This article will guide you on how to choose and pursue the right path to achieve your social media marketing goals.
How to Identify the Right Goals for Your Business?
What works for one business doesn't necessarily work for others, even within the same industry. Before defining your goal(s), understand your business's current state. First, audit your brand's digital presence, including a social media audit. Then, analyze your marketing and sales shortcomings to determine where improvements can have the greatest impact.
Should you build awareness, generate leads, cultivate your community, or learn more about your audience? Through auditing and analysis, you'll understand which goal, if achieved, will yield the most profit for your company at this time. When you can answer this question, you've defined your goal.
Goal setting is important because your ability to produce results from social media marketing is strongly linked to your ability to identify meaningful goals. This is a logical two-way street: you can't measure failure or success if you don't know how far you are from achieving your goal.
The goal you choose to pursue will dictate which strategies you adopt and which key performance indicators (KPIs) you track. Once you've identified this overarching goal, you can move on to identifying relevant metrics, creating strategies, and producing content.
General Recommendations for Setting Social Media Marketing Goals
Here are some general recommendations for goal setting within the context of social media marketing:
- Align your goals with your brand's core values.
- Understand what makes each social media platform unique, and leverage it to your advantage.
- Ensure your campaigns are unique and differentiate your brand.
- When setting goals, ensure your efforts are consistently maintained over time.
These recommendations should be considered across your social media goals, whatever your desired outcome.
Number 1: Increase Brand Awareness
Social media is a powerful way to spread your message. Facebook alone boasts 1.94 billion monthly active users. Whether you sell skincare products or IT services, your business will likely benefit from a social media campaign that effectively positions your brand content before the right eyes.
If you are launching a new brand or product, have lost significant market share, or are seeking to reach a new target market, you'll want to set a brand awareness goal. For example, CVS created an advertisement to build awareness about its new partnership with Target.
Brand Awareness Metrics to Track
Measuring brand awareness can be tricky because you need a sample group to measure brand recall. However, several specific numbers can provide valuable insights into the strength of your brand presence:
- Average reach per post
- Website traffic from social media
- Number of followers
- Number of brand mentions
- Engagement levels (likes, shares, comments, replies, etc.)
- Brand share of voice (your brand's coverage compared to your competitors)
For most tasks, you'll find these metrics in your relevant social analytics tools (e.g., Facebook Insights) or free tools like Google Analytics. More sophisticated metrics like brand share of voice require specialized tools such as TrendKite or Brandwatch Analytics.
How to Increase Brand Awareness
After identifying the relevant metrics, it's time to improve them. First, start posting content that excites your audience. Your brand is competing with a vast array of other brands for users' attention, so your content must be unique and valuable.
Aim to create content that educates, informs, entertains, or inspires. Try to mix these up to have a combination of all 4 content types and minimize overtly promotional posts. REI's Force of Nature campaign highlights women’s presence outdoors. This content connects to REI’s mission and aims to inspire, not directly sell.
You can create content that increases your brand awareness in several ways. Adding some personality to your content reminds everyone that you are human too. You may want to try influencer marketing but make sure to get your approach right. If your audience loves freebies, run a contest or giveaway.
To increase your post reach, try curating other people's posts to leverage their reach, and add relevant hashtags to each post. If you have a suitable marketing budget, you can invest it in social media advertising. It's amazing how precisely you can target audiences with social media advertising.
You have several options, but keep an eye on those relevant metrics. They are the numbers you are trying to improve.
AirAsia's Brand Awareness Campaign
Several years ago, AirAsia was launching a new airline route from Sydney and wanted to increase passenger awareness. The problem was that they didn't have a huge marketing budget, or at least one large enough to compete with other, larger players in the industry.
To promote this new route, AirAsia ran a Facebook contest called Friendsy. Users had the chance to win a flight for themselves and 302 of their friends (essentially an entire plane), earning this chance by tagging them in a seating plan. Since tagging automatically shares the post, the campaign quickly went viral.
As a result of the Friendsy campaign, AirAsia saw a dramatic response and boosted its awareness metrics.
