Setting social media goals will help you measure and monitor the progress and performance of your marketing strategy. It also increases the chances of success at achieving the goals you define. Common social media marketing goals for roofing businesses include:
- Increasing traffic to your website
- Advertising your roof replacement and repair services
- Generating more sales and leads
- Increasing brand awareness
- Running campaigns
- Communicating with customers
- Establishing online authority.
You may also have other goals that align with your business goals.
What is the SMART social media marketing strategy?
The acronym SMART refers to attributes that goals must have in order to come to fruition. This means that the goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-specific. These relevant and achievable SMART goals will form the framework of your social media strategy.
1. Specific
For uttermost clarity on what you are trying to achieve, your goals need to be very specific. For example, if you want to increase engagement, are you targetting 100 new followers or 1,000? On which platform are you planning to increase engagement and how are you tracking the progress of this goal. It is important to also specify your target audience for both organic and paid campaigns. Specifying your audience will also help you identify the best platforms suitable for your content and the best ways to concentrate your resources.
A specific target audience will help you better understand their interests and habits and create content that will resonate and encourage engagement accordingly and therefore boost sales. Creating buyer personas depending on age, demographics, location and platform and tailoring the material accordingly is a good way to start.
2. Measurable
Every goal and initiative that you include in your strategy needs to be measurable so that progress and success can be tracked. For example, if you are aiming to increase Twitter followers what is the number and percentage by which you are planning the increase. The metrics used need to be quantifiable. To go about doing this, start with identifying measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media strategy. Tracking KPIs will enable you to also track the ROI of your social media campaigns.
Even goals like building brand awareness and managing brand reputation and customer experience need to be measured. The KPIs that you decide upon can be specific to your product. For example, to increase brand awareness your KPIs might track the number of followers, the average number of impressions and the number of brand mentions.
3. Attainable
When you decide on your social media goals you must ensure that they are attainable. Any goal should challenge you and require you to stretch out of your comfort zone but they should also be realistic. If you find that the goals that you defined are not attainable, then you need to find a measurable metric for a situation that is more attainable. Setting attainable goals allows you to maximize impact and motivate you to achieve real progress.
Current performance metrics will help you define areas where attainable stretch is possible and goals can be recalibrated accordingly. For example, if your goal was to double your click-through rate in a month but you are not achieving this growth rate, then you need to adjust your timeline and test out different content. The important thing to remember is that your goals should align with your overall objective and larger strategy.
4. Relevant
Goals need to be relevant to align closely with your business objective, mission, vision and values. Your goals need to get you closer to achieving these objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase Facebook likes you need to understand how that will benefit the business. In order to design a relevant social media strategy, you will need to do market research and competitor analyses to see what topics and content types resonate with your audience and inspire engagement.
5. Time Specific
A timeframe for the completion of goals will keep your team accountable as well as provide a marker point for measuring success. Milestones marked along the timeframe will help with incremental check-ins. Deadlines help to define schedules and assign time limits to your KPIs. This helps you track progress and make adjustments where required. Include both short-term and long-term goals in your social media strategy with KPIs to match. Time-limited KPIs also help the company achieve broader goals. For example, if your overall goal is to increase brand awareness then you need to set time limits related to the number of followers and impressions.
Setting SMART goals and aligning your social media strategy accordingly is a good way to achieve online marketing success. SMART goals will help you track KPIs and metrics more accurately. Revisit your goals on a regular basis to check if you are on track or whether you need to make adjustments. Test, analyze and reevaluate regularly for a strategy that will grow along with your company.
Do you need help with defining SMART goals for the social media marketing strategy? At The Social Expansion Project, we help roofing businesses with their strategies and growth. You can request your free, no-pressure consultation here.
