Why are social media marketing goals so critical for today’s marketers? Marketing has undergone a sea change over the past few years. No longer is talking at your prospects enough.
Prospects expect two-way conversations – conversations where you do the listening. Having a robust presence on social media gives you the opportunity to connect with your prospects with valuable content, answer their questions, and move them toward a deeper relationship with your brand.
But you can’t just wish for results. To achieve success with social media marketing, you need to set measurable, achievable goals. Here are some tips to help you set the right goals for your marketing teams.
Align Your Social Media Goals with Your Company’s Objectives
Before you formulate a social media content strategy, schedule a sit-down with your C-suite to make sure you’re on the same page with your corporate leadership. Ask them to provide you with a list of their overall goals for the coming quarter. Make a point to meet with them at least quarterly to ensure that your marketing goals align with theirs.
After each meeting, list the goals by priority, as Brody Dorland advises. Then, schedule a meeting with your social leadership team to brainstorm how to translate your company’s goals into your social media KPIs.
Make Your Goals SMARTer
Once you’ve aligned your social media goals with your company’s objectives, clarify them to make them easier to track. The SMART acronym, which stands for “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-limited,” is an excellent tool for non-numbers people to put raw ideas into concrete goals.
- Specific: Create detailed, precise descriptions of your KPIs to help guide your teams to produce laser-focused posts that have a better chance of hitting the target. For example, instead of stating that you want to attract more followers, limit those followers to those people who are likely to need what your brand offers.
- Measurable: Whether your goal is to connect with more followers in your target market, encourage more clickthroughs to your website, convert followers into blog subscribers, or drive sales, you need to define success numerically.
- Attainable: Aim high – but not impossibly high. Then, put all your efforts into exceeding the numerical goal you set for each KPI.
- Relevant: If you’ve already aligned your social media KPIs with your company’s goals, you’ve already tackled this step. However, it doesn’t hurt to double-check to make sure your KPIs relate to your company’s success, not only your marketing team’s success.
- Time-limited: Your company’s numbers people have to pay the bills by a specific date. If your KPIs don’t produce enough results to achieve your company’s ultimate goal – to increase ROI – they won’t have the money to pay those bills. It’s that critical. So, never set open-ended goals. Shoot for achieving your goals well before your company is running on fumes.
Promote Your Best Performers in Key Areas
Once you decide on the social media KPIs that drive numbers that matter to your company, look at your current content to see how it has performed in meeting your corporate goals, both on social media and on your owned content.
For example, if one of your company’s goals is to expand into new markets, engage new audience segments with posts that address their needs. Facebook and many other social platforms have a wealth of user data that can help you find common characteristics among your new target audience.
Image: Facebook Audience Insights
Identify those segments, create customer personas from their data, and post content that performs well with them on the social media channels that they frequent. Then, task your content teams to create and amplify more of those types of content.
Identify and Strengthen Weak Areas
Similarly, if your company has been bleeding out sales among one of your longtime market segments, check your content marketing analytics for indicators of lagging interest in types of content that once performed well with those segments.
Review that content to see if it needs an update to incorporate new data, trends, or insights. If so, revise it and repost it on those prospects’ favorite channels. Then, look for new ways to reach those segments.
If it’s been a while since you’ve researched these target customers, review and update your data. Perhaps they’ve abandoned their social media of choice.
Or, their interests and pain points might have changed. If so, adjust your social and content planning to reflect those changes. AI-powered predictive analytics can suggest new topics and angles that can hook them in, nurture them along their buyer’s journeys, and entice them to buy your product or service.
Use Cross-Departmental Collaboration to Shore Up Support
Suppose one of your corporate goals is to reduce customer churn. Support that goal by planning to create social media posts that address the main complaints or issues your customers face.
Partner with your customer support team in content collaboration to learn the types of questions and complaints they hear from your customers. Then, create social media posts that help your customers troubleshoot issues proactively.
Make that partnership permanent by working closely with your support team to respond quickly to customers’ and prospects’ comments, as Sprout Social’s Brent Barnhart advises. Even better, build customer goodwill with social posts that teach customers how to get the maximum value from using your products.
Build Buzz Around New Product Offerings
If your meeting with the company brass unearths plans for a new product, dig a little deeper for more information, including the timetable for the product launch and all the steps leading up to it. Additionally, find out what it does, what problems it solves, and how it works.
Next, research the types of people and businesses that would benefit from such a product. Construct buyer personas for each segment, and then sketch out various points along the buyer’s journey where conversions need to occur.
Then, set conversion goals for each point along the journey and map out a social media strategy that gives you the best shot to achieve them. Test often to make sure you’re on track to hit – or even better, exceed – each goal.
Finally, Cut Costs with Content Automation
There’s one goal that all companies have in common – slimming down the budget. For content marketing – especially the social media side of it – it’s the time-suck that occurs if you don’t take advantage of content automation.
If you’re like most large companies, your social media strategy includes a variety of channels, each chosen to reach specific audiences. And, if your brand’s reach spans several time zones, you might need to time some posts to appear on your followers’ feeds in the middle of the night.
Automation solves all those problems. Just choose when you need to post content on each channel, set it to post at the proper time, and you’re done. Then, you and your teams can invest all the time you save into producing valuable content – a much better use of your payroll spend.
Even better news awaits. Meeting your social media marketing goals can become even easier with a content marketing platform that combines automation with analytics, collaboration tools, and a content calendar that keeps everyone on the same page.
DivvyHQ has all those features and many, many more – and you can try it free for 14 days with no obligation. Start your free trial today!