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Setting goals for your social media marketing strategy is essential for any business. But those goals will be much more effective if you weave in an element of meaning and authenticity.
However, creating meaningful goals for your business doesn’t just mean being honest and authentic. It also means setting goals that make sense for your brand strategy and actively contributing to real growth. Part of what makes a social media campaign catalyze growth and change is establishing a connection with your audience.
By letting meaning be the driving force behind your social media goals and objectives, your brand can experience much higher levels of engagement and commercial success.
Understanding Social Media Marketing Success
As anyone working in the digital sphere knows, the main social media marketing objectives are always driven by the same motivation. The goal is to reach consumers, generate leads, and drive traffic to brand websites.
But when it comes to captivating users’ attention and encouraging them to engage with your content, it’s not all about zeros and ones. People crave meaning and authenticity behind the posts and content they consume—and today, this behavior is more prevalent than ever before.
Social media is a great way to reach out to potential customers and foster relationships with consumers around the world. But without a sense of purpose, your content can easily be drowned out by more emotionally oriented brands.
With the right approach, your brand can incorporate these themes into its strategy. Setting social media goals for businesses that bring purpose and connection into the mix is far more likely to see success with consumers.
You may also like our free 7-Step Social Media Content Strategy Template
The Importance Of Purpose And Meaning In Social Media Campaigns
So, what is it that makes purpose and meaning so attractive to consumers on social media? Well, there are a couple of things.
Enhances trust
It makes people trust your brand more. They want to see that you have a valid reason for promoting your brand and possess something beyond superficial media babble.
Increases engagement
Purpose and meaning drive higher engagement. People are more likely to like, comment, share, and purchase your brand’s products or services if they can relate to them.
Adds practical value
In today’s economy and the online-centric world, social media content is one of—if not the most important—ways of reaching customers. If your content has no purpose or meaning, it won’t add any value to your campaign.
Creates realistic goals
Your social media marketing goals should reflect the realistic ambitions of your brand for the next few years. What does it mean to your company to grow by 14% each quarter? What is the purpose behind aiming to increase site activity by 50% by the end of the year?
When you add meaning to your social media strategy, you not only tap into something that humans are naturally hardwired for, but you also put your brand in a position of improved brand awareness and competitive advantage.
6 Tips For Setting Meaningful Social Media Marketing Goals For Businesses
Understanding the importance of meaning in social media strategy is one thing. Setting and implementing goals in conjunction with this is another. Here are six tips to get you started:
1. Start with the big-picture objectives
What is the mission behind your business? Where does your team see it going, ideally within the next five or ten years? Taking a bird’s eye view of your brand’s strategy is a great place to start when setting goals and creating a schedule for your social media marketing campaign.
This approach will help you identify what you want your brand to look like in the future and then work your way back to find goals that will realistically get you there.
2. Make authenticity a priority
Stay true to your brand’s purpose and mission. If the goal of social media marketing is to connect with an audience, bringing authenticity to the party is one of the smartest things you can do. Establish the meaning behind what your brand represents, and use it as the driving force behind your content goals.
3. Understand who your audience is
To develop a social media strategy that’s geared for success, you need to know who you want to appeal to and engage with. Generation, region, income bracket, gender, and more are just some of the specifications it helps to know when designing a social media strategy.
Once you know who you are advertising to, you can curate your content and engagement strategy in a much more concise way. You can then share this across your business and ensure everyone “speaks” to the same audience.
4. Identify the purpose behind your goal metrics
Having clear reasons for why you are setting specific goals can help your social media marketing strategy become sharper and more effective. Dive into the “why” behind your essential KPIs as a team to better understand and execute your mission with more conviction.
5. Monitor your progress closely
There’s no point in setting meaningful social media goals and objectives unless you are going to track them en route to success. Monitoring your progress allows you to identify potential issues along the way and reshape the approach of your strategy based on how it’s performing.
6. Set SMART social media goals
In the social media marketing industry, SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive.
- Specific – Establish the exact details and specifications of each goal.
- Measurable – Make sure it’s a goal that can be tracked and measured using accessible tools.
- Achievable – Your goals should reflect your natural capacity for growth.
- Realistic – Be realistic in your goal-setting. Can this be achieved within the desired timeframe?
- Time-sensitive – Make sure you have the necessary time available to reach your goals.
Using the SMART approach as a guideline, you can assess the feasibility of your goals as they are set in motion. When all else fails, set smart goals for social media.
6 Mistakes Brands Make in Objective-Setting for Social Media Marketing
Knowing what not to do when setting objectives for social media marketing is just as important as knowing what to do in this part of the marketing strategy process.
By taking note of some common flaws and fallibilities in other businesses' objective-setting plans, yours can gain a competitive edge by intentionally avoiding them.
Let’s look at some mistakes to avoid when setting meaningful goals and objectives for your brand’s social media marketing strategy:
1. Not using data analytics
Data analytics are arguably the single most important tool in any social media-active brand’s toolkit today. This is because they provide a perspective that you won’t get anywhere else. Clearview Social’s Social Media Analytics tool will show you the who, what, where, and when of all your posts in the digital sphere in one place, providing you with invaluable engagement data that you can use to refine your strategy in the future.
2. Copying competitor's brand goals
Your brand is unique, and what works for others won’t necessarily work for you. Your goals should reflect the vision you have cultivated for your brand. The most successful brands are typically the ones that develop their own blueprint for success, drawing on unique internal objectives to inform their goals.
See our free e-book, 8 Steps to Creating a Social Media Plan
3. Setting objectives that aren’t brand-aligned
While performance and engagement are still very important factors to consider when setting objectives and goals for your brand, they are certainly not the only ones that matter.
Each goal your brand works towards should be closely aligned with the creative and ethical visions you have for the future. They should also tie in harmoniously with your brand voice, identity, and general personality online. Overall, your objectives for social media marketing should synergize with the other components of what your brand represents in the online world.
4. Focusing only on short-term goals
Long-term goals are key for maintaining momentum over time and ensuring your brand stays on a clear path to success.
Setting short-term objectives, such as increasing engagement by X amount by the end of the month, is useful for progress. However, setting long-term goals will give your strategy a more sustainable overall structure. Knowing where you want to be in a year’s time can also inform your short-term objectives for social media marketing and the goals you set in the interim.
5. Using the same objectives for different platforms
By now, we all know the importance of adapting social media marketing strategies for different platforms. But it’s extra important to keep this in mind when developing new objectives for your brand. Set goals based on the unique performance measurements for all of your active channel presences.
6. Being too rigid
Consistency and commitment are crucial for achieving your goals. But forgetting to adjust them as needed is a common mistake that can lead to stagnance and rigidity for your brand.
As trends and expectations come and go, all businesses should perform continuous reassessments to ensure that brand evolution and audience reception are growing in a sustainable direction. Change your objectives as the need for adaptation arises.
How Clearview Social Can Help You Develop A Purpose-Driven Social Media Campaign
Clearview Social is here to help businesses streamline their content-sharing strategy on social media. With us, the goal of social media marketing becomes easier to reach, and your company enjoys a meaningful boost where it matters. From goal setting to campaign implementation, employee advocacy to gamification, Clearview Social can provide your business with the tools, resources, and expert advice needed for a successful marketing strategy.
Through Clearview Social, your brand can develop a system that improves revenue, promotes realistic growth, and boosts the productivity of employees and the people who hire them.
Request a demo today to learn more about how Clearview Social can transform your social media strategy.