This Podcast is FREE! Donations are appreciated https://busk.co/loganEstablishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your social marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup a social presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of social presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in. Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content) Probably one of the most popular goals of Social Marketing is to funnel your traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t to business “on” social media, per se. You are leveraging social media to obtain traffic and convert that social traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they are being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing social traffic AWAY from social platforms and over to their own web properties. Social Following In this goal category, your aim is to build a large number of followers. This usually means “likes or followers” in the case of a business/brand page or it could mean “friends” if you are focusing on your personal profile. The main sought-after benefit here is to increase the number of people who will see your posts or tweets in their feeds. In this sense, your social posts become like sending out email broadcasts via your autoresponder. It should be noted that some social networks have recently adjusted their algorithms in such a way that people tend to see less posts from businesses they have followed. This means a much smaller percentage of your followers will see your posts in their feeds today than did in the past. Still, if you grow a large enough community, this can still be greatly beneficial and if your content is engaging enough to get a lot of traction in the form of likes, comments, and shares, you can significantly increase the range of your organic reach into people’s feeds. Passive Presence Some businesses might have purely passive goals. Simply being present and discoverable inside social platforms is a benefit that has wider appeal and greater utility than you may think. In many cases, a company’s social presence might supersede or even totally replace what was once the role of a website or blog. Your business’ phone number, address, directions, hours of operation, mission statement and so on can often be put on your social accounts and, depending on your audience, that might be where most people seek you out, rather than your website. The ease of posting announcements, updates, photos, and other content without relying on a web developer or having to use a web-building platform also makes social presence an attractive alternative to the traditional website model. This same approach can also be used for events, communities, and brands. Brand Awareness Another goal that is less thought about might be spreading brand awareness and recognition. If you are just starting out, there is a good chance your brand might need a jumpstart. If nobody has ever heard of you, a great way to increase recognition is to simply create and share unique, helpful, or entertaining content and get your name, logo, and overall brand identity in front of as many people as possible as many times as possible. If this is your goal, you want to avoid being salesy in the beginning. Ensure you’re focused almost entirely on posting helpful, relevant, or entertaining content. Expand Existing Audiences If you have already got an audience, your goal might be to make it bigger. This can be done via several social marketing methods. Sharing viral content, either curated or created yourself, can lead to a huge increase in your social audience. Recently, a restaurant in Southern California released a 60 second video with shots of people enjoying their signature menu item, an enormous T-bone steak topped with melted cheese, and it went viral in one day. They had already garnered a respectable audience prior to the video, but after the video, their Facebook audience...
