A strong social media marketing strategy is essential for the marketing success of businesses today. The best way to have a strong social media marketing strategy is to set SMART Social Media Goals.
Companies now spend a considerable amount of their marketing budget on Social Media Marketing. Despite that still half of the digital marketers have difficulty showing the impact of social media marketing on their business.
Simply putting if you can’t justify your marketing spends then there is some problem. It’s either the channel you are spending on or you haven’t set the SMART Social Media goals.
With the emphasis on ROI from the marketing spends, setting up SMART Social Media Goals and executing the marketing campaigns to achieve the business goals becomes a vital part of the marketing’s function. And if you’re struggling to measure the social impact of your social media marketing, there are a lot of tools. You can use these tools to monitor and analyze your social media success.
Defining Social Media Success starts with SMART Social Media Goals Setting, backed by benchmarking, monitoring, analysis, tracking, and reporting.
Nevertheless, not all results generated through social media can or should be measured in terms of money.
Instead, if you make qualitative improvements in terms of awareness, reach, engagement, those are also valid non-monetary metrics to measure.
Below are five practical tips that I strongly believe will guide you in setting up SMART Social Media Goals. Using these you can define the Social Media Marketing Success of your company.
Define Your Scope
A lot of companies start participating in social media before making sure what they want to achieve from social media.
To be present on social media for the sake of doing social media is not going to help your business. To just maintain social media presence many marketers scatter unproductive efforts that don’t impact the company goals.
Though, if you take a holistic view then there could be many reasons for companies going on social media, but they typically come into one or more of the following goals, which can be broken down into elements that can be monitored and measured:
Awareness about the Brand
Social networks can dramatically boost a brand’s exposure and pave ways for customer loyalty more than any other marketing channel. But, it could only happen when you set up SMART Social Media Goals for your social campaigns and social actions.
In this case, there are certain important metrics that need to be tracked to understand the impact of social media marketing of the brand.
Brand Reach & Visibility
How many people saw your brand and if they took an action as a result.
Followership & Engagement
The number of followers, fans, or subscribers who have subscribed or following your social channels and are getting engaged with your content.
Share of Voice
How many discussions mentioned your brand or product name.
Influence
How your brand is discussed, mentioned, and seen out there by your customers, followers, and potential customers.
Nature of Brand Mentions
How people feel about your company and/or its products/services. Whether they talk positively about your brand or they have negative feelings for your brand.
If you track these metrics you can assign monetary values to these, like a decrease in cost per acquisition or increase in the referral traffic generated from your social media to your website or physical stores compared to other marketing channels.
New Sales
As we all know that social media is an excellent source for generating leads, but conversion typically takes place in other channels like the website, app, or the physical store. So, it’s important to assign a monetary value to the social actions that drive traffic and lead to a sale on your point of sale, similarly like the assisted conversion metrics in google ads and google analytics.
The effect of these can be determined by measuring:
- Number of Leads generated through social channels. Do check the quality of leads.
- Comments, Replies, Likes: Engagement metrics, which are is important data to understand the sentiments of the customers and the perception of your brand in the people’s mind.
- Conversion: Measure all the business goals like filling out a form or downloading a white paper, download a catalog, subscribing for your newsletter from your website.
- Length of the Sales Cycle: Compare the time it takes to close sales generated and nurtured through social media versus through traditional methods
Customer Retention
In the digital economy and the digital marketplace, the shift in customer loyalty is very easy. No business wants to lose a customer. The key is to keep them engaged with your business.
This not only adds long-term profit but those loyal customers can also be sounding boards for new products and services, they can serve as brand ambassadors and refer new customers to your brand (word of mouth marketing).
There are several customer retention metrics you can measure, such as:
- Customer Saves: How many customers threatened to cancel their relationships with your brand but ended up staying with you because of the action you took on social media channels to save them; like resolving their issues, replacing their damaged goods, or something else which satisfied your customers, assess the value of the revenue that you would have lost in your overall ROI without these saves.
- Customer Recommendations: Measure the increase in positive comments and recommendations after you initiate social outreach.
- Customer Retention: The number of customers with whom you engage on social channels compared with those you don’t; assign a monetary value to each customer group and then measure the monetary value per customer of each group at a certain point in time.
Reduce Costs
Recently we are experiencing that brands are spending a huge amount of their marketing money on social media, the trend is likely to go up in coming years. When done right, social media marketing is often more cost-effective than other marketing channels. Here are some measurable examples:
- Market Research: Compare the cost of market research through social media channels and other traditional channels. For example, you can compare the cost of an email survey and social media survey.
- Complaint Resolution: How many customer complaints were handled through social channels, the average time to resolve, and how those metrics equate to cost savings compared to the complaint redressal mechanisms you may have in your organization.
