Setting goals and objectives to guide your social media marketing activity is critical to ensure that your efforts are making a meaningful and positive impact on your business.
Without well-defined goals and objectives, there is no way to determine what success looks like, no way to measure success, and no way to optimize. In short, without established goals and objectives, you're completely flying blind.
Of course, there's more to success than just setting goals and forgetting about them. Be sure to execute in such a way that will address your goals and objectives, track performance against those goals, and finally, optimize to ensure you're maximizing the effectiveness of your efforts.
Establishing goals and objectives
Without first establishing goals and objectives there is roughly a 0 percent chance that your social media and content marketing efforts will be successful. Without goals, there is nothing dictating your actions, nothing ensuring you will be working toward anything meaningful, and nothing that will allow you to determine if what you've done is in fact a success. Set goals - short term and long term - and don't be afraid to push yourself to achieve great things.
Executing strategically
Use the goals and objectives you've established as a compass to guide your audience facing execution of your social media strategy. If the executional components of your social media strategy don't create a strong value proposition for your audience, you will want to reconsider why or how you are using social media and content marketing.
Tracking and reporting
Be disciplined when tracking the effect of your social media and content marketing efforts against your goals and objectives. This will enable you to chart performance, measure effectiveness, demonstrate progress, observe trends, track momentum, and inform key stakeholders. Additionally, it will allow you to more confidently optimize and refine efforts moving forward.
Optimization
The dynamic nature of social media, technology, your audience's tastes and preferences, your business, competition and category will all require that you adapt your social media strategy to address the inevitability of change. Also, opportunities will undoubtedly be identified in the future to do things more effectively. All of this means that your social media and content marketing goals and objectives should be equally as malleable to account for these changes.
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Now is a perfect time to create, review, or optimize your social media and content marketing goals and objectives.
Having focus on where you want to be is critical to achieving success. For this reason, it's imperative that you have goals and objectives, and that reviewing, measuring and optimizing against them is part of your regular social media and content marketing regimen.
What goals do you have for the year ahead?
Have you ever had great success achieving lofty goals?
Do you think there is such thing as setting your sights too high?
How do goals and objectives help you to keep focus?
It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial