If you are like the rest of us, you are bound to get swept up in making resolutions and setting goals for the new year. Setting goals now will help you see if you are accomplishing what you intended for your social media marketing in the year to come. Below are 5 guidelines for setting social media goals to track and achieve in 2019.
Tie your social media goals into the goals for your business.
It can be tempting to try to achieve everything with your social media marketing.. Instead, take a step back and identify your marketing goals, then align your social media to those overall goals. Are you trying to sell more to existing customers? Gain more leads? Reach an ideal customer? Improve relationships with clients? You probably don’t have the time or money to do everything, so focus your social media tactics on supporting your primary marketing goals.
Decide how you are going to measure your social media goals and create monthly reports.
So, you’ve identified the social media goals that are vital to your bottom line. Now it’s time to pinpoint how to track your progress. Create a monthly report with metrics related to your goals. Most social platforms give you more information than you need. You don’t need to review all the metrics. Just the ones that support your goals. For example, if you are trying to grow sales with existing customers, watch how many visitors to your website are new vs existing customers in your analytics. Or if you are trying to gain attention from an ideal customer profile, review the demographics of social profiles in your analytics to see if who is responding to your posts and ads. Whatever your goals, be very specific when you review your metrics to see if you are making progress.
Break down big lofty goals into smaller 3-month chunks.
If you haven’t been introduced to it yet, I recommend you check out the book “The 12 Week Year” by Brian Moran. It shows you how to break down big goals into three-month plans that are easier to track and manage. The same theory works when setting goals for your social media marketing. Look at the projects and promotions in your calendar and plan specific campaigns leading up to launches and events. Be sure to carve out time to review what marketing tactics work best so you can improve on them in your next three-month planning cycle.
Recognize that social media ads may be required for success.
In the “olden days” (ok, a couple of years ago) we could all post some content, do a little engagement, and the social media gods would reward us with lots of new followers and tons of engagement. But then came the algorithms that restricted the visibility of posts, plus a few million people jumped on to all the social platforms. The result is that you now need to pay to get your content seen on social media platforms. Again, it’s important to be strategic. Put your marketing dollars behind the ads that support your marketing goals.
Be open to pivoting your goals as social media changes. Because it will.
If there is one thing that years in the social media marketing world have taught me, it is that you must be open to change. This industry is in constant motion and odds are whatever your goals are, you need to be ready to revisit those goals in a new light a few times during the year. How does that look from a strategic viewpoint? It might be that the tools that you intended to use for visibility and awareness will no longer work in a month or two and you need to try something new. Yes, it’s challenging. But the quicker you can recognize these changes, and adapt by learning new tools, the more successful you will be in supporting your marketing goals strategically.
Looking for more ways to refine your goals in the new year? Get a copy of the Social Media Cookbook Checklist here.
It gives you a basic to-do list for your online social media marketing routine, plus the image sizes and specs to help you post on various platforms.