- Advertising Costs: The percentage of budget spent on traditional advertising mediums and its results versus the results achieved from social media marketing lest the campaigns are targeted to the right audience.
Define SMART Social Media Goals
If you haven’t first defined your SMART Social Media Goals, and just hopped into social media marketing, it is unlikely to give you results you were expecting.
It requires strategic planning for Social Media Marketing as you did for traditional marketing. Though it’s little different than the traditional marketing plans, still, it is there and you need to think of a strategic plan for social media marketing before you assign your marketing budget for social media marketing.
Below are the five SMART Social Media Goals setting metrics which will help you set SMART Social Media Goals for your social media marketing:
Specific
Each of your Social Media goals needs to be well defined with an anticipated, specific result. For example, instead of saying “drive more traffic on the website,” say “drive 20% more traffic to our website’s home page.”
Measurable
First, establish a benchmark. For example, if you want to attract 20% more traffic to your website’s home page, measure that against the traffic you have now on your website home page.
For instance, if you had 10,000 hits this year on your website home page, say you want to have 12,000 hits the following year that would be 20% increase in the traffic to your website home page.
Achievable
If you are expecting a miracle to happen when you start on social media, you are asking for moon.
Remember, planned, sustainable growth takes time. For example, if you only have 10,000 visitors to your website in a year, it’s clearly not realistic to assume that your social media marketing will generate 100 times visitors in a year.
Rather you can expect a 20% increase in the traffic from social channels if you have the right strategy for it.
Realistic
Be realistic with your capacities. For example, you should first analyze that do you have the infrastructure and manpower ready to handle the increased 20% inquiries resulting from your increased 20% social media traffic.
Time Bound
Your goals should be time-bound. So, you need to set a start and end date for your SMART Social Media Goals. This will give you a comparison timeframe to your previous benchmarks.
Set milestones during your social media campaign to monitor progress and analyze results, and adjust the plan as required.
For example, you decided to spend Rs. 120,000 over a year on social media to generate 20% additional traffic for your website, but after the first quarter, you noticed that after spending Rs. 30,000 you were able to generate only 2000 additional traffic to your website through social media, then you might need to see your campaigns and target audience, your copies, and images you have used in the ads. Fine-tuning those may give you better results.
Call-to-Action
Undoubtedly, Social Media Marketing and setting up SMART Social Media Goals would lead to increased sales, decreased marketing costs, better results, better analytical data, and more satisfied customers, but without a specific call-to-action (CTA) you won’t be able to track which social activity or Social Media Channel contributed to which business goal.
A well thought out and properly placed CTA (call-to-action) persuades and urges people to respond in a particular manner — in digital marketing or social media marketing usually by clicking on a link to take an action such as downloading, sharing, subscribing or purchasing.
Now the question is how do you decide which would be an appropriate CTA for your social media outreach.
The first step is to research your target audience, define their personas.
Try to find out what resonates with your target audience, what matches their interests, and what will be an offer that they can’t ignore.
Ways to Create super-effective Call-To-Action
Following are some rules-of-thumb for creating a super-effective CTA:
Provide Value
Make sure your offer or request offers value to the audience in the first instance, otherwise they will not respond.
Be Clear and Specific
People need to know in the first 2 seconds what you’re asking them to do and why (e.g., “download whitepaper” or “register now”, etc.). Don’t just say “click here”—let them know what they’ll get when they take an action.
Sense of Urgency
Create a sense of urgency like a limited period offer or the expiration date which is clearly visible, so that people don’t miss out on your CTA and take immediate action.
Only One CTA per Outreach
Don’t confuse people or you will lose them, do not use multiple CTAs on one landing page, keep it specific, clear, and of great value.
Remove Risk
It’s a great way to remove the risk of inhibition for the people to provide a money-back guarantee or other similar assurance. Show social proof that people like them have already taken benefits of the offer. For example, say 2718 downloads so far on the whitepaper.
Social Proof
Show your audience the testimonials of the existing customers so that they gain trust to click on your CTA.
Be Visible and Prominent
Visitors quit a page if they don’t find the offer or the CTA in the first fold of the website, so, place your CTA message and link prominently on your social channels. On your landing page, use distinct colors, keep a clean and uncluttered layout, and use other visual clues to make the call-to-action stand out.
Be Consistent & Seamless
People should be able to see the connection between the CTA on your social channel and on the landing page. Maintain the same message, look and feel, so that they have a seamless experience throughout.
Examples of Most Common but Effective Call-to-Action Messages
Below are examples of the most common but effective call-to-action messages. Don’t forget to make it resonate with the interests of your target audience. It is always a good idea to conduct test campaigns to compare which messages get better responses. You will know this in the first few days of your campaigns.
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Know Where Your Leads Came From
We discussed earlier measuring success, and to measure success, you will need a proper mechanism to follow responses from your audience as they land from your social channels to your website’s landing page and on to your marketing automation tool and CRM system.
