Are you sure your social media marketing efforts are working? Are you confident enough that you are doing it right?
Not sure about the answer?
Well, you aren’t alone!
This single question has troubled many internet marketers and has eventually stopped them from engaging in social media activities. Because most of them follow the wrong route and give up hope on social media marketing. It is no rocket science, to leverage the optimum benefit from social media, but it happens that false notion, and most importantly incorrect goal settings hamper the overall process.
But, every cloud has a silver lining. The brand new year has just started. And this is the perfect time for new beginnings. With so many social media platforms and resources available, you no longer have to confine your social media activities just to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. On top of that, there are several tools available out there that allows you to measure your campaigns, your ROI and how much social media is actually paying off for your business. This is the apt moment to assess your social media progress so far – and where you want to be at the end of this year.
And we would love to help you in the process.
Social Media Goals – Be S.M.A.R.T.
This is not the character trait I am talking about. This is the most pivotal aspect of any social media marketing strategy. Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals.
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Realistic
T – Timely
If your social media activities are comprised of just blind posts, mundane blogs, and robotic automated emails, then you are probably cooking food without the right ingredients, yet expecting a perfect dinner. You just cannot expect massive amounts of sales if you are carrying out these wrong methods. To achieve the success, you need to set some prior goals before you begin. This makes it easier to measure success or failure.
So here you go, the 7 Goals of Social Media Marketing.
1. Brand Awareness
Building Brand Awareness is all about making your brand relevant to potential buyers. This implies sharing value added information on a regular basis targeted to your clients. This includes Infographics, blog posts, relevant articles, humorous memes, etc. Now the analytics you should track are –
- Brand Engagement among your target audience
- Number of Followers
- Likes
- Retweets
- Shares
- Comments
An example of a goal to set is – To gain 1000 fan followers within one month.
2. Drive traffic to your website
Who doesn’t want a steady flow of traffic to their website? Driving visitors to your website or blog who might turn into customers is the ultimate motto for every marketer.
And for this, most of the marketers use social media to share their contents and drive traffic. The metrics to measure traffic are as follows –
- Share of the overall traffic
- Bounce rate of social media traffic
- Clicks on your social media posts
3. Locke and Latham’s 5 Principles of Goal-Setting
The researches of Dr. Edwin Locke and Dr. Gary Latham have yielded a theory of five elements of goal settings.
1. Clarity – Clear goals with no ambiguity whatsoever help to understand the task at hand, measure the results without any complication and achieve due success.
2. Challenge – Set your goals to a nominal challenging level, so that it is achievable in teal life, not only in theory. Make it enough motivating but not so difficult that it overwhelms and demotivates you.
3. Commitment – Commit yourself full time to achieving the goals. Work done half-heartedly without the requires commitment, mostly turns out to be futile. Involve your teammates in the goal-setting process.
4. Feedback – Seek for feedback and advice from your audience. And take every feedback positively. You can measure your progress by the feedback you receive.
5. Task Complexity – Do not add too much complexity to your goal, that may negatively affect your mettle, vigor, and inclination.
4. Build Community of Advocates
Gone are the days when companies relied only on word of mouth. Brand loyalty plays an important role these days to spread the fame of any business. And social media is the perfect platform where brand loyalty could be shared with thousands of people in real time.
Your potential customers would pay more close interest to what your existing clients say about your product or service. And for any business, the greatest resource are their existing customers/clients. They are the advocates of your brand who can take the customer relationship a step further. And this is far more credible than any company-led advertising campaign.
And this is the only reason for the rise in the promotional offers and discounts offered by restaurants, hotels and apparel stores. The more they give offers, the more they get mentioned on social media.
The analytics you should track are the follows, mentions, likes, shared, retweets and comments.
Example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal –
To achieve 10 mentions or retweets within 1 month.
5. Grow Your Revenue
Avail your social media channels to turn your audience into steady paying customers. In case you do not have an extending sales process, you may take help of social media to boost your sales and grow your revenue. Facebook Ads have become an immensely popular strategy to boost your sales.
Until 2015, a typical return on investment from Facebook Ads in e-commerce was 152%. So you can very well evaluate the rate of ROI Facebook Ads will give you in 2017 and beyond.
The possible metrics to measure your revenue growth are –
- How many sign ups your social media channels are yielding every week or every month?
- How much revenue is being generated from your active social media channels per month?
6. BSQ
Another useful acronym, BSQ stands for Big, Small, and Quick. You must think in Bigger dimension to define your ultimate goal. You have to act small by setting up Small milestones periodically. This will make it easier to achieve your goal.
And lastly, take Quick action. Be agile and come up with timelines for each milestone.
7. Boost Brand Engagement
Why do marketers use social media? The answer is simple. Brand Engagement!
Social media interactions improve brand perception, brand loyalty and boost brand engagement. Moreover, the latest algorithms of Facebook and Instagram are prioritizing posts with higher engagement quotient. This is out of the theory that netizens will be more interested to see highly engaging content.
So in short, if you want your social media posts to be viewed, liked and shared, then you have to create engaging content on a steady basis.
How You Should Achieve Your Goals
To achieve your set goals, you need to create a full proof plan. This should be comprised of –
- The daily, weekly and monthly targets you need to complete.
- The milestones you want to meet during the process.
- The key person involved in each step.
So what are your social media goals for 2017? And what metrics are you using to track them? Let us know in the comments!
