Happy New Year! It’s the start of a new year (and new decade!) and everyone is focused on GOALS. January is a great time for planning, plotting and establishing expectations, especially when it comes to your business growth. If you are planning your social media marketing strategy for the year then you need to get SMART with your goals. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym that is used to help businesses create clearly defined and measurable goals and objectives. Creating specific, relevant, and achievable goals will help you review and refine your social media strategy.
S.M.A.R.T stands for:
Specific:
Be as specific as possible with your social media goals. This will help you track progress and measure success. For example, “increasing brand awareness” is commonly used as a social media goal. This is a very intangible concept unless it is defined more clearly. What does brand awareness mean to you? Typically, it relates to social engagement, shares, and brand mentions. It’s vital to be as specific as possible with your goals in order to track success.
Measurable:
Every goal needs some kind of metric attached to it. “Improving customer service on social media” is a great concept, but it’s not a goal unless you have a way to measure that improvement. Measurable goals are often called “Key Performance Indicators”. For example, here are two goal types of measurable goals I’ve used for influencer marketing campaigns in the past – Goal one is brand awareness measured by reach, impressions and engagement. Goal two is actions measured by click-through rate, website visits, newsletter sign-ups, or ticket sales.
Attainable:
Be realistic. Your social media goals should absolutely be ambitious, but are they achievable considering your current resources? The bigger your goal, the bigger the effort. It’s easy to say you want to show a 50% increase in sales from social media, but it’s much harder to achieve it. Instead, think of how you can break that goal down into smaller pieces. For example, you could say “next month, we will improve our add-to-cart rate by 10%.” As you complete these smaller, more attainable milestones, you’ll build momentum towards your ultimate sales goal.
Relevant:
All social media goals should be tied to your business goals. Understanding your business goals helps you choose the right social media platforms to be on, drives your social content, and also helps you track your success. For example, if your business goal is to increase sales by 10% per month, you may have a S.M.A.R.T social media goal of increasing leads by 10% per month via direct-messages. This goal will be attainable as you will invest more money into social media management in order to post more consistently, engage with your target audience, and have clear “calls-to-action”.
Timely:
Deadlines keep everyone accountable. Include a timeframe for completion of your goal so you know when to check in on your success. Hold yourself accountable. Not giving yourself enough time, may discourage you from accomplishing what you set out to do. Start by making a list of your short and long term goals. Check them through the S.M.A.R.T. checklist and begin building your priorities.
Get planning and good luck!
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Establishing SMART social media goals is a vital step in the social media strategy for any business. Establishing your SMART goals is one aspect of my Social Never Sleeps Mastermind course. The aim of the course is to help small business owners create a complete social media strategy for their business, and empower them with the knowledge and tools to implement it successfully. Full information click HERE.
