So you’ve added social media to your marketing arsenal. Now what?
By this point, you should be in alignment with why your business decided to invest in social media in the first place. This is usually defined in your social media strategy. If you haven’t gotten that far, not to worry. Check out our blog on defining your social media strategy to get started.
Goals are the end-game to your social media strategy and help assign value to all of the work you’ve been doing to manage your social media pages. You should be practicing goal-setting at all levels of your business because goals hold you accountable, help define your budget and get you paying attention to your data.
AND let’s not forget the vital role goal-setting plays on measuring your return on investment. Monitoring your metrics is a MUST when it comes to determining your social media ROI, but what good does monitoring do for you if you aren’t putting that data towards an actionable goal? Let’s give those numbers a purpose and set some goals!
Get there faster by knowing where you’re going
As we mentioned before, understanding why your business is on social media is the starting point for defining meaningful goals. So, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Here are a few examples of broader social media objectives for your business:
Brand Awareness: Getting new people to discover your brand.
Engagement: Encouraging users to interact with your content.
Customer Service: Addressing customer issues and concerns to maintain customer retention.
Leads & Sales: Getting users to visit your website and make a purchase.
Once you have chosen an objective, you can begin to get specific on the goals you’ll set to move in the right direction. This can be one or all of the objections mentioned above.
Make sure your objectives are achievable
We’re taking it back to goal-setting 101 with SMART goals. You may already be familiar with this handy acronym when it comes to goal-setting, but we find it’s useful to put ourselves in check when we’re setting marketing goals for a client. In order to be SMART your goals should be:
Specific: Simple and clearly defined.
Measurable: Determined by one or more metrics in your analytics.
Achievable: Attainable by you or your team. Don’t set the bar too high!
Realistic: Possible to achieve within the resources, time and money you have available.
Time-sensitive: Met within a specific time frame.
The practice of using SMART goals is what makes confident marketers. When you make a habit out of using this tool, tracking the success of marketing campaigns becomes a breeze. Every one of the steps in setting a SMART goal is important to having Social Media marketing objectives that are obtainable. When we have a client that walks in and wants to grow their account by 10,000 followers in a month and has no budget to back it, we tell them that their goal isn’t realistic. It’s easy to be specific, but realistic dimensions are important when setting marketing objectives that can be achieved, and you will enjoy your journey a lot more if you have the right metrics in place to measure how far you have come.
Build an analytics dashboard so you know how fast you’re going
In order for SMART goals to be measurable, you’ll need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs), otherwise known as metrics, to track your progress. Metrics can vary across platforms, but here are some common KPIs that are associated with your broader social media objectives.
Brand Awareness
- Impressions
- Reach
- Followers
- Shares
- Story Views
Engagement
- Engagement Rate
- Likes, Comments, Retweets
- Mentions
- IG Story Retention
Customer Service
- DMs
- Response Rate
- Response Time
Leads & Sales
- Sales Revenue
- Lead Conversion Rate
- Link Clicks (link in bio)
- Clicks on Shoppable Posts
Effective data analysis requires context and timely access to information. This is why consistently monitoring data at regular intervals is crucial for achieving your marketing objectives. Social media is a fire hose of information and there are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of it all. We highly recommend using multiple analytics tools to stay on top of your data and to bring as much of that data into a strong reporting tool like Google Data Studio. Many social media management tools come equipped with entry-level analytics tracking, so start there. Also, Google Analytics is a must for seeing what actions your social referrals take on your website. If you don’t have Google Analytics set-up – it’s time.
Putting Your Goals Into Action
Now let’s apply what we’ve just learned into a real-life scenario. A new local pizzeria, Pepperoni Palace, wants to get the word out about their restaurant. This goal might sound like “increase brand awareness on Facebook.” However, it’s in our best interest to get much more granular to make sure this goal is being reached. So, let’s apply the SMART goal method.
Objective: Increase Facebook brand awareness
Make it Specific: Increase Facebook followers by 20% within our city
Is it Measurable? YES! We can monitor the number of followers in our city.
Is it Achievable? YES! We have a strong content plan and can boost our posts targeting people that live within 3 miles of the Pepperoni Palace.
Is it Realistic? Yes, with the number of followers we have (400), 20% is a realistic goal given our budget and time frame.
Set a time frame: We’re going to do this in a month.
Great success! We just used the SMART process to define our goal of increasing brand awareness within reach of the Pepperoni Palace pizzeria over the next month. Our objective is specific and we’ve locked down metrics and a time frame to measure our success.
The Bottom-Line
SMART goal-setting makes for effective marketers. Because you’ve done the heavy footwork from the beginning, you now have a clear vision of what the campaign should look like and what you’ll need to do to make it happen. And remember, no matter your objective, it’s important to get specific. This allows you to make adjustments in your efforts to get closer to reaching your goals, and in the end, when you have achieved your social media marketing goal, you can celebrate with pizza. ?
