What’s it all about?

Why setting a social media marketing goal is crucial to success.

You know how everyone says you have to set a goal? You hear it constantly if you’re at all tuned in to classic marketing advice. But in my time working with small businesses, I’ve found most people don’t know how social media can serve them.

How do goals serve the greater good? It’s simple really. Setting a goal gives you a direction to aim for. Once you have your direction, you can set your messaging and strategy. Once you’ve got a solid goal, you’ve got something you can constantly refer back to when you feel like you’re off course. You can look back and ask - is this strategy still serving my goal?

So where to start? It’s important to know what kind of goals are available to those who want to employ social media in their strategy. You can look at social media marketing goals the same way you look at other marketing goals. How do they fit into your marketing funnel? Are you trying to grow brand awareness? Are you trying to convert followers either by getting them to sign up for your newsletter or having them purchase a product or service? Are you maybe trying to encourage your conversions to become loyal advocates? You could be trying for multiple of these goals but you need to prioritize one at a time.

For example, it’s completely reasonable to assume you’re trying to grow brand awareness and increase conversions. But you need to focus on one. Maybe your business isn’t quite ready for a flood of purchases so you’re trying to prime the market and increase awareness. This would be your main goal while soft selling your product or converting followers would be your secondary goal.

Maybe you have an event coming up and tickets aren’t on sale yet. That would make awareness your number one goal until your tickets are available. Then your goal would shift to conversions with awareness as a secondary goal. Lastly, during and after your event, you would switch to building loyalty for your next event.

These are small examples but they demonstrate how you can think about your goals, how often they can change and how you can have multiple goals at once.

Confusing? Let’s chat. We can work together and help make sense of it for your specific needs.