If you're ready to step up your social media game and get serious about your KPIs, it's time to learn about SMART goals in social media marketing. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.
The time of solely focusing on the number of followers is behind us and the best way to elevate your social media goals is with a bulletproof strategy that focuses on engagement, creating new leads, and increasing your revenue.
We can all agree that your biggest long-term goal is increasing revenue and to get to that point, you need to lay down the groundwork by focusing firstly on brand awareness and increasing your social media reach. If your budget allows it, you can go down the PPC route and try either Google Ads or one of the alternative search advertising platforms.
Different social media platforms have different algorithms that try and curate the content and provide people with the photos and videos they will most likely enjoy, depending on the type of content they previously liked.
Seeing how platforms will push engaging content, it's only logical you'll want to work on having a high engagement rate. Engagement is calculated by combining all of the likes, comments, and shares on social media. However, the engagement rate can be calculated in a variety of different ways. Facebook calculates it by dividing the number of total engaged users by the number of total reaches multiplied by a hundred.
That's why engagement is a better rate to focus on than just a number of followers since it provides you with the number of followers who have actually seen your posts and reacted to them.
Research shows that brands that engage with their audience have stronger relationships with their consumers. Knowing that, make sure to analyze your social media and work out what type of videos, photos, and articles people like, and work on producing more of that type of content.
Another reason for focusing on engagement is the overall goal of creating a loyal community of people who can in the end become your brand ambassadors. That entails putting in the work, asking questions, creating challenges for your followers, engaging in social listening, and actively responding to your audience and their concerns.
Once they start creating communities in which they can share your content and help others with questions about your products or services, you'll see your hard work paying off.
Social media is a great place to generate new leads for your sales funnel. It provides you with the perfect opportunity to inform, educate and lead people down your sales pipeline. Leads are prospects that have already given you pieces of information about them, like an email address or phone number. In some cases, you could generate that organically, while in others, you could gain more leads by doing outreach with mass email services.
The best way to engage them is with educational and fun content, as well as with targeted ads that speak directly to them. While your social media posts can cast a wide net and you don't necessarily need to customize your content for a specific group of people, targeted ads can help you with just that.
Once you gather information about your leads, you can segment them and target them based on gender, location, age, education level, type of device they access social media on, and more.
The KPIs you should focus on at this stage are email sign-ups, other non-revenue conversions, and click-through rate. There isn't one best way to increase these metrics since it very much depends on the industry and brand, but you can test out different options and see what works best for you.
Once you generate new leads for your sales funnel, you'll want to close the deal and convert them into customers. This process has been simplified by social media by providing brands with options to have webshops integrated into their Facebook and Instagram pages.
You can measure the conversion rate from your Instagram product pages and Facebook store, as well as the number of conversions in your webshop, channeled through social media, which you can follow in Google Analytics.
The important thing you'll want to focus on here is the revenue generated from social media compared to the amount of money spent on social media advertising. You don't want to spend more than you're earning, but more importantly, you don't want to spend any money on people that will not convert at all.
This is why analytics is your best friend. Make sure to analyze all of your past social media campaigns and shape your buyer persona according to your findings. A lot of marketers make a buyer persona before they even sell a single unit and work off that persona for years, without making room for market changes or changes in customer behaviour.
Your social media strategy is only as strong as your goals are measurable and achievable. It's easy to get lost in the numerous KPIs and metrics that seem to measure a whole lot of nothing.
Keep your focus on these three goals and make sure you produce quality content at every stage of your sales funnel and results will follow.
by Petra Odak | 27 Sep 23