Determining Clear Goals For Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

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Most people feel overwhelmed when it comes to setting goals for their social media marketing campaigns.

Whether you are dreaming of having one million followers or fans, or you are experiencing trouble in articulating your goals, the importance of having a clear and concise strategy in place for setting social media marketing campaign goals cannot be denied. With a solid strategy in place, you will be able to establish realistic goals, determine how you are going to reach those goals, and be able to measure when those goals have been attained. In today’s post, we will share six points to help you determining clear goals for your marketing campaign.

1. Be Specific

Begin by setting specific goals. Many brands make the mistake of being too generic when establishing social media marketing goals. Do not set a goal of simply wanting to grow your fan or follower base, as you could reasonably say that you have met your goal after adding just one fan or follower. The more specific you can be about your goals, the easier it will be to recognise what needs to be accomplished. Along with being specific, it is also important that you are clear about what you wish to accomplish. There should be no room for ambiguity in your goals. If you do not set specific goals, it will be impossible to effectively measure your activities, nor will you be able to understand what actually denotes success.

2. Be Realistic

Along with understanding what you must accomplish, you also need to have a system in place for measuring your progress and understanding when you have achieved that goal.

Consider whether the goal you have set is actually attainable or realistic. While it might sound great to have a million fans or followers, is that realistic? Setting unrealistic goals will only cause you to be set up for failure and disappointment. Establish goals that you can realistically meet. For instance, set a goal for growing your fan or follower base by 20%.

3. Be Punctual

Make sure you provide yourself with a deadline for meeting your goals. While it would be great to grow your fan or follower base by 20%, if you leave that goal open ended, your growth could easily become stunted. Establish a deadline to hold yourself accountable for meeting your goals, such as growing your fan or follower base by 20% in six months.

When establishing goals for your social media marketing campaigns, keep in mind that the goals you set can vary based on your company’s mission. Additionally, your goals will likely change as your brand’s influence and recognition grows.

4. Categorise Your Goals

In developing goals for your brand, you might find it helpful to break those goals down into categories. Here are four common categories:

  • Audience-building goals
  • Activity-based goals
  • ROI goals
  • Engagement goals

Note that the social media marketing goals you establish will also likely vary based on the specific channel you opt to use. Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest are all quite different. In setting goals for Twitter, you might focus on such areas as increasing engagement rate, tweet frequency, retweets, follower growth, etc. Facebook goals, by comparison, could be quite different, and might look more like this: to increase engagement, reach, or page likes. Since brands do not have profiles on Pinterest, as they do on Facebook or Twitter, your goals on this social media marketing channel will naturally be much different. Even so, that does not mean that you should not set goals. A solid goal for channels such as Pinterest or Instagram might be to increase shares.

5. Leveraging Past Stats

If you find that you are experiencing difficulties in determining which types of goals you should set, try pulling past stats or analytics so that you will know what you have accomplished previously. Breaking down these stats in terms of average monthly traffic and the percentage of traffic that came from various sources can provide ideas of where you can make improvements. Plus it gives you a good starting place for setting goals.

6. It’s Not A Pass / Fail Scenario

In short, you need to improve continuously. Most marketers feel as though they have failed if they did not meet specific goals and became discouraged. Rather than becoming caught up in the fact that you did not meet the goals you set, take some time to review and analyse what you did for future improvements. For instance, consider what you could have done differently, and what could potentially work better. Avoid the temptation to focus solely on what did not work. Look at strategies you implemented that worked well.

Remember that the only way to know what is going to work for your brand is to explore and try new things. This means testing, tracking your activities, and then making changes to your social media marketing activities so that you can make improvements moving forward.