The use of social media within marketing strategies is beginning to become commonplace in this day an age as technology is bringing small businesses much closer to their potential customers than ever before.

This has led to the majority of small businesses leaning towards a Facebook page to be their first introduction to the world of online marketing.

This has led to a large number of pages being built although unfortunately, small businesses have been diving into the realm of digital marketing without first laying out a set of goals. A clear set of goals ensures that they are getting the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Quite often when I ask small business owners which goals they have in place for social media. The most common reply that I get is to lead to more in-store sales.

Sales are always great for business although there are so many other benefits to an effective social media strategy that quite often go unnoticed.

This is why I have decided to piece together a list of social media goals that are geared towards turning those one-off low converting Facebook page views into engaged long-term customers.

Business social media goals

Increasing brand awareness

First, upon our list, we have the single most popular reason that small businesses begin to develop a social media strategy, brand awareness.

Social media has enabled the little guy to finally grab the attention of potential customers that are beyond their usual local reach. Social media metrics allow small businesses to grab a magnifying glass to drill down into their digital impact.

How to track brand awareness

A lot of social media platforms have analytics tools built into them and Facebook is no exception sporting the Facebook insights dashboard, there is quite a bit of power under the hood.

From your Facebook insights, you are able to track the social growth of your brand as well as how your visitors are interacting with your content. One of my favourite tabs is the Posts tab because this is where the action happens.

From this tab, I can view all of my recent posts and quickly determine which ones are performing well so I can pivot my strategy accordingly. This information is particularly valuable if you are implementing a varied content approach to social media covering visual, lead and written content based posts.

Now that you’re armed with this new piece of knowledge jump over to your Facebook page and view your post insights. Do you need to pivot your content strategy?

Driving traffic

The next goal that we need to focus on is directing traffic to that beautiful looking website that you have to convert your valuable leads into potential customers.

Now I know what you’re thinking here what does this have to do with social media? Three in five marketers use social media as their primary way to distribute marketing content. Social media works fantastically in conjunction with your print and physical distribution methods.

Let’s say that you are currently running a guerilla marketing campaign by distributing fliers in one of those dinosaur costumes that you see everywhere these days.

You can maximise your marketing impact by streaming your journey through your social media platforms with videos and regular posts. You will be surprised at the level of impact that can be achieved with some great content and a well-placed hashtag.

The magic in the measurable metrics

• Traffic from social media: It is important to measure the amount of website traffic that is coming directly from your social media platforms as well as which platforms that they are coming from. This will allow you to refine your social media efforts to the platform that is working for your business.
• Social traffic bounce rate: Bounce rate looks at the amount of social media traffic that is reaching your website and leaving without consuming any of your amazing content. If you’re finding that your social media leads are resulting in high bounce rates then you may need to double check that your social media content is matching the type of content that is on your website. As an avid content reader myself there is nothing worse than clicking through an interesting Facebook post only to find that the article was nothing like what you expected.
• Lead content performance: Your lead content is the business end of your content management strategy, therefore, it is important to assess the success of your lead generating posts. These posts have a specific call to action that often leads through to a particular product or piece of content. You will need to ensure that your lead post has a high click-through rate combined with a low bounce rate.

The best way to measure these metrics is the use of google analytics for your website. If your only rocking a Facebook page than no need to worry as Facebook page insights will have you covered.

Develop a call to action

Setting lead generation goals

When developing a social media strategy for your business it’s important to clearly define what you would like to achieve from your social media efforts.

This call to action will usually lead to an email newsletter description, purchase of a product or the downloading of content.

In order to successfully measure the effectiveness of your lead generation strategies, you will need to measure the level of clickthroughs as well as how many of those click-throughs are converting into paying customers.

This will allow you to determine if it is your media material or your landing pages that need further tweaking to increase your level of conversions.

The above image is an example of a lead generating post that links through to a website landing page. It’s important to have a clear call to action to incentivise customers to click through to the website.

In this case, the incentive is to book a free website consultation. Through Facebook insights, I am currently measuring the impact as well as the lick through rate for this advertisement.

To finish up let’s do a recap on effectively setting business social media goals. When setting up a Facebook page it is essential that you clearly define your social media goals.

From here you can put in place clear objectives on a week by week basis that can be effectively measured through the use of Facebook page insights or Google analytics.