Sugarspun Marketing wrote a great article about The Primary Social Media Goals, read below to help you formulate how doing social media for your business needs a direction and a plan.
When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually aimed at:
1. Building/Strengthening the Brand
2. Driving Conversions
3. Increasing/Monitoring the Presence
Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals.
Let’s take a closer look at these three areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts.
Goal #1: Building the Brand
When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them. It opens the door that can allow you to shape the way your brand is viewed and to leverage consumer opinions to aid that mission.
These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you’re forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping. Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors – your Unique Value Proposition. This is the thing you want to use social media to shape conversation around and build awareness of.
If you’re a service professional, target a specific niche and build a content marketing strategy around it. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks.
If you sell a product, ask yourself if your want your company to be known for its products or for the lifestyle your products are associated with. Then formulate a content marketing and influencer outreach program based on boosting the conversations about those topics.
Goal #2: Drive Conversions
One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you’re looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media.
Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company’s website or while interacting online.
Obvious options like buying products or generating a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, sharing a piece of content or downloading a white paper. The latter actions play into content marketing, and although more subtle, can often have the most impact on the bottom line.
Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts.
Goal #3: Increase Presence
Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts – increasing the conversation about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It’s about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR-driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them.
Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching a new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it’s all trackable.
When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions.
- Who do you want to hear talking?
- What do you want them to be saying?
- Who do you want them to say it to?
These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence.
You’ve Set the Stage, Now Start Building a Plan
Looking at your business with each of the above goals in mind will help you set the stage for your social media efforts. If you’re small business looking to take your social media efforts up a notch (or maybe even just get started,) take the time to define at least two goals from the categories above. Once you’ve identified your desired outcome, you’ll be a lot more ready to start mapping out the path to get there.
If you are a larger company or an agency working with a variety of brands, sit down and rethink your existing strategy with these three areas in mind. Have you established measurable goals related to these three areas? If not, consider the ways you might be able to tighten up or fine tune your efforts through the establishment of new goals.
