Social media marketing isn't a "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" type of action your business should make. Instead, take the time to get to know these goals and work towards them bit by bit.
Social media marketing is a no-brainer if you are a small business owner. Not only is it a free way to market your business organically, but it’s also a great way to get to know your customers. But how do you know if your business is doing the right thing? Through these 10 essential social media marketing goals for small businesses, you’ll learn how each goal plays into the bigger picture of your business and how to keep your business running sustainably.
1. Boost Brand Awareness
Without visibility, how can you sell? Brand awareness is how you get on the radar of your potential customers and get them talking about you. When you post shareable content that resonates with your ideal customer, they are more likely to spread the word, increasing your brand’s reach and exposure. Consumers feel more comfortable and confident when purchasing from a brand they know and trust. Your brand awareness is crucial if you want to stand out from the competition.
Creative Ways to Increase Your Brand Awareness
Build a recognizable brand - Decide early on your brand voice, values, tagline, and logo, and how you can incorporate those components into your marketing, and ensure you show up consistently as your brand on social media.
For example, CocaCola
Coca-Cola is selling the emotion of belonging. They convey that through their advertisements by highlighting the joy of sharing a Coke with family, friends, or partners. You recognize their logo, colors, tone of voice in their messaging, and slogan, “Taste the feeling.” This generally brings up the feelings of warmth, love, and being a part of something such as family, friends, or community. How can you convey an emotion with your brand? And what emotion do you want others to feel when using your product or service?
2. Grow An Online Presence
Showing up online helps you build trust with your potential customers and gain brand recognition. When your customers have a question or concern, or in a very bad scenario, a complaint, they typically turn to your online presence to find the answers. Having an online presence lets them know that you are there for them and have an easy way for them to reach you.
3 Tips For Improving Your Online Presence
Have a website and update it often. One of the best ways to be discovered online is your SEO. When you update your website by including SEO-rich content, meta tags, appropriate keywords in your descriptions, alt-text for your photos, and any blogs or videos that may live on your website, you signal to the search engines that you are discoverable.
Include your location and contact information in prominent places such as your About page, website, social media bio, etc.
Show up on social media. Don’t just post and ghost. Spend time speaking with and getting to know your customers, potential customers, and those interested in supporting your business. It’s not uncommon for people to seek reviews and recommendations online before purchasing. Who do you trust more? A stranger online? Or a friend who spoke about a business?
3. Increase Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is developing relationships with potential customers and brand loyalists. This connection increases your chances of bringing in more revenue for your business. People spend money with those whom they trust. Unless you sell a product or service under $20, more effort is required to build trust and make the sale.
Techniques For Fostering Meaningful Interactions
The beginning of any meaningful relationship between you and your customers is customer experience. You can have the best product in the world, but if your customer’s experience is lacking, there’s no way you’ll increase your engagement meaningfully. Look at all the touchpoints you make with your customers, such as your social media, website, emails, and in-person interactions, to see if any areas need improvement.
As much as we sometimes get frustrated with chatbots, they also can be helpful. Consider programming typical FAQ answers in your social media DMs and website for quick responses to your customer’s questions. By programming responses, you ensure you meet your customers wherever they are.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention engagement on social media. Engagement rates are one of the metrics to remember when using social media as a marketing tool. Engagement rates are calculated based on the number of interactions your content receives (interactions include comments and shares), divided by the number of followers and multiplied by 100. That number is your percentage of engagement. The average engagement rate for most accounts is 1%-3%. Anything from 3%-5% is considered good engagement. And any engagement rate that is above 6% is really good.
4. Drive Website Traffic
While social media marketing is beneficial for getting your brand seen and recognized, the ultimate goal is getting traffic to your website to hit your sales goals. Not only does website traffic contribute towards your ultimate goal, but it also helps with your SEO. When users visit your website, the activity signals to search engines that you are active, have authority, and have a high value. When you boost your SEO, you’ll appear higher on the search results!
