According to statistics, social media claims 30% of all the time people spend online. For teens, make that nine hours a day. Which is why social media ad spending is expected to top $32 billion in 2019.
In short, if you want to reach your target prospects, you have to go where they are spending most of their time – which is on social media. But this requires an intentional strategy with clear, achievable and measurable goals. Here is how to set goals for a high-yielding social media marketing strategy:
- Establish a Starting Point
There is a chance you are already on social media? But, that you have until now just been posting randomly without a strategy. To formulate a strategy with clear goals, there is a need to carry out a thorough social media audit.
Most social media sites have analytics tools from which you can pull data to measure both your historical and current performance. The audit will expose your least and best performing social channels, holes that need plugging, wins to build on and insights on what is achievable as well as what a feasible time frame will be.
- Define Your Objectives
The audit you have just done, and a bit of competitor analysis, should show you what marketing opportunities there are on social media. Importantly, it will help you spell out what your immediate and long term goals should be. These could be to:
-
- Increase engagement on your target social channels,
- Drive traffic to your website,
- Increase brand awareness,
- Generate new leads, or
- To boost SEO.
- Know the Right Metrics to Track
Goals must have timed targets. For example, to generate 100 leads per month. But to meet your targets you need a set of metrics to track and guide you. For your search engine optimisation strategy, these will likely be backlinks, SERPs rankings growth and traffic to your site.
Social media metrics you can track include mentions, likes or shares/pins/retweets per post or per given time period. Remembering, too, that some are vanity metrics that aren’t worth tracking.
You can look at this as breaking your goals down to shorter-term objectives and key results (OKRs). Use these to flag parts of your strategy to tweak for better results as well as to highlight high-performing posts and assets that you may boost to maximise benefit.
- Establish a Measuring and Reporting Framework
Tracking specific metrics to keep your social media goals in focus is important. But so is clearly spelling out how to measure each campaign’s effectiveness, when to report progress and which tools to use. Weekly is a good frequency to measure and note campaign progress, with a strategy meeting at the end of the month.
Ready to streamline your social media marketing efforts with a clear strategy that brings results? Then contact our SMM experts, WSI OMS, today for expert guidance.