What are your digital marketing goals for social media? Do you have any? Many business owners are overwhelmed and find it difficult to craft solid goals. This series on digital marketing goals is meant to help with that! In the first part of this series, we addressed digital marketing goals for your website, and today we are sharing all you need to know to establish challenging yet attainable digital media goals for social media.
Evaluate Your Current Presence
The great Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.” Although his quotes are often in jest, this simple statement does hold true. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going with your social media presence because you might not get there! Where are you currently with your social media strategy? Is it working? Are you seeing results from your efforts?
To evaluate your current social media presence, you must take a look at your social media metrics. Look at the data through your business profiles and/or ad manager. Are you gaining new followers? What kind of engagement stats are you seeing? How much traffic on your website comes from social media posts? Be sure to evaluate over a decent amount of time to get an accurate picture of your social media performance.
To help you evaluate your social media presence you will find the following blog posts helpful: How to Audit Your Social Media and Understanding Social Media Metric Terms.
Are there any periods of growth or decline? If so, what were you posting (or not posting) during that time period? Are you closing any sales that led from your social media? Our blog post Why is my Social Media Declining? may offer insights as to why you have declined.
Once you have evaluated your social media presence, it is time to set some digital marketing goals for social media.
Examples of Digital Marketing Goals for Social Media
When crafting your digital marketing goals for social media, consider the following examples and broad ways to reach those goals :
Increase Brand Awareness: add X number of followers in X amount of time, increase social shares, increase your social media reach.
Increase Traffic to Your Website from Social: Improve a call to action in your posts, track visitors from social to your website, track the bounce rate of website visitors from social media, increase the number of clicks on your social media posted links.
Increase Your Revenue from Social Media: Increase the number of sign-ups or sales from social, increase your budget for paid sales posts and/or redesign the look of the sales posts, offer discount codes on social media for purchases on your website.
Consider These 3 Things When Crafting Digital Marketing Goals for Social Media
Are You Posting Where Your Customers Are?
Who is your ideal customer? What do they look like? What age demographics do they fall under? Are these the customers that are actually making purchases from your business? Then compare those demographics with who your followers are on social media. You may see some changes that need to be made either to what platforms you are focusing on or who your ideal customers are.
To help gain insight into different demographics of audiences and where they are most active on social media, we recommend reading our series on Generational Marketing Dynamics. We shared insights on digital marketing to the generations then specifics on generational marketing for businesses, marketing for nonprofit organizations, and marketing for faith-based organizations.
What Kind of Content Are You Sharing and How Often?
When brainstorming your digital marketing goals for social media, take a long hard look at what kind of content you are sharing and how often? Are you consistent across all platforms or do your profiles look random, haphazard, and dare I say…neglected? At the other extreme, is your feed too full with little to no engagement that you are running yourself ragged? Neither is good.
If you are not consistent in sharing on social media, perhaps commit to a consistent posting schedule for 3-6 months and then evaluate the performance. You may find that simply showing up consistently helps you meet your goals!
Evaluate which types of posts perform best on your social media. Does engagement increase with video? Do you receive many clicks on blog links? Do you share infographics and get shares? You do want to mix up what kinds of content you share but you should know what kind performs best with your audience and prioritize that type of content.
If you are overdoing your posts with little engagement, take a step back. Is the content you are sharing consistent with your branding? Perhaps taking a little more time to plan what content you are sharing and creating quality consistent posts would make the difference!
Decide on A Paid Social Media Ad Budget (Use Targeting)
If you have not incorporated paid social media advertising yet, perhaps this is the time to do it. Be sure to use the targeting demographics available on each platform to narrow down the eyes seeing your ads to those that are most likely to buy from you! After running each ad campaign take a long hard look at what worked within that campaign and what didn’t.
Dogwood Can Help!
The crew at Dogwood Media Solutions helps our clients reach their digital marketing goals every day! We can help you define a strong strategy, consistently post on your social media platforms, and manage your paid social advertising campaigns. Reach out today and let us help you set and reach your goals on social media!