Organic posts are one of the easiest ways to use social media to direct traffic to your website. But to see if your posts produce the desired results, you need to look at your backend analytics to see the number of link clicks or website taps. Then and only then can you truly see if you are hitting your goal. Additionally, looking at the analytics for your website, you can see where your traffic is coming from, if they are viewing you from a desktop or mobile device, what pages they navigate to, and if they are heading to one page and bouncing off.
Tools to Track Website Visits
Google Analytics - Google Analytics shows a robust view of your website traffic, including acquisition reports, audience insights, conversion reports, real-time tracking, and more! The best part, it’s free!
Semrush - This popular tool does what Google Analytics does AND more. With Semrush, you can create a comparison report of how your website is performing against your competitors.
Mouseflow - This tool allows you to improve your website by showing what your customers see.
Hubspot CMS - Hubspot tells you what content types, sources, and campaigns generate the most leads. Additionally, Hubspot makes SEO suggestions to help you rank higher on the search engine results pages.
5. Generate Leads
Most potential customers come from social media at the top of the marketing funnel. They see a post they like and give it a like, a comment, and maybe even save it. However, if they’re not ready to spend money with you, how do you recapture their attention and remain on their radar? Communicating with potential customers is vital for creating a sustainable business model. Those potential customers are leads.
Strategy For Lead Generation Through Social Media
Potential customers go through a journey called the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is a great strategy that produces a way to stay connected with your potential customers. The top of the funnel is when you grab their attention. This is typically done through entertaining posts and educational tips. In the middle of the funnel, you can show more authority or value to your potential customers. At the top of the marketing funnel, you can build a deeper connection by showing your authenticity to stand out from your competitors.
So, how do you use this model to generate leads on social media? The best way to generate leads is by creating a freebie or irresistible offer, such as a coupon or limited-time special that only newsletter subscribers will receive. You should generate a newsletter list because you then create a direct way to communicate with customers and potential customers. If social media were to shut down due to glitches, cybersecurity attacks, or due to government regulations, you no longer have a way to communicate with potential customers.
6. Boost Sales
What else can you do with social media besides the obvious call-to-action in your social media posts to boost your sales? Social media can boost your sales by highlighting success stories by showcasing your product or service. The reviews you receive from satisfied customers show potential buyers how your business fits into their lives. Additionally, you may enjoy sharing User Generated Content (UGC) to fill up your content calendar, provide firsthand accounts of your brand in use, and extend your post’s reach by being shared by the customer’s account.
1 Tip For Effective Selling
While organic social media posts are a great way to grow your brand, boost your sales, and form the foundation of your community, paid advertising is truly the best way to drive sales quickly. However, unless you have a good grasp on how to set up your ads to target the right people, I don’t suggest throwing any money behind your ads. If you can’t learn the ins and outs of advertising on social media, I highly recommend you invest the money in hiring a professional marketer.
7. Monitor ROI
Let’s talk about ROI (return on investment) momentarily. ROI can be measured by the amount of money you put behind the effort of something, such as an advertisement, or how much money you spend on outsourcing a marketer, and the correlation of that effort to the incremental gain of your business. However, if you’re the only one handling your marketing and aren’t spending money on advertising, what should you measure for ROI? Measuring ROI for marketing is tricky at times; however, you can calculate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, such as custom links for products, coupon codes to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, or even if someone clicks on your link shared in an email.
How to Optimize Your Strategy Based On ROI Data
Set clear goals and objectives. Are you trying to gain more newsletter subscribers? Are you trying to clear out old inventory in time for a season or event? Knowing what numbers or metrics you want to hit ahead of time will help you adjust your marketing.
Know your audience like the back of your hand. Knowing what type of messaging will resonate the most with your audience is vital for setting up an effective marketing campaign.
Find the right channel. You already know your ideal customer, but do you know where to find them online? Knowing exactly what platforms will help you reach your goals is crucial to effective marketing.
