Social media has been one of the most persuasive marketing tools for businesses in the last few years. In today’s business climate, it’s not sufficient to merely have your business page on Facebook and LinkedIn. Instead, it would be best if you had a solid presence on these channels and have to put some real effort into getting your company noticed.
What are these ‘real’ efforts am I talking about? Well, I’ve observed many businesses having accounts on popular social media networks and they usually use them as some sort of portfolio or reference that yes they do exist on social media as well. In order to make the most of your social media presence, you need to:
- be more committed to creating great content
- have a unique and authentic brand personality
- engage more with your audience and listen to them
- track and improve your performance
There are now 4.2 billion active social media users and numbers are growing incessantly. These users generally spend 2.5 hours daily on different social media platforms and this significant timeframe is more than enough for brands to raise brand awareness, market their products, or generate quality leads.
However, you need to remember that each social media platform is constantly changing, whether it’s adding new features, increasing character limits or otherwise changing advertising rules. It’s getting rough for many to decide their social media marketing goals. And if you’re one of them – you’re not alone!
What is Social Media Marketing?
If you’re on this page, you’re probably already aware of the basic definition of what social media marketing is all about. For new marketers or unversed business owners, Social Media Marketing is the process of promoting people, brands, products, or services using various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Each social media platform has at least one function as a marketing tool from a business standpoint, and how you utilize it will depend on the audience you want to reach.
The most important step in doing social media marketing is defining social media goals. Many companies out there have no idea what impact their social media campaigns did on their business. You can measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns only if you are exactly aware of what you want to achieve with them.
What Are Different Social Media Marketing Goals?
According to Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, marketers want to attain the following goals from their social media marketing efforts:
- Brand awareness
- Increased website traffic
- Loyal fans/following
- Marketplace insights
- Lead generation
- Boost brand loyalty
- Business partnership growth
- Increase online sales
Social media goals are not the same for every company. Obviously, you need to determine which objectives are most crucial in your social media strategy and focus your efforts on achieving them. Initially, it’s better to invest some time in optimizing your social media accounts, posting some good content, and getting some recognition.
For instance, you must raise your following count, impressions, and mentions in order to enhance brand exposure and awareness. Posting your promotional creatives or stories in advance and expecting individuals who don’t know you yet to buy from you would be improper.
You must assess the appropriate KPIs (key performance indicators) in order to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. For brand awareness, the ideal KPIs might be profile visits, post impressions, and the number of likes, follows, and shares.
If your goal is to generate leads for your business or increase sales of your eCommerce website, the primary KPIs might be the number of reach, clicks, sign-ups, and downloads.
Businesses can use different social media platforms for achieving different marketing goals. For example, if you’re looking to generate B2B leads, you may count on LinkedIn as it is widely known to be effective in generating higher-quality leads.
Why Are Setting Up Clear Social Media Goals Important?
When you have a goal in mind, you can set your plans accordingly. You don’t need to hurry; you don’t need to jump on the bandwagon. We’ve already talked about different goals that most businesses have when they are running social media marketing campaigns. You won’t make any genuine progress if you don’t have a clear direction and if your goals are vague.
Setting up clear social media marketing goals can help you in many ways, including:
- Making a focused strategy
- Choosing the right platforms
- Selecting the right content or ad formats
- Managing budgets
- Measuring, reporting, and improving results
Clear goals would help you create a solid social media strategy that serves as a guide you can walk behind in order to get from Point A to Point B. If your company does not have a social media marketing strategy, you will not have control over the path you take and the destination you reach.
Setting Up Realistic Social Media Marketing Goals: 5 Steps
Now that you understand the importance of not going blindly when it comes to social media, here are five steps you can follow to set realistic social media marketing goals regardless of which network you’re using:
1 – Recognize your target audience
Your target audience is people who are most likely interested in your products or services. Depending on your business category and product, your target audience might be narrow or broader. For example, if you sell burgers, your target audience would be broad, since men, women and children all eat burger. On the other hand, if you’re selling high-specific supplements for women, your target audience is more niche. In both cases, it is crucial that you define and categorize your target audience in order to identify the creative messaging that will resonate with them. Here are some tips that will help you determine your target audience.
Analyze your customer base and conduct client interviews: Analyzing the people who have already purchased your goods or services is one of the finest ways to identify your target audience. What is their age, where do they live, and what are their areas of interest? Engaging in social media activity or sending customer surveys are effective ways to find out this information.
Do market research and identify industry trends: Look at the market for your industry to identify service gaps that your product can solve. Analyze market trends for similar products or businesses.
Examine competition: Review top-performing content on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for hashtags relevant to your products or services. Track what other companies are doing. Rival IQ is a helpful tool for keeping tabs on a rival’s social media activities.