- 30% increase in Facebook fans
- 12,500 contest entries
- Over 2 million unique users reached (approximately 20% of Australians using Facebook)
- Estimated PR value of $1.7 million
Number 2: Increase Website Traffic or Leads
Website traffic and sales leads are metrics directly tied to sales and profit. The nature of social media platforms, with their myriad hyperlinks and clickable media, makes the process of growing sales and profits much easier. However, increasing traffic and leads requires a good understanding of what motivates users to click.
If your sales are sluggish, your website content isn't getting much attention, or you're looking to identify and address inbound marketing issues, you might set a goal to increase traffic and leads. In this Facebook ad, JAM invites prospective subscribers to learn more about their online courses for kids and sign up for a free trial.
Traffic and Lead Metrics to Track
When your goal is to increase traffic and leads, analytics tools should be your lifeblood. They tell you how well your social traffic and lead generation efforts are performing. Below are the analytics you should be tracking:
- Traffic (page views) from social referrals
- Session duration of social referrals (bounce rate)
- Form submissions from these individuals (email subscriptions, gated content signups, contact forms)
- Sales conversion rate of social referrals
While traffic, leads, and conversions are important, you should also look at the actual profit you’re getting from your social media referrals. If your social conversions aren’t yielding as much profit as your traditionally acquired customers, your source may have a traffic or lead problem.
How to Increase Traffic and Leads
In the 2017 Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 78% of survey respondents said that social media marketing helped them increase traffic. This response suggests that businesses should strive to improve their social referrals.
To increase traffic, your primary strategy should be to create great content for your target audience. The more accurate and relevant this content is to your target audience, the higher your conversion rate will be from your social referrals. For example, this Host Analytics ad promotes a white paper on Microsoft Excel, a topic that will appeal to its target audience of financial professionals.
You can combine several strategies to increase traffic and leads. If you are a beginner, make sure your profile aligns with your brand’s aesthetics to meet user expectations. Also, link to your website whenever appropriate. Link your website in your bio, branded posts, and anywhere else that allows you to introduce your brand.
As you produce content, regularly promote your latest blog posts and content offerings (ebooks, white papers, templates, etc.) to increase traffic to your branded assets. Repurpose content that performed well to expand reach and exposure.
Advertising and influencers can also help promote your content. When investing in social media advertising, ensure it is sufficiently targeted so you don’t waste money on irrelevant traffic. An influencer can share a link from your website with their audience and help you create content that will be enjoyed by both your followers and theirs.
IBM’s Lead Generation Campaign
IBM encourages its employees to engage with its audience on social media. For example, sales teams can join existing conversations on social media and use them to identify and capture more leads. And the company has well-defined social computing guidelines.
As a pioneer in social media marketing, IBM has a good understanding of how to engage its audience.
When IBM launched its cloud services, it wanted to identify and qualify users and then direct them to relevant pages to drive conversions. But IBM wanted a less expensive channel than search advertising.
Sales staff focused their efforts on Twitter and LinkedIn, achieving great results, increasing traffic and expanding leads.
- Twitter followers increased by 55%
- Over 2,000 clicks to cloud product pages
- 19% of total traffic to cloud product pages originated from social media
Number 3: Build a Community
Look at it any way you like, your social media page, along with your followers and influencers, forms an online community. Your job is to cultivate and expand this community to become a valuable asset that reflects your organization’s vision and purpose.
Building a social media community is a good goal if you want to improve customer service efficiency, increase brand engagement, build trust, or provide more value to your audience. To encourage discussions and add value, the Quirky Momma Facebook page asks questions and shares relevant videos and links.
Community Building Metrics to Track
When looking at measuring the impact of your community building efforts, remember that measuring the direct profit from your community is very difficult (if not impossible). However, a community can help you gain valuable insights into who your customers are, what they like, and more.
While you can’t directly measure the profit generated by a community, these metrics can help you see the results of your efforts.
- Engagement (number of clicks, likes, comments, shares)
- Brand mentions
- Posts that link to your content
- Follower growth rate
- Survey responses to the question "How did you hear about our brand?" (if the answer is social media)
In short, building a strong social media community is all about driving engagement. The more relevant engagement within your community, the more valuable it becomes for users. You should also carefully track which topics and content types perform best (videos, memes, quotes, etc.) and use this information to shape your community building in the future.