A SMART way to do it is that you create campaign-specific tracking codes. Simply putting, tracking codes are URL extensions that link to your landing pages and contain specific information like the name of your campaign and the social channels you’re using them on.
It is also called UTM tagging. It’s better to create a different campaign URL for each social channel and campaign component so that you can track the information you want to make use of. Simply google Campaign URL Builder or click this link to Campaign URL Builder to create your URL tags.
These links can be embedded in text or images on your social channels, or use a URL shortener such as bit.ly or google url shortener, with an embedded campaign code if you want to include the URL in a tweet and want to keep it simple and short for the users to click on.
Note: Google URL shortener discontinued its services from 30 March 2019. So, better you use bit.ly to shorten your links.
Track Your Results
You can then track the results in Google Analytics. Or you can also use your marketing automation software to see what types of customers your campaign is attracting and what offers they’re responding to.
You can also assign a monetary value to those leads and compare them—by social channel—to leads generated through other mediums than the social channels.
Over time you will be able to analyze which social channels are working the best for you. You can refine your campaign based on the data for better results.
Get Organizational Alignment and Set Expectations
Social media marketing campaigns require organizational alignment as it impacts various areas and departments of the organization.
For example, a festive season discounting offer may have an impact on advertising, PR, marketing, customer service, internal communications, product development, research, recruiting, and sales/commerce to handle the queries and transactional volumes.
Consequently, it also impacts HR, IT, finance, and operations. Remember the Flipkart’s Big Billion Day Sale two years back when they servers chocked due to heavy traffic and they have to apologize publicly for not preparing ahead of the time to ace up the servers which crashed due to the high volume of traffic.
To achieve Social Media Marketing results you need to have proper alignment and coordination among all the departments.
People, processes, and platforms must be in place to identify, engage, and quickly respond to social opportunities, issues, and crises as well as report on results.
It is relatively difficult and challenging in the multi-location and multi-city organizations to align and coordinate.
Regardless of your organizational structure, the steps below would help you organize and align your organization to respond to the social media marketing campaigns effectively.
Assess Your Start and End Points and Agree on Strategy
Set a benchmark by analyzing your current situation and social media marketing status, and then determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and what defines your end result. Make sure all KPIs should feed into your overall business goals.
This will help you and your teams involved in social media participation to measure the results against the benchmark and on the Key Performance Indicators and refine the campaigns whenever required to achieve the goals.
Identify Roles and Responsibilities
You might already have teams working on social media. But their contributions will be scattered lest you consolidate their activities based on social media goals and business goals.
Guide them to do specific tasks and report on them rather than do everything and get confused.
You can guide them about what type of content they contribute and who views activity and performance, and who and what to report.
Create a Social Media Policy
Every brand that participates in social media should create a policy document that outlines the purpose of its social media initiative.
And it should also comprise guidelines to help employees use good judgment, maintain confidentiality. It should also mention how to respond to a customer query and how to resolve a customer complaint.
Make sure all your organization’s employees sign off on this policy document after reading and completely understanding it. This will protect the brand as well as the individuals who contribute to social media. Also, it would offer a quick customer complaint resolution mechanism.
This should also be a part of your social media strategy when you set up SMART Social Media Goals. This document clearly mentions who will answer questions about products, who will handle negative comments about the organization. Also, mention which social media channels will be used for what kind of communications.
Mention what kind of situations require escalation, to whom and within what window of time.
Use the Right Social Media Marketing and Social Listening Tools
A strong social strategy is based on a solid foundation of research and relies on regular monitoring and active engagement. You can use social media listening and analysis tools to help you measure the impact of your social media marketing.
With the right tools and the right set of people set SMART Social Media Goals. Execute social media campaigns, handle queries, and deliver value to the customers. This will certainly make a difference in your revenue, customer loyalty, and brand visibility.
Evaluate and Report on Progress Regularly
When you clearly establish your SMART Social Media Goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) tracking and reporting on those metrics should be relatively straightforward and in the benefit of the organization as a whole.
Summing Up
A lot of businesses start Twitter account or create Facebook business page without first setting up SMART Social Media Goals. They think that everyone else is there on social media so they should also be present on social media.
While social media offers an excellent opportunity to increase your brand visibility, drive revenue, and achieve business goals. Hence, creativity, expertise, manpower, and dedication must be applied to social media management.
It means that defining SMART Social Media Goals, outcomes, understanding the actions required to achieve them, aligning workflows throughout your organization to capture opportunities, and constantly analyzing, measuring, and reporting on the results are important and would give you defined and expected results.
Brands that take this approach of setting SMART Social Media Goals gain in several ways. For instance, they might get increased brand visibility, an increase in revenue, an increase in loyalty, increase in brand positioning. Also, they might get an edge over their competitors.
