to help guide them to the next stage, and ultimately to a purchase decision. By mapping your content to meet your customers where they are in their buying journey, and putting it in front of them consistently, you can greatly enhance the customer experience. And at the same time, greatly increase your chances of them coming to the decision that you are the best option on the market to solve their problem. You need to analyze your content on a regular basis to see what’s working and what’s not working.
Track and measure your goal progress
Is this working?
Now that you’ve decided what you want to accomplish, how are we going to tell if it’s working or not? “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. So make sure you have implemented a reliable way to watch for changes in the key factors that show growth and progress on your campaigns. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are the measurable values, or metrics, that tell us what progress we’re making on our goals and how effective we are. An example of a KPI could be website visitors, click through rate, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, video views, email newsletter signups. You get the idea. Each goal will have some different key performance indicators to measure improvement – and each objective will have values to indicate success.
What should you be measuring?
First, determine what the primary factors (KPI’s) you want to influence and measure…
- Website Traffic – use social to drive a larger audience to your primary website and track the increase, and impact over time.
- Qualified Leads – use social to drive an audience to your site to opt-in for a free offer and track new subscribers.
- Social Reach & Engagement – how much of your audience are you reaching, and what percentage of them are engaging with your content?
- Your Responsiveness – how quickly do you respond to questions and customer service requests? If you’re not responsive people will stop trying.
- Social Mentions – measure how many brand mentions you’re getting online over time.
- Audience Size – measure the increase of your social media fans and followers.
- Customer Satisfaction – track your response times and reviews.
- Benchmark – how do your likes, shares and engagement numbers stack up to your competitors?
Let’s tie it all together…
- Main Goal -> “Increase Revenue”
- Objectives (sub goals) -> “increase sales by 15% in Q2”
- KPI (measurement) -> “number of new website visitors that convert into a sale”
How do we actually do the measuring?
While you can’t always measure everything, you will likely need several types of tools to effectively keep track of your metrics. Here are a list of tools (some free, some paid), in no particular order, that will help you follow and track your most critical social media metrics:
- Sproutsocial
- SimplyMeasured
- kissmetrics
- Google analytics (Track traffic from social platforms, Social media conversions)
- Google Alerts (brand monitoring/mentions)
- Facebook insights (Click on the gear on your Facebook Page and select ‘View Insights’)
- YouTube analytics
- Twitter analytics
From here you should be able to identify where visitors come from, what’s working and what’s not, and use that knowledge you’ve gained to revise, rinse and repeat to get better results. So dive deep into your KPI’s (sounds so official doesn’t it?), and track and measure your activities to see if you are trending towards or away from your goals. This let’s you use data, not hype, to make better decisions on what to change or keep to get the best results possible.
Need help with your social media marketing?
Ready to Get Started?
Starting at just $349, you can get a custom website and managed online presence for your business plus incredible support from a real web pro that has your back.
Get Started Today