Create amazing content. Creating amazing content doesn’t mean you have to have the latest tools and technology to make your content stand out. However, knowing what types of content will get saved, shared, and even engage your audience will help you reach your goals.
Check your data and analytics. Throwing content against the wall to see what sticks isn’t going to be helpful, especially when you are already a busy business owner. Look at your backend analytics on social media to get familiar with the ups and downs of the numbers and what is working the best. Once you know what works the best, repeat that process repeatedly. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Optimize your strategies. Regularly investigate your analytics and form educated strategies based on your information. Continuous improvement is the name of the game for ROI.
8. Adapt and Evolve
Social media is an ever-changing landscape that can be overwhelming if you aren’t staying on top of what’s trending, what new updates are available on each platform, and what new platforms are popping up. With any business marketing its products and services, learning where your potential customers are and what they like is crucial information required to adapt and evolve along with them. There are zero instances when your marketing mix can remain the same.
Strategies For Staying Adaptable In Social Media Marketing
Continuous learning
Make data-driven decisions
Audience research annually
Experimentation
Diversify your platforms
Remain flexible to changes
Listen and engage
Collaborate with others
Mentally prepare for unexpected changes
Regularly review your strategy
9. Enhance Customer Loyalty
In today’s digital world, it is increasingly difficult to find brand loyalists, but they are out there. And when you find “your tribe,” you’ll find a customer for life. One of the best things about social media is that word-of-mouth still holds its weight in gold. Reviews, comments, and online forums such as communities and groups are a great way to market your brand through your brand loyalists. They are the first people to speak up about how great you are. And the best part? They genuinely mean it. They speak highly of your brand because they use your products or services and love them. Their opinion matters to those who trust them; their word is gold.
The Benefits of Loyalty Programs
If you haven’t found your tribe yet, what can you do to foster brand loyalty? One way to encourage customers to purchase from you is through loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are a great way to leverage data from the customer journey. You gain insights into buying habits, such as timing and products they purchase. Also, loyalty programs incentivize customers to provide additional key information, such as email addresses, birthdates, etc., to help you make smarter business decisions.
10. Stay Ahead of Competition
Social media marketing can sometimes feel like you are yelling into the ether. With all that noise that only seems to get louder and louder by the day, how can you stand out against your competitors? That’s where strategy comes in. A competitive analysis on social media will help guide your business towards keeping up with your competitors and outpacing your rivals.
Tips For Conducting A Competitive Analysis of Your Competitors On Social Media
Identify your primary competitors on social media. I consider primary competition to be those offering the same or similar products or services, who also are at a similar price point and are offering similar quality products. If you’re making and selling craft sodas, of course, you’ll compete with Coca-Cola. However, those considering purchasing from you do so without comparing you to Coca-Cola. They are considering your brand versus another craft soda maker. So, to conduct a true competitive analysis, consider the micro and the macro of your industry and niche down to the top three to five brands.
Gather platform-specific data. Meta offers benchmarking analytics against your competitors, but you must program it to perform that action. Once you identify your competitors, you can plug in their information on the Meta dashboard to see how you stack up. Other tools are available if you’re willing to invest some money, such as Sprout Social and Semrush. Additionally, you can go down your own research rabbit hole by looking at each competitor’s social media. What links do they share in their bio? What description do they use? How active are they on social media? What content is getting lots of views AND engagement? Remember, views are cool, but is it effective if people don’t engage with the post or do the requested call-to-action?
Analyze the data. You’ve done a great job of culling your research. Now what? Put together a report or spreadsheet if you need to. Jot down notes, stats, and numbers. See if you can put your own spin on the types of content they’re sharing.
Now that you have the 10 essential social media marketing goals for small businesses, I encourage you to take each step gradually. It’s a lot of work running a small business, not including the details and strategy it takes to be successful with your marketing. If you need help uncovering the data, understanding what you’ve found, or want guidance on what strategic moves to make, schedule a free discovery call today!