Learn who your target audience isn’t: There will undoubtedly be people in your target audience who do not respond to messaging or do not engage much with your content. When identifying who your audience is and isn’t, try to be as specific as possible.
Use native analytics features: Social media networks have their own native analytical features that give you insights into how your content is performing and how the audience is reacting to it. You can use this data to create social media persona.
Social media marketing can be more successful if you focus on specific target groups. When you have a clear understanding of your target demographics, it helps in maintaining a brand voice that resonates. This simplifies deciding specific marketing goals as well.
2 – Align social media goals with your brand’s objectives
There must be some objectives and aims that your company strives for. Social media, when carefully considered and in line with the company’s objectives, can help grow your organization’s clientele, level of engagement with the brand, products, and services, create conversations about its offers, and collect insightful data that can inspire and spawn new directions or improvements, boost brand awareness, and help provide more efficient customer service.
For example, if one of your brand objectives includes raising brand awareness, you can effectively achieve this with social media marketing. Brand awareness shortens the sales cycle, boosts market share, and establishes a brand as an industry leader.
- Review your business marketing strategy and find out where social media fits into each goal of marketing to help the company achieve its ultimate objectives
- While social media may only have a small part to play in accomplishing some goals, others may have an obvious and direct connection
- Make sure your brand’s message is consistent with what you’re posting on social media while keeping in mind the objective of each tactic
For each business objective, create a corresponding social media marketing goal or goals. For example, the business goal of increasing sales and revenues can be turned into a social media goal by breaking down the processes that would be required to boost sales and revenues. If the product or brand is new to the market, it will definitely need more exposure and you can implement strategies like utilizing more video content, partnering with related brands, and collaborating with social media influencers.
3 – Making them SMART
Determining social media marketing goals isn’t a complicated process but it needs to be well-structured. An effective goal should be measured with the SMART goal guide.
- Specific: Each goal you set must be specific so that you know exactly what you want to accomplish.
- Measurable: It must be quantifiable so that you can track your progress and determine just how much more work you need to put in to attain your goal.
- Achievable: Setting achievable goals is crucial because you want to push the business to its full potential. You should consider how realistic is the goal given existing constraints, such as limited budget, while measuring your goals’ achievability.
- Relevant: A relevant goal will prevent you from squandering time, resources, and effort on something that won’t help the business grow.
- Timely: Every goal should have a target date/time so that you have something to make progress towards and a deadline to keep up with.
SMART is a proven tool that effectively guides you towards determining and achieving your social media marketing goals.
4 – Gain market insights
Does your team have a common understanding of what’s happening in your market? Are you aware of how those changes going to impact your company’s growth strategy? The purpose of defining and consistently being in the loop with your market is ultimately to gain a set of insights that your marketing team can utilize for social media content strategy and marketing goals.
The team develops a shared understanding of the industry and how it is changing by collecting, sharing, and deliberating on the defined market and its ongoing trends and events.
You’ll need to develop a social media marketing strategy to streamline your efforts if you want to reap the benefits of market insights and social media data collection.
With today’s markets changing and evolving at supersonic speeds, you need to regularly track news, innovations, and competitive market events to understand how they shape and impact your social media goals for business growth.
5. Track results
The answer to the question of whether you will consistently meet your social media marketing goals or not depends on how well you are tracking your marketing performance and utilizing results to shape future strategies and goals.
It’s crucial to prioritize information because there are so many metrics you may track and analyze on different social media platforms. Below are five crucial metrics that will give you a thorough knowledge of your social media performance.
- Engagement
- Impressions & Reach
- Follower growth
- Customer satisfaction
- Conversions
You may utilize the information you get from tracking these metrics to improvise your social media marketing goals.
For example, if you’re a Florist in Vancouver who ran an ad campaign on Facebook to sell more flower bouquets, you can measure its performance by overseeing metrics such as the number of engagements, impressions, customer queries, sales (conversions), and feedback.
You will have a 360-degree view of your social media performance when you will analyze these metrics. You’ll be able to add more complex measurements as time goes on and your social media marketing goals change to make your analytics more useful for your company.
Let Mgadz Help You Achieve Your Social Media Marketing Goals
Your social media marketing strategy should be based on your social media goals. They give you the chance to maximize the effectiveness of your strategy and produce content that will appeal to your intended audience.
Is raising brand awareness one of your goals? Or do you have a stronger interest in generating leads? Having a set of clear social media goals will help you succeed no matter what your business goals are.
What are your social media goals? Are you facing difficulty in obtaining them? Let Mgadz help you with the best social media marketing services in Brampton, Mississauga, and Toronto. Book your free consultation today!
Let’s Grow Your Business and Revenue!
Get in touch for a result-driven digital marketing strategy.