Social media has matured as a marketing channel over the years and is often paired with other channels like websites, blogs, videos and more when trying to accomplish a specific business goal. Lost on me, until more recently, was the value of goal setting when it comes to designing a social media strategy.
Social media, as I often treated it, was a one-to-many information channel. I would write a new blog post and, using an auto-posting plug-in and scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, I would blast my post on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. My only strategy was based on the idea that the reader would find the headline, excerpt and image compelling enough, on one of these social media platforms, to click on the link and discover SteveBizBlog. From the website, we hoped that the prospect would find our content interesting enough or be drawn to one of our free offers and signup to our email list. However, what I’m discovering is that it is taking more and more effort to reach fewer and fewer people using this, rather ill-conceived, strategy.
Today with so much stuff in my personal social media feeds, most of which I do not care about, I rarely, if ever, read more than a few posts before I lose interest and move on. Moreover, I don’t think I’m alone.
What I’m beginning to finally internalize is that with an overabundance of social media content the old ways of spray and pray are no longer working and that, for social media to remain an effective marketing tool, it needs to be more of a one-on-few channel vs a one-on-many channel. Moreover, it needs to have a more specific objective.
With the way platforms like Facebook are rewriting their algorithms to prioritize engagement. It is becoming more and more obvious that more of the same will not produce the results that I want.
Lost on me until more recently is the value of goal setting when it comes to designing a social media strategy. It was not until I hired a new social media manager, which led me to describe my social media strategy, that I noticed that what I had was basically no goals and no strategy.
I began to ask myself: Do I want to achieve brand awareness with lots of impressions? Do I what to create content that people are likely to share? or Do I want leads? These are just some of the questions I asked myself about my social media goals and you should too.
For example, I could create a Facebook Meme that would generate 50 likes but no click-throughs. But I could also create a blog post and post it on Facebook which could generate no likes but generates 50 click-throughs to my website. One is not better than the other as I realize that each achieves a specific goal but the real question was, what were my goals for SteveBizBlog.
After some research I now believe there are essentially six social media goals worth considering:
Brand Awareness
Community Engagement
Followers
Traffic
Lead Generation
Revenue
In this post we will discuss the first two in a little bit more detail:
Brand Awareness
When we talk about awareness we are talking about both:
Reach which is the number of unique people who see your content and
Impressions which is the total number of times your content was displayed.
To put a finer point on it, a single unique person in your reach may see your content two times. That would be a reach of one and two impressions.
When it comes to awareness, as a social media goal, let’s not forget that, as we discussed in “The Rule of Seven”, that it takes approximately seven impressions in the span of 18 months to penetrate the buyer’s consciousness. Therefore, while you want to get your content in front of more people, you have to reach a minimum number of impressions per unique visitor to reach the buyer’s consciousness. As you would expect, awareness takes time and consistency to accomplish.
Moreover, as we discussed in “Brand Marketing vs. Direct Marketing” the goal of a brand awareness campaign is only to help facilitate the sales process and not make actual sale.
Social media is not the only channel to help you create brand awareness. As we discussed in the post “Brand Awareness – free and low-cost ideas” there are many other ways to achieve this goal. However, when it comes to social media, brand awareness is generally accomplished by renting access to an already existing channel’s audience using a paid engine.
The most important thing, when it comes to renting an audience to achieve brand awareness, is proper targeting. For instance, if your retail business sells power tools that are predominantly used by male customers you may not want to target a platform like Pinterest whose audience is tipped heavily toward a female demographic.
Most platforms that rent you access to their audience offer both Pay Per Impression (PPM) and Pay Per Click (PPC). Generally, PPC is designed more for direct marketing and PPM is designed to achieve brand awareness. The fee associated with PPM is based on 1,000 impressions.
Community Engagement
When we talk about engagement we mean likes, comments, shares, or retweets. Engagement is more direct and helps achieve the second goal of Brand Marketing, making a positive association with the brand. This means that the engaged prospective client has read and demonstrates some level of support for the content through their engagement.
When it comes to the Know Like Trust continuum, as defined by John Jantsch in his book “Duct Tape Marketing”, engagement demonstrates enough trust to make the prospect do something with the content.
The first step in writing content that will drive engagement is to write content with value that people want to read, watch, or listen to.
On the flip side, you need to use your social media accounts to engage with other content developers too. Asking questions or leaving comments on their content will often drive reciprocity and start a conversation. You want to show the prospective client that there is a person behind the brand.
Memes are those interesting pictures with inspirational sayings on them. Memes are self-contained and do not require a click-thru so they are frequently liked and shared. Branding your memes with your URL will at least gives the curious prospective client a way to finding your site.
Another idea to drive engagement is to use branded hashtags where appropriate and encourage others to respond to a question or challenge.
For example, one of my branded hashtags is #ContentForEntrepreneurs. One way in which I use a branded hashtag is to create a social media post and say something like:
This tactic encourages others to write their own posts and include your branded hashtag #ContentForEntrepreneurs.
One of the best engagement techniques I saw to not only drive engagement but also help self-identify potential customers involved a contest conducted by a local HVAC company that I wrote about in “Host a Contest to Self-Identify Customers”
Still, on the topic of using hashtags to promote engagement, don’t forget to look at trending topics. For example, you might post
“Can’t get to the office because of #NorEaster2018 – Why not use the unexpected day off to develop your #sidehustle with SteveBizBlog.com”
Also, every day has a hashtag like #WednesdayWisdom or #FridayMotivation.
Finally, let us not forget to encourage more remote engagements with review sites like Yelp and Foursquare that encourage patrons to share their experience in a comment or star rating.
Are your social media goals to improve brand awareness or community engagement?
