Goals, Tactics and Metrics
Setting achievable goals for your social media marketing efforts is essential to making sure that you’re not wasting time, money and resources hitting your head up against a brick wall. It’s essential to test and measure each marketing strategy, including social media. If you lose sight of the point of social media in terms of using it to promote your business efforts, you can also lose track of the amount of time you’re spending using it. And let’s be honest, sometimes the time you’re spending is just messing around.
In order to set goals you need to be able to write down what your goal is. A goal is something like — “Increase sales by 5% in 60 days.” Now you’re going to have to develop and discover ways to verify that you’ve achieved any goal you make. That is where testing, and evaluating metrics comes in. First you create the goal, then you decide how to achieve the goal (tactics), then you test and evaluate (metrics).
The steps look like this:
- Determine Goals
- Determine Tactics
- Perform Tactics
- Study Metrics
- Repeat
The important thing to remember is that you can’t achieve what you don’t name and plan. In other words, if you have no idea where you’re headed how can you create a map to get to your destination? If you’re not quantifying your efforts, it’s impossible to ever know if you’re achieving anything. One of the main reasons of business failure has to do with not having a plan, not following the plan, and not tracking metrics to ensure that the plan is working and the goals are achievable.
Determine Goals — Achievable goals are small, short term goals. To create a small, short term goal you create a long term goal and break it down to manageable chunks. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your blog by 100% in one year, you’d need to figure out what your traffic is today, and what your traffic growth needs to be each month to achieve a 100 percent growth in one year.
Determine Tactics — Now that you have your goal, you’ll need to figure out what actions you’ll take to achieve your goal. Actions may involve using social media more strategically such as creating a social media calendar and then sticking to your plan. Your social media calendar might look like this:
- (10 am, 4 pm and 9 pm) Monday through Friday — Auto sharing of new blog posts each day (posts which were either written by a ghostwriter, or yourself from a publication calendar)
- (8 am, 1 pm, and 6 pm)Monday – Wednesday -Friday — Re-Tweet useful information to my followers
- (11am, 3pm, and 11pm )Tuesday & Thursday — Introduce or hint about new products (you can do this via blogging as well if you have everything set up to be automatic)
- 8am each day spend 10 minutes answering direct messages personally
- Post 2 articles a week to article marketing sites, share said articles with social media
Once you write it down, really do it, or delegate it, but get it done. You can’t succeed in any plan without carrying out the steps no matter how hard you wish it or think about it success takes action.
Study Metrics — Before you start any new campaign check your current metrics using whatever system you like such as Google Analytics. Then, pick a specific time each week or month to look at your data again. You can keep track in a spreadsheet to put it all together in one spot. Track subscriber rates, new comments, visitors, and even by how many people re-tweet and or share your information. Hint: Use Google Docs and hire a VA to keep track of this for you.
If you find the tactics you used worked well and you’re satisfied with the results, repeat them. If you want to ramp something up, or change a tactic, change only one tactic or even part of a tactic at a time, that way you can really measure and test how your one change affects your future results.
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