How to Set SMART Social Media Goals and Achieve Them

Social Media has served billions of people daily with an endless supply of content, connections, and products or services. Unfortunately, for small businesses, only 6% believe their social media efforts are providing value.

It is increasingly difficult to cut through the noise on social media channels without an effective strategy. Most businesses owners become overwhelmed when first starting in social media because they don’t know where to start.

SMART Social Media Goals provide the starting point for you to maximize your ROI from your social media efforts.

Why Your Business Needs SMART Social Media Goals

Think of social media networks as the new radio stations, tv networks, magazine articles, billboards, etc. 20 years ago, these platforms were highly relevant for small businesses to get customers in the door and increase their sales. Today, social media networks are those platforms all wrapped together and are where over 2.5 billion users are active and consume this content every single day.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, mass amounts of content are consistently being pumped into social media networks at all hours of the day. This makes it difficult for small businesses to cut through the noise.

However, through the use of Specific, Measureable, Achieveable, Relevant, and Time Sensitive Goals, your business can succeed in delivering your content right in front of your ideal customer.

What are SMART Goals?

SMART Goals is a framework for setting goals that provides structure and are easily trackable. It is an easy to use guideline when developing strategy for your business including social media marketing.

As mentioned above SMART Goals is acronym which stands for the following:

• Specific – your goal should be clear, concise and well-defined
• Measureable – this is where trackability comes in; you want a specific value that you can measure through the utilization of KPI’s
• Achievable – do you have the resources to hit this goal?
• Relevant – the goal should be aligned with your business
• Time Sensitive – every goal needs a deadline

How to Use SMART Goals for Your Business

When setting SMART Social Media Goals, it is best to start by first identifying your organizational goals. For instance, assume a car dealership is looking to increase sales during Q2.

A SMART business goal could be:

• Specific – Increase leads by 20% per month by the end of Q2
• Measureable – KPI – Current Leads * 120%
• Achievable – Yes, we just added one new salesman to our team
• Relevant – Utilize lead lists to contact 30 leads per day. Use social media to drive leads to a landing page and collect contact information.
• Time Sensitive – Deadline is end of Q2 – June 30th

Once your business goals are identified and put into place, we can then translate them into Social Media SMART Goals which plays a huge role in helping business grow.

How to Use SMART Social Media Goals

Social Media networks are replacing traditional media and advertising platforms at rapid rates. Ad spend on social media platforms is expected to surpass $19.3 Billion in 2018.

With micro-targeting & retargeting capabilities, persona enhancement, and lead capture opportunities, social media networks connect more businesses to their customers every day than any traditional media outlet has in the past; all this at a fraction of the cost.

Translating your businesses SMART Goals to drive your Social Media Marketing strategy is fairly simple.

Five Common Social Media Goals:

• Increase brand awareness
• Improve return-on-investment
• Create a loyal fan base
• Increase web traffic and lead capture
• Increase in-person sales

Using our SMART business goal above of increasing leads by 20%, we can translate this into a social media SMART goal of “increase form submissions and phone calls by 20%”.

On the surface, you may be wondering how social media can help you accomplish this.

There are many tactics utilized but for simplicity, you can create ads on networks like Facebook that drive traffic to a landing page on your website that encourages a potential customer to fill out a form (so you collect their contact info) or click-to-call via a phone number on your website.

A SMART Goal breakdown

To “increase leads by 20% by end of Q2” for the car dealership could look like this:

• Specific: Increase lead capture by 20% from Facebook & Instagram within a 50 mile radius
• Measurable: Increase form submissions by 5% and phone calls by 15%. Increase web traffic via link clicks on posts by 20%. Have an average Post Reach of 2000 people per post.
• Achievable: Yes
• Relevant: Boost car dealership posts with Facebook and Instagram advertising with $10 per post targeting an audience within a 50 mile radius. Consider posting specific discounts/specials for types of vehicles that could target a more specific demographic.
• Time Sensitive: 3 month time limit – ends June 30th.

As you can see, SMART Goals are deliberate in what the goal is and also provides insight into how the goal will be achieved.

Choosing the Right Metrics for Your SMART Social Media Goals

It is important to note that you are using the appropriate metric to measure the results of your SMART Goals. Depending on what the goal is, you could have various metrics that are utilized via social media.

The specificity of your SMART Goal will determine what your objective is and will also help in choosing the right metric for your SMART Goal. In our example above, our goal is to increase leads, so a metric utilized in this scenario could be Site Traffic and Leads Generated.

Some examples of metrics worth noting are:

• Reach
• Audience engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
• Site traffic (clicks)
• Leads generated
• Sign-ups and conversions
• Revenue generated

When you have a clear goal that is well defined, you can begin to build your strategy accordingly. Social Media Marketing is not as difficult as most business owners make it. With the right tools and goals in place, you can begin to maximize your businesses return from social media tactics.

Click the button below to get our FREE SMART Social Goals Template. We use this as a starting point to build social media strategies for our clients.

Click here to get your FREE SMART Goals Template

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