Successful Social Media Marketing Starts with Goals and Metrics

Success means different things to different people. Successful social media marketing means increased sales, exposure, and repeat customers.

What do you Want to Accomplish with your Social Media Marketing?

Got you thinking, right? Well, successful social media marketing starts with setting goals and metrics — and they have to be SMART goals.

I see too many small business owners dive into social media marketing without planning anything. You can’t have a plan without goals! How do you know what you’re doing is working? Jumping in without goals is a useless effort — you waste valuable time and money. Therefore, you need to be SMART about it!

What are SMART Goals?

SMART Goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound

Specific:

“Getting more sales” or “building awareness” is not specific. That’s very general. Sure you want more sales. Who doesn’t? The best way to get specific on this is to determine how many new clients or customers you need to make a profit each month. Start with how much money you want to make in the next 12 months, fiscal year, or calendar year. Divide that by 12 or however many months are left in the calendar year and that becomes a specific monetary goal that you want to reach every month.

Now, how many new clients do you need to reach that goal? A SMART goal could be 5 new clients every month. The question then is HOW are you going to get them? That’s where strategizing comes in. Next, you need to determine how many new visitors you need to wisit to your site in order to convert them into those 5 new clients.

Where to Start

Begin with how many visitors you are currently getting. Hopefully, you’ve got some analytics set up on your site like Google Analytics, which is free, but it won’t help you until they are set up. Hence, if you’re just starting out, you’re not going to have anything to go by. Set a sensible, realistic attainable goal for website visits like 100 visitors in a month. That’s not too high if you are planning an aggressive campaign. If you surpass it, excellent! Raise the bar a little higher for the next month. If you don’t meet your goal, you’ve got to review what’s not working and change your strategy and tactics. Then, determine the conversion rate. Depending on your marketing message, site, company, product, or service, the conversion rate can be anywhere from .1% to 10%.

To reach the goal of 5 new clients, you need 100 visitors to your site in one month at a 5% conversion rate. If you don’t get that at the end of the month, you have to ask yourself, “What did I do wrong?” or “What didn’t I do?” You may be able to find out what your industry’s standard conversion rate is by doing some research on Google.

Measurable:

What do you want to accomplish?

• New, quality leads
• New Clients
• Sales
• Increase your website traffic
• Grow your email list
• Grow your social media following, likes, or engagement
• Appointments
• Get the phone to ring

At the end of the month, you can look at your finances, reports, and analytics and see if you’ve met the goals.

Attainable:

A 5% conversion rate is not that easy to attain. A more realistic one would be 1% for the first month — especially if you’re new to planning. Blogging 3+ times a week will draw people to your site. Post to social media several times a day to effectively build awareness and SEO.

The same goes for income. Clearly, wanting to earn a lot of money, but what is reasonable for you? If you set this goal too high, you’ll be disappointed when you keep missing it.

Relevant:

If you’re more B2B than B2C, having 100 followers on Instagram is not relevant at all. That goal, however, is relevant on LinkedIn. However, the reverse would apply to a B2C company trying to reach consumers with a product or service.

Time-Bound:

It makes sense to use the monthly time frame. It’s manageable and gives you time to develop the strategy and tactics that you’re going to use to meet your goals. Especially if you need to pivot because of a major event, trends, or news.

It’s also convenient to look at your analytics and insights when you’re doing your end-of-the-month bookkeeping.

Saying you want 100 followers on X (formerly Twitter) in 1 week is not attainable. I’ve done it in 2 weeks for a client, and it took a lot of diligent posting, understanding the target market niche well, researching keywords, and creating the right hashtags. Their analytics told me a lot about the client’s followers and the other topics they were interested in, which helped me determine what content to post.

Don’t even THINK about buying likes or followers! They are fake accounts or people paid to keep hitting the like button. You want to grow a true, organic (non-paid) following that follows you because you put out great content. Moreover, you want to build relationships with your followers. That’s the “social” part of social media.

What about Overall Goals and Objectives?

Sure, you can have overall goals and objectives, as well as long-term goals, however, for successful social media and digital marketing, go month-to-month. It’s easier to plan for the next month when you only have to manage one month at a time.

Nevertheless, if your business depends on holiday or seasonal business, you may need to do a 3-6 month plan but have monthly campaigns, strategies, and tactics planned out.

Write them down!

Goals become real when you’ve got them written down somewhere. Whether it’s a Word document, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, an app, a software program, a bulletin board, or Post-it notes — whatever works for you.

What are some Successful Social Media Marketing metrics? What are your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?

• Likes and followers
• Engagement
• Website clicks
• Video views
• Visits to your website
• Conversions
• Call-to-Action button clicks on Facebook
• Target market demographics – if you’re local, you need to make sure that a high percentage of your following is local!

Don’t know where to start?

Why not schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation so I can review your current marketing efforts? I’ll test your SEO and page-speed loading, as well as look at your social media profiles and branding.

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