Marketers must clarify what they’re aiming to achieve with B2B social media campaigns, especially given the stubborn status of social media as a younger, relatively untested type of marketing. For example, if you choose brand awareness and thought leadership, you’ll focus your social media efforts on achieving those two objectives. First, focus on creating social content that’s helpful, shareable, engaging, and uniquely styled to give definition to your brand. A reasonable goal for social lead acquisition might be “over the next 3 months (time-bound), increase leads by 50% via LinkedIn publications.” If you’ve found that prospects have a peculiar affinity with your brand over Twitter, you might devise the following goal: “over the next quarter, get 300 new people to engage (RT’s and/or comments) on Twitter.” With such SMART goals, you’ll weed out distractions and your social marketing team will know exactly what to focus on, day to day. Here’s how you can construct a social campaign that has very specific goals as a target: Create drip campaigns. Using your social media management platform, construct a calendar for automatic publishing; so that for the specific networks you’ve chosen to target in your SMART goals, your posts go out exactly when prospects are most likely to see them. It’s a no-brainer – if you’ve used the SMART system, you know exactly whether you’ve fallen under or exceeded those goals after the specified period of time. To return to an earlier example, if your goal was to acquire 200 leads on LinkedIn, ask yourself: have you truly defined a “lead” from LinkedIn? Of course, the one thing B2B marketers should keep in mind through goal-oriented campaigns, particularly when they’re successful, is the importance of tracking conversion rates. Throughout your social media marketing ventures, keeping goals in focus is the only way to make sure you’ll reach them.
B2B marketers in particular, being tasked with the job of bringing prospects into sales funnels for complex products and services, need to know how to set goals for every aspect of their campaigns – and that includes social media initiatives.
Marketers must clarify what they’re aiming to achieve with B2B social media campaigns, especially given the stubborn status of social media as a younger, relatively untested type of marketing.
Setting specific goals will help illustrate the conversions and ROI that can come directly from involvement in social networks, as well as help set solid expectations for future social media ventures.
So you might ask: How can B2B marketers define goals, especially in the ever-changing social media world?
Types of goals to set
When it comes to social, there are two types of goals that marketers should be setting.
Broad goals help you and your team understand the purpose behind your social media campaigns but they are useless without specific, measurable goals to help track your progress.
Choosing broad social marketing goals is perhaps the easy part, but it still requires careful consideration.
The top 5 goals of B2B marketers are, in order:
- Thought leadership, and
Any and all of these things can be accomplished with a good social media campaign. Depending on the market position of your company, you might select just 2 or 3 of the above goals for now, and focus on others in the future as company needs dictate.
For example, if you choose brand awareness and thought leadership, you’ll focus your social media efforts on achieving those two objectives. First, focus on creating social content that’s helpful, shareable, engaging, and uniquely styled to give definition to your brand. Secondly, for the thought leadership component, make sure your social posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook link to your comprehensive guides, ebooks, and white papers on important industry topics.
To create your specific goals, you should use the very intuitive SMART paradigm. SMART is, of course, the famous acronym for “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound,” which describes everything a reasonable, clear-cut goal should be.
Formulate some social media marketing goals that can be put in those particular terms.
A reasonable goal for social lead acquisition might be “over the next 3 months (time-bound), increase leads by 50% via LinkedIn publications.”
If you’ve found that prospects have a peculiar affinity with your brand over Twitter, you might devise the following goal: “over the next quarter, get 300 new people to engage (RT’s and/or comments) on Twitter.”
With such SMART goals, you’ll weed out distractions and your social marketing team will know exactly what to focus on, day to day.
Building a social strategy around goals
Once you have both specific and broad company goals in clear view, it’s time to construct your social campaign around them.
The focus on these goals shouldn’t take away from continuously engaging with prospects on each social platform and responding to all lead engagements in a timely manner.
You should attack the specific goals you’ve set by incorporating them into these day-to-day social management tasks as well as in your overall campaign strategy.
Here’s…
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