Setting the right goals for social media marketing is critical to ensure that the effort put in by the company is going in the right direction, and money is spent wisely. Unless the goals are set accurately, the strategies adopted for achieving those will be faulty and will yield no results.
This is however easier said than done. Companies often struggle with this major activity. The result is a lot of trial and error before they are able to decide on the exact outcomes that they want to achieve.
So what are the important factors that a company must keep in mind while setting a goal for their marketing efforts? Here are a few important matters that they need to pay attention to.
- What should you target?
While setting a goal, understand the pain points that your social media marketing team is currently facing. If you are creating posts which are not generating enough response, then there is a problem with customer engagement. On the other hand, if the posts are good, and are generating interest, but are not reaching a large number of customers, then you need to improve upon your reach. Remember that you should set realistic improvement metrics for whatever areas of improvement that you identify. Otherwise, the goals will be unreachable and you will get de-motivated very soon.
- Make realistic assumptions:
Unfortunately, you cannot base your goal setting process entirely on data. Some assumptions will have to be made. Understand how you can reach your target and what other changes need to be made. For this, you will understand what changes are likely to get you the desired results.
Let us take an example to understand this. If your company is selling online education courses, then you will have to assume that LinkedIn is going to be your social media platform of choice since most professional engagements happen there.
- Evaluate alternatives:
Instead of relying totally on your gut feeling for making the assumptions, you can conduct controlled A/B tests and gather data. Through A/B tests, you can test variations of the same ad, campaign or marketing message to test which one is performing better through statistics.
For example, to improve your ad impressions on social media, you can conduct an A/B test to understand which ad is performing better. You will have to also experiment with the variables in the ad in order to improve its effectiveness. Thereafter, you can keep the better performing campaign and drop the ones that have had poor performance.
- Implement:
Once you have completed all the steps mentioned above, it is time for you to formalise the goal and float it to the team. By now you will already be having some insights into how the goal can be achieved.
- Measure
A responsible person should be made accountable for measuring the progress towards reaching the goals. Unless there is a follow-up on this front, the goal will remain far from being achieved and the improvements expected by accomplishing the goal will remain unattained.
Related Post: Golden Rules For Optimizing Your Social Media Presence
