Social media marketing is one of the fastest ways to reach your target audience today. You can log in on Facebook right now and start posting about your business.
However, posting just anything won’t do much for your business. You need a social media marketing strategy, and that strategy begins with setting clear, measurable goals.
Below, I’ll show you how to set social media goals for any platform you’ll engage your business in.
9 Social Media Marketing Goals
Social media goals define where you are at the moment and forecast where you want to be. The goals determine what you post, how often to post, and so much more.
Now, everywhere you’ll look online, you’ll find these nine common goals:
- Increase brand awareness
- Boost Engagement
- Increase website traffic
- Generate more leads
- Generate sales and conversions
- Increase customer retention
- Manage brand reputation
- Collaborate with influencers
- Market research
Note that while they seem standard, your business has to go deeper to personalize these goals.
Conditions for Setting Social Media Goals
How many times have you ever told yourself you should start waking up early? Then six months later, you realize you never woke early even a single day? Maybe it’s because you didn’t know the conditions for setting great goals.
In social media, you have to follow these conditions for your brand to go far. Here are the conditions and how to fulfill them:
- Define specific goals clearly
- Use quantifiable metrics in your goals
- Set challenging yet achievable goals
- Align your social media goals with overall business objectives so they’re relevant
- Define a timeline for each of your goals
This is known as the SMART way of setting goals which was developed by Doran George in 1981 in his paper, “There’s a SMART way to write management’s goals and objectives.”
Now that you know how to set a smart goal, let’s see two specific examples from the nine common goals.
1. Brand Awareness Goals
Brand awareness goals aim at making your brand to be known to more people like the way Apple and Microsoft are household names. Here are 2 examples of smart brand awareness goals:
- To increase social media followers by 20% in six months
- To boost brand mentions by 15% through user-generated content by encouraging your audience to create and share content related to your brand.
2. Engagement Goals
Hootsuite defines engagement as, “any visible interaction with your brand on social media.” That means shares, likes, comments, retweets, and other forms of interaction.
Here are 2 examples of smart brand engagement goals:
- Increase the average post-engagement rate by 10% in three months.
- Enhance customer satisfaction by responding to 100% of social media inquiries:
3. Website Traffic Goals
If you have a website, you don’t have to wait for months for people to find it on Google. Start sharing it on social media to drive traffic to the site. Here are 2 examples of smart website traffic goals:
- Drive 30% more traffic to the website through social media referrals
- Drive click-through rate on social media ads by 20%
4. Generate Leads Goals
Leads is one of the most misused terms online. When I started working online, I used to see people saying they were finding leads. Somehow, I thought leads were a certain group of people like doctors or lawyers!
Anyways I did my research and found its meaning. If you’ve also come across this somehow confusing term for beginners, here’s what it means:
Leads are the people who share their contact information with your business because they’re interested in what you’re offering. The more leads you get, the higher your chances of converting them to customers. Therefore, here are two smart lead generation goals to pursue:
- Generate 500 new leads through social media sign-ups in one month
- Increase conversion rate on landing pages shared on social media by 15%
5. Generate Sales and Conversions
Who doesn’t want to make sales online? Unless you’re a non-profit generating agency, you started your business to make money. That money comes in the form of sales and revenue. Here are 2 smart sales and conversions goals to pursue:
- Increase e-commerce sales by 25% through social media promotions
- Achieve a 10% increase in revenue from social media advertising
6. Increase Customer Retention
According to Outbound Engine, you have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer compared to a 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer. That alone is enough reason to pursue customer retention as one of your social media marketing goals.
Now, here are two examples of smart customer retention goals:
- Decrease customer churn rate by 15% through social media engagement
- Enhance customer satisfaction by responding to 100% of social media inquiries
7. Manage Brand Reputation
We all want our brands to be trustworthy so we can attract and retain customers. Therefore, brand reputation involves any action that’ll create customers’ trust in your business.
Here are two smart brand reputation management goals:
- Address and resolve 90% of customer complaints on social media within 24 hours
- Improve online sentiment by 20% through proactive reputation management
8. Collaborate with Influencers
Have you ever wondered why people call that celebrity who talks about food in your state an influencer? Here’s your answer:
The Influencer Marketing Hub defines an influencer as someone who has these two things:
- The power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.
- A following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.
Based on this definition, here are two smart influencer collaboration goals to pursue:
- Collaborate with three influencers every quarter to promote the brand and increase its reach
- Increase engagement and conversions through 5 influencer marketing campaigns every quarter
9. Market Research
Finally, you need an update on what’s happening in the market. Remember, customers and times are always changing. Therefore, what worked yesterday may not work today. You’ll only know that by conducting market research.
Here are 2 smart market research goals to pursue:
- Conduct quarterly surveys or polls on social media to gather insights from the target audience
- Monitor and analyze competitor activities and customer preferences on social media
Set Your SMART Social Media Marketing Goals Now
Now that you have all the information you need, follow the above guidelines and set your social media marketing goals for the next year. If you’re too busy developing your products that you don’t have a minute to spare to do this, get in touch now. I’ll help you develop a full social media strategy that’ll help you grow your business.