Social media isn’t only a marketing tool, it can affect almost every aspect of a business such as brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, customer support and much more.
The question many businesses ask is “how can we ensure we’re getting as much value as possible from the time and resources we put into social media?”. Well, that is easy, just set goals!
In 2010, a group of researchers in Canada studied the effect of goal-setting on the academic performance of 85 students. After four months, they found that the group that went through an intensive goal-setting program achieved significantly better results than the control group.
If you want to stay motivated and achieve more results for your company through social media, science recommends setting goals. But which goals should you set?
Below is a list of 9 ultra-effective social media goals to help you maximize your returns from social media:
1. Increase brand awareness
It was reported in 2019 that 70% of marketers say that their main goal for using social media is to increase brand awareness. This is due to the fact that the average person spends nearly two hours on social media every day, and therefore social media is one of the best places to grab consumers’ attention.
Most social media platforms provide data on the reach of your content, allowing you to report your online presence more accurately as well as provide you with a more quantitative understanding of your brand’s presence in the online world.
One way to track the growth towards your brand awareness goal is by keeping record of your followers count, the reach of your social media posts, mentions, shares and retweets.
2. Drive traffic to your website
One step further from having a brand presence on social media is driving visitors to your website or blog, who might turn into your customers.
Three in five marketers use social media to distribute their content and drive traffic to their sites. A team at HubSpot, for instance, grew their monthly blog traffic by 241% over eight months through social media experiments.
To successfully increase your followers and lure potential customers through social media there are various tactics that can be used such as:
- Engaging with the target audience through prompt responses to inbox queries and fun content such as polls.
- Share visual content
- Post content frequently
When measuring the traffic flow to your webpage from social media, you need to track the share of overall traffic, the bounce rate of social media traffic and the clicks on your social media posts.
3. Generate new leads
Lead generation is typically used by companies with a long sales process, such as enterprise software companies. Before discussing what exactly lead generation is let’s break it down.
Firstly a lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication, by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, coupons or online content, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information.
Therefore, lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. It has been proven that over 55% of B2B marketers spend more than half their marketing budget on lead generation due to its ability to increase in sales and profit ratio.
Keeping count of, personal information collected through social media; downloads of your content; clicks on your lead-generation social media posts and conversions of leads from social media will assist you in gaining a quantitative measurement of how far you are from your goal.
4. Grow revenue
Did you know, adding social media content to websites can increase purchases.
Having a website is so important for your business as it is a key step in the customer journey. This is where potential buyers read all about your products and services and make the decision to hit the buy button or retreat from the purchase.
Research has shown that the impact of social media on purchasing decisions is huge. In fact, a massive 71% of consumers are likely to purchase something based on social media referrals and 74% of consumers actively rely on social media when they’re making a purchasing decision.
Once a potential customer lands on your website, whether they make a purchase or not is still not definite. This is because consumers today are naturally suspicious and more aware of the persuasive marketing tactics used, which is why they want to hear real stories from real customers. They trust their peers, and this makes a huge impact on their buying decisions.
So, by implementing a social media wall on your website, you’re tapping into the need by consumers to hear from other customers in order for them to make a positive purchasing decision.
The revenue will speak for itself when measuring your success.
5. Boost brand engagement
Engagement is the second top reason why marketers use social media and research has found that social media interactions improve brand perception, loyalty, and word of mouth recommendations.
Furthermore, social media platform’s algorithms, such as those on Facebook and Instagram, prioritize posts with higher engagement on their feeds due to the belief that users will be more interested in seeing highly engaging content.
Therefore, if you want people to see your social media posts, you have to produce engaging content and respond to your community.
Using metrics such as likes, shares, and comments, mentions and replies per post are a good way to measure engagement.
Tip: although each goal has different metrics you can use to measure your success towards reaching your goals, Google Analytics has proven to be most helpful in measuring goals such as lead generation, revenue growth and website traffic.
In conclusion by implementing these 5 ultra-effective social media goals to your business or service, it will help you maximize your returns from social media.