How to Build a Community
Brand communities can provide businesses with a competitive advantage that’s extremely difficult to replicate. When it comes to building trust with your audience, communities are truly unparalleled. Simply owning/managing an engaged community is enough to establish brand presence as a powerful entity.
First and foremost, you should always encourage conversations and keep the lines of communication open. Make connecting and engaging with your brand as easy and inviting as possible. To do this, consistently nurture your community. Developing valuable communities can take significant time and effort, so be sure you’re committed to the task before you start.
Share your insights with your communities and let people know about your future plans. They appreciate this transparency, and you increase your chances of positive engagement. To encourage even more engagement, consider tying your discussions to popular culture, current events, and (potentially) controversial headlines. But be careful not to speak inappropriately or offensively.
Giving your fans a voice can complement these efforts. Highlight user-generated posts that reflect your brand’s vision and allow your fans to share their opinions. User-generated content is often considered the most trustworthy. For example, DesignSponge invites its followers to participate on its Instagram page based on a changing hashtag that defines a theme.
Also, focus on your customer service and problem-solving. Try to make your community a dynamic resource where professionals can find solutions to industry-related issues.
Finally, understand that communities have very specific values, usually around trust and transparency. Make sure you understand these unwritten rules (e.g., avoid dishonesty or over-promotion) to avoid breaking them and turning your community against you.
Marc Jacobs’ Community Engagement Campaign
When the Marc Jacobs brand wanted to launch a new line, it created the #castmemarc campaign to promote its new rebellious collection and drive community engagement.
In a campaign that ran simultaneously on Twitter and Instagram, aspiring models from the company's fan base posted pictures of themselves using the hashtag #castmemarc. The idea was that campaign participants would inherently increase brand awareness on their own social networks, especially those with disposable income and an interest in fashion.
The #castmemarc campaign yielded these impressive results:
- The first #castmemarc campaign had over 70,000 participants in one week
- Marc by Marc Jacobs represented 70% of the company's revenue in 2014
- Over 102,000 mentions of the #castmemarc hashtag were seen on Instagram
- Over 4,000 mentions of the campaign existed on Twitter
- The models hired were significantly cheaper than professional models
Number 4: Listen to Your Audience to Discover Their Interests
Social media provides brands with ample opportunities to learn about their audience through social listening. The nature of these media means publicly sharing information, which is great for marketers who are conducting research. By monitoring conversations, comments, and mentions, you can gain valuable insights into your audience’s sentiment about a particular topic.
Social listening is a good goal in social media when you're promoting a new product and there's no previous market, or you want to focus on a specific niche market. However, in reality, you should always practice social listening. Regularly checking in with your audience is something you should never stop doing.
Research and Development Metrics
Measuring how much you know about your audience can be challenging. No metric is directly tied to the success of collective listening. But fortunately, there are numbers that indirectly relate to it and provide a few suitable indicators:
- Brand mentions (this metric should increase during collective listening campaigns)
- Sentiment analysis (determines whether the social perception of your work is positive or negative)
- Audience demographics (age, location, interests)
- Influence levels (the power of a social media user, measured by their overall reach)
Some of these metrics are subtle and therefore require more sophisticated analysis to gain insight from the data. This analysis will likely require a greater time investment than traditional data analysis processes. But remember that the ability to understand your audience is priceless.
How to Research Your Audience
Something as simple as searching a specific hashtag and viewing the results can be considered collective listening. But collective listening can itself be a job. To perform it, follow conversations that mention your brand and respond to as many interactions as possible to further promote brand-related conversations.
To facilitate collective listening, use listening tools like Mention or Hootsuite. Also, create brand alerts and organize them with campaign creation.
After completing a listening campaign, enter the information you’ve gathered into a report. Make sure your collective listening report is actionable. For example, if you notice an issue in people’s comments, your next step might be to focus on social media PR. It’s easy to spend all your time on social media reports, so you should maintain a healthy balance between actual listening and reporting. Always prioritize actual listening and action.
Conclusion
Before deciding on which strategy to adopt, you will need to properly define your social media goals. A systematic goal-setting process can also help you track the appropriate metrics and know how successful your efforts are in achieving your goals.
While you are not limited to one goal, the metrics for each goal are different. Therefore, you will need to cover more bases. If you’re just starting out with social media marketing, start with one or two goals maximum.
