I’m sure by now you’ve set (or started setting) goals for your business. But have you set goals for your social media and marketing?
It’s common to set goals for your business but it’s also a good idea to set goals for your social media or else you won’t know if you have a goal and you won’t know how effective it is for you.
Step one: determine what your main focus and goal is for social media
Obviously, in order to set a goal, you need to know your overall goal, but this needs more thought than just saying ‘more sales’.
If your overall goal is increased sales:
- What dollar amount or percentage do you want to increase by?
- How are you going to increase your sales?
- How many more leads do you need in order to reach that sales goal?
- Do you know your lead conversion rate?
- How much will you need to increase your ad budget to obtain those leads?
These are just a few things to consider for this one goal.
Other social media goals:
- brand awareness
- increased email list
- larger social media audience
- more event attendees
- increased website traffic
- learning about social media platforms
- learning about tools to improve your productivity online
If you are a coach or consultant, maybe your goal is to book a certain number of consulting calls a month. If you are a mobile app obviously downloads could be one of your goals however it could be that you want to receive five new app ratings a week, or you want to score a certain number of five-star ratings a week or something like that. Make sure that it’s very clear.
Step 2: be specific and measurable
Not only do you need to make these goals, but why and how are you going to measure your results. If you want increased brand awareness, a more specific goal would be ‘I want increased brand awareness in order to serve 100 more customers a month. This goal will be measured by our community outreach survey, social media numbers and increased sales per month of $xx.
If your business decides the goal for the year is increased sales, you might want to work backwards, think about what were your sales for 2016, what your profit was, what your expenses were, and then how many leads did you get to your sales. Then you know how many leads you’re going to need each month in order to hit your ultimate goal for 2017.
Step three: decide how to do better
Once you set your specific measurable goal, take a look at what you did last year; what worked well and what you can cut out and not do again this year to save yourself time, money and energy.
Take a look at these things to consider how to do better this year:
- What social media platform did best for us?
- Is there a platform we should cut from our social media posting?
- Is there a social media platform we should test and see how it works for us?
- Is there anything I need to learn in order to better understand social media?
- Where did I get most of my leads last year?
- How can I best use my time in order to reach more people (and the right people)?
Step four: create clear steps
To actually hit your goals, make sure you have clear steps in place to reach those goals. If your ultimate goal is to increase your email list so that you can deepen the relationship you have with your potential customers, and increase your communication with your community, how are you going to do that?
Create a list of steps to achieve, for example:
- add email sign up in my email signature
- use my social media platform CTA’s to add to my email list (ie. Facebook CTA under your header)
- use an iPad app to collect emails each time I am at an event
- create a contest to increase my email list
- etc.
Once you have larger steps, you might even have to break down some of those again into smaller steps in order to get very clear of how you will achieve that ultimate goal.
Make sure that whatever goals you make this year, make them big enough to be exciting, but not so big that there is n chance you will ever reach them.
Do you set goals for social media? What are they? I would love to hear your feedback below!
