Goals are crucial for your social media campaign: here’s how to set them

Do you know and understand what is possible with a social media marketing strategy? Do you know what you can achieve with a social media campaign for your business? Are you thinking of integrating social media marketing within your overall marketing initiative? With most traditional marketing and digital marketing campaigns, you need to be absolutely sure of your goals before you start with your campaign. If you don’t have any goals, there is a chance that you will waste a lot of effort and time on something that will not produce any results.

You will find many people online that will say that social media is irrelevant to their business and it is only a medium for the youth to chat to each other. There are many articles and books explaining social media ROI, but at the end of the day, social media is more than just a once off campaign to see a return. It is a long-term investment, and this is why it is so important to know what goals you are aiming for with your campaign.

If you don’t know what you want to achieve with your social media marketing strategy, find below a couple of tips to give you an idea of the goals you can pursue.

Social media for brand awareness

For many brands and businesses, being visible on social media is the only goal they are after, especially on big social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While most social media campaigns (except if they go viral) can’t deliver the same level of brand impressions as other mediums such as TV, it can get you to interact directly with your customers. If you already have existing brand metrics to measure your offline marketing campaigns, use them on your social media campaign or create new ones.

Online reputation management

In today’s digital lifestyle, your business reputation can be made or broken in 140 characters or less. A negative reputation online can destroy your business. ORM is also one of the most popular goals that many businesses are using to promote their brand online, and to protect them from any negative feedback.

Do you know your target audience?

By engaging with people on the social web, your business can use this participation for market research. By doing this, you can save money because “social media listening” reduces market research costs.

Increase leads/sales

Building a customer base is a crucial part of any business. You can use the social web to acquire new customers based on the content that you are creating and sharing online. Think about how you can engage with your customers and prospects. What content do they find interesting? What are their demographics?

Customer service

Social media can be highly effective when used for customer services to engage with your customers and prospects to solve their problems. The challenge with this is that your customers will want to get answers from you anywhere and anytime. Consider how you are going to handle any inquiries that come in via social media.

Get others to talk about you

You can use your social media campaign to encourage people to discuss their experiences by using your products and services. You can use the reviews you are getting to entice new customers and prospects with other people’s input. How are you engaging with people who are already talking about your business? How can you leverage this to reach new customers?

Having goals with your social media marketing campaign is very important. Take your goals further so that you can measure the results from your campaign, and see what is working, and what you can leave out.