Did you know over 70% of successful business owners have their goals written down? When you see all those successful entrepreneurs that you idolise on the daily, I can promise you they are all goal setters. They are the ones that have sat down, developed a clear idea of what they want and taken the time to plan and focus on how they will achieve them. Goals give us the opportunity to determine the direction we want to take our business.
As behaviours change and our consumption of the internet continues to grow, our goals need to change. Social media needs is an extremely effective form of marketing, and in order for our business to grow and to achieve the goals we set we need to first and foremost get our social media goals under way. So, let’s get clear on what our social media goals are.
Why are you using social media for your business? Is it to get foot traffic? Are you a local store? Is it to get brand awareness? Is it to get online sales? Start by thinking about what your main objective is, what is it you want to achieve by using social media, and write that down.
Still not sure? Let us help. Here are some common goals of the most successful social media campaigns.
Build Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which someone can recall or recognise a brand. It can be said that those brands which have ‘good’ brand awareness are those which are frequently brought up in conversations.
And it is because of this that Brand Awareness is the top reason marketers use social media. With over two billion people active on social media platforms and those people spending significant amounts of time on social media consuming content, it is the prime spot for any business to grab consumers attention.
How do I measure brand awareness?
To measure the success of your brand awareness efforts you want to focus on a few key metrics.
- Followers/Likes – “How many people Like or Follow your page” Whilst this isn’t a massively important metric to measure it does give an indication of the number of people who are interested in seeing more of your content.
- Mentions, Tags & Shares – “How many people are talking about your brand and want others to know about it to?”
- Reach of your social media posts – “How many people have my posts reached each day / week / month?”
Increase Traffic to Website
An increase in traffic to your website/blog etc. is another common goal of any successful social media campaign and builds on from the brand awareness goal. Driving those followers and people who see your social media posts to your website to then take some further action on the site is top priority.
Measuring web traffic fortunately is one of the easiest goals for us to monitor. With tools like the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics and UTM tracking codes we are able to track, with quite a level of accuracy, the traffic which comes from social media platforms to our website and where that traffic goes on the site.
When measuring the traffic to your site from social you want to make note of the following key points:
- Source – “How many visitors are coming from your social media channels and which channel/s are they coming from?”
- Bounce rate of social media traffic – “What is the quality of the traffic from social media?”
- Conversions – “Is the traffic being sent to your site from social media taking the desired action you have set up on your site?”
To Generate Leads
Lead generation is probably the most common goal of any business using social media. Afterall, with over two billion active users on various platforms it’s hard to argue that your target market isn’t using social media as part of their every day life. And if your target market is there, you want to speak them, right?
Generally, the most effective lead generation strategies on social media encompass the paid advertising side of social media whereby you pay to place an advertisement which speaks directly to the audience you have set. These ads will ask for some details from your audience, commonly their name, email address and phone number, in exchange for some sort of value for example an e-book with information about a particular product or service you offer.
When set up correctly, lead generation advertisements can be extremely powerful in connecting you with your target audience, but generating the leads is only half the battle. You must have a sales process which can then convert those leads into paying customers otherwise your efforts are all in vain.
There are many metrics you can measure when running lead generation ads on social media. Some of the main ones to focus on are:
- Reach – “How many people did your ad get to?”
- Leads – “How many people actually submitted their details to qualify as a lead.” It is important to outline what qualifies as a lead to your business.
- CPR ‘Cost Per Result’ – “How much did it cost to have someone fill out the lead form”
- Conversions – “Of those leads generated how many of them were your sales team able to convert into paying customers?”
So now that you know what some of the most common goals of successful social media campaigns are, have a think about what the goals you have for social media? Why does your company use social media to market themselves.
Marketing using social media is so much more than just posting content. When you actually set out clear goals to be achieved and develop strategies to achieve those goals you can start to reap the many benefits of marketing through social media.
About the Author
Jessica Colusso is a digital marketer specialising in social media marketing and helping businesses navigate the social media landscape to achieve their marketing and communication objectives. She spent seven years in marketing before deciding to specialise in digital and social mediamarketing and then starting her own company Catalyst Marketing Solutions in 2015. Catalyst Marketing Solutions’ purpose is to help businesses achieve their marketing and communication objectives through the use of social media platforms. Jessica is excited to now be working with Max My Profit as their Digital Excelerator to provide tailored social media marketing services to their clients.
