Using social media in your business can seem scary at first, it's just as easy to get it wrong as it is to get it right and getting it wrong could lead to losing customers or even creating a backlash against your business. So it's important to think about what you want to achieve through social media and create your Social Media Goals as soon as possible.
3 Essential Questions To Answer To Create A Good Strategy:
- What you want to achieve?
- Which sites will work best for you?
- How will you measure your results?
This post deals with the first of those questions. You may want to print it out and keep it.
Reasons Businesses Use Social Media:
- Market Research
- Customer Service
- Brand Awareness
- Brand Reputation (Buzz)
- Boost SEO
- Website Traffic / Leads
- Sales
- Finding Business Partners
Start by asking yourself: what key areas of my business do I want to improve or what problem(s) do I want to solve.
It is useful to think of this in terms of your business plan and to keep in mind your current marketing activities when doing this.
To find out which areas you want to concentrate your social media efforts towards, use the chart below.
Start by marking where you feel your business is currently at in regards to these areas. If you are 100% happy with the amount of sales you are getting mark a cross right on the outer edge of the circle where 10 would be, if not mark it where you think is appropriate. If you get only half the amount of sales you want mark '5' with a cross. Do the same for all the areas.
Having marked each area now take a pencil and starting at the top join each mark to the next until it forms some kind of circle.
You may notice at this point that your wheel has a puncture or that it is looking a little deflated or maybe it's not a wheel at all but a triangle!
Seeing which parts of the wheel you score lowest on certainly gives you an idea for one of the areas that you need to focus on, but each of these areas can influence the others so if you are after more sales it may make more sense for you to focus on building customer service through social media in order to get a larger number of repeat orders. Only you know which areas need the most attention.
And of course Social Media Marketing (as all marketing) works best when it's part of a cohesive marketing plan so you may already be getting enough leads through networking but need to boost your brand reputation to a larger audience through social media.
List the 3 most important areas you want to use social media to help below.
1. ___________________________________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________________________________
These three areas will guide your social media strategy, but you also need to be specific about exactly what you will achieve and by when.
Start by thinking in terms of the end objective, for example if you want to get more sales from social media, how many more sales do you want? $1,000 more per month? $10,000? $100,000?
How Can You Create An Achievable Goal?
To get some idea of this it's worth figuring out what your average sale per customer is. If you are a consultant and each new client signs up for a package that delivers $1,000 into your account each month then you only need 1 new client but if a customers average spend with you is less you will need more, you know this, and you may already have this detailed in another section of your business plan.
What you also need to take into account is how many hits on your website equal a new customer, and how many new followers on twitter lead to new hits on your website!
Now of course there are no hard and fast rules for this as it is just as much about what you sell, what you tweet, when and who to as it is about the numbers!
As a guideline for creating your first goal I generally recommend that for each 100 followers you could get 1 customer. However other platforms are different! If there is a stronger level of engagement on a platform, such as there is on Facebook, you may get more customers from less connections.
So create the goal with specific numbers of followers or likes etc, then break it down into monthly targets. 15 new customers would then equal 1,500 twitter followers. That's only 5 new twitter followers a day and it sounds much less daunting that way! Don't forget to mention those new customers in your monthly targets too!
In future posts I'll take you through the next two questions, which of course play a huge part in helping you figure out not just what your goal is but also how to acheive it, but for now I'll leave you to get plotting and dreaming! Enjoy!
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below!
If you liked this, you'll love Setting Goals for Social Media Profile Development
