The importance of setting digital and social media marketing goals
As a social media manager, one of the first questions I ask a client is, ‘What are your social media goals?’.
Many business owners respond with ‘Engagement’, which is excellent! Others have no idea, and that’s why they’ve reached out (which is also great!).
The biggest thing you need to understand is that digital or social media marketing without goals is doomed to fail. Posting for the sake of posting isn’t doing you any favours; honestly, it’s a waste of time.
Not setting goals for your social media marketing plan is like getting in a car to drive to a new destination without any map. Sure, you may wing it and get there eventually. But isn’t it better to get it right from the start and get there quicker?
Start by knowing your big ‘why’ for posting on social media
I encourage you to think about why you’re posting on social media.
Are you:
Raising brand awareness
Sharing information
Growing your sales or leads
Increasing community engagement
Boosting your website traffic
Or a combination of reasons
Once you know your big ‘why’ for posting on social media, you can create content that matches it. For example, if you’re raising brand awareness, you’d produce posts that do just that – raise awareness.
Monitor it for 6 months or so and look at your engagement levels. If you’re not getting the hit rate you’re after, you know it’s time to change your posting strategy.
Here are some FAQs I’m asked about social media goal setting.
What are the top 2 non-negotiable social media marketing goals?
Although there are many goals you can set for your social media marketing, these are my top 2 non-negotiable goals:
Posting consistent content with your audience in mind (think about how you can help your audience)
Engaging with your audience
Posting content is only a small part of social media. To be successful, you need to engage with your audience as well. It is ‘social’ media, after all!
So, if you want people to see your social media posts, you must produce engaging content and respond to your community. Otherwise, it’s like traditional marketing, where you only push messages without the ‘social’ side.
How do you measure social media marketing goal success or know what’s relevant?
When you’ve worked out why you’re posting on social media (see above examples), you can start to measure relevant goals.
To start, your goal can be broad. For example, you’re a small business that wants to engage followers and promote a community feeling group vibe. You can measure things like audience growth and participation in your groups.
Most social media platforms share analytics with you, so you can see how many people engage with your posts.
And when you get new enquiries (e.g. they email you for information, join your group etc.), ask them how they found you. If you know they came from a Facebook post; then there’s your sign that Facebook marketing works for you.
You will know what goals are relevant to your business once you’ve made your social media plan.
And honestly, you don’t need big goals to succeed – do what’s right for your business.
What does social media goal tracking data provide (and why is it important to tweak and modify)?
Social media analytics reveal what is working well or what needs tweaking or changing.
The top 2 things to look at are:
Engagement
Reach
The more people that engage with your content, the larger your reach should be.
It’s interesting to note that social media platform algorithms (like those on Facebook or Instagram) prioritise posts with higher engagement on their feeds. These platforms believe users are more interested in seeing highly engaging content, so they almost ‘promote’ it.
What are the most useful (grounded and relevant) social media goals?
These are the top goals that my clients have when it comes to their social media marketing goals:
To increase brand awareness
To drive traffic to their website or download a freebie or lead magnet
Generate new leads
Build a community
As you can see, most business owners will have similar social media goals. You’ve just got to set them to measure your success! It’s not as complex or mysterious as some people feel.
How does the social media goal setting concept apply to the tweaking part of the process?
Setting social media goals can help you when you need to tweak or change them. For example, you create a post, and the goal of your post is to get people to tag a friend and share the post.
If you find that no one tags a friend, then next time, you might try and ask people to comment instead.
It’s all about seeing what works and making the little tweaks needed to achieve your goal.
Need a hand setting your social media marketing goals?
I’ve been helping business owners like you set their social media goals for many years.
You can find my services here if you’d like to learn more about what I do. Or drop me an email, and let’s connect.
Here are some other blogs you may find handy (while you’re on a reading roll!):
If you’ve got any excellent goal setting tips you’d like to share, please drop them in the comments below.