Social Media Marketing Goals: 9+1 Strategy for strategic success

Social Media Marketing Objective – We give you a free insight into the strategy objective of a social media marketing agency. What exactly is the big goal in social media marketing? The subject of social networks is so new that there is hardly any well-founded long-term expertise. While social media managers are slowly getting used to Facebook, YouTube is a bit understood, Instagram is back and Tik Tok is already in the starting blocks. Apart from this, there are also certain networks that fulfil their purpose for certain purposes, e.g. in public relations Twitter, in addressing B2B customers LinkedIn and for the Asian market Wechat. Different social networks bring with them individual challenges. Not only the individual social networks, but also the different bases of products, services, companies and brands.

  • Who sends his information?
  • Who should be reached?
  • What exactly are the goals of the social media marketing strategy?

As a social media agency we have ten goals in focus, depending on the client and project in different elaboration and priority setting.

All goals are interconnected, mutually dependent, promote each other, but can also have an equally negative effect on each other. This is why it is so important to focus on a targeted concept right from the start when setting up your own social media channel. Let’s look at the individual goals in detail.

Increase of brand awareness in a certain target groups

The A&O for every company, the absolute focus, the increase of own brand awareness within a certain target group. The choice of social networks varies according to the target group. From the one extreme, the fashion company with worldwide representations and shops in every major city, the large mass audience from child to senior, the choice of strategy and social networks differs to the other extreme, the large corporation with excellent B2B business model, completely without retail business and great public attention. Here the work focuses on specific social networks and public relations. Quite different from the big fashion company, which lives from daily publications, constantly changing visual languages, competitions, up to events in the local shops. Influencer marketing for the general public, TV events and their exploitation for Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and many more.

Ultimately, however, it’s always about more customers, more prospects, more reach.

The more people talk about their own brand, the more frequently it is mentioned, the more customers will fall back on the brand if necessary. Therefore, one of the absolute priorities for companies that want to do social media marketing is to increase their brand awareness.

Winning new customers and generating fans

How do you achieve brand awareness in social networks? By generating fans, i.e. people who follow them, they increase the attractiveness of your social media channel, your brand and ultimately promote the acquisition of new customers.

The term social media marketing already contains the big term marketing. Marketing itself deals with many disciplines. From their studies, many social media managers are certainly still familiar with the classic business terms about product and pricing policy, but also publicity. Marketing does not only deal with advertising but also with psychological and economic aspects. These factors also play an important role in social networks.

In order to generate new customers, the primary goal must be to generate fans. Even the first 100 fans should be regarded as very valuable by small companies. They are the first 100 brand advocates who can make their brand known through recommendation but also through interaction. The larger the community, the more people will talk about it, mention its brand in articles or give positive or negative reviews. The more people talk about their brand, the more important it is perceived. Ultimately, it is this increase in your own reach that will bring you the new customers you initially wanted in your objectives.

Interaction with customers / Increase of customer loyalty

What makes social networks so strong is the changed communication model. There used to be rigid structures, from the PR agency to the final output in magazines or on TV. Today, every company can become a broadcaster itself and thus ensure daily interaction with its own audience. The more frequently your own brand is perceived, the more it is anchored in people’s minds. We just had that in the part about winning new customers. The next step is to keep our newly won fans and customers. It is also a matter of convincing those who have not yet decided of our product or service. Communication is the highest standard and the third goal for social media planning.

What makes a community successful? Conversations, interactions, comments, I like expressions, evaluations, any form of interpersonal communication. The more present we are ourselves, e.g. by answering comments and questions, or by specifically involving the community through surveys or other means, the more present we are. But the more the users feel taken seriously. Whether the big idol, the influencer or the big brand, in this case you! Users want added value and they want to be valued. Note that in their objective.

In order to initiate new topics at all, they constantly need new content. To encourage interaction you should interact daily with your fans. Regularity makes a big difference. For example, the morning posting with inspiration for outfits in everyday life and in the evening the special features for holidays to evening dress. Every day there is new inspiration and every day the fans can exchange ideas with each other.

Revenue increase

After talking about our goals of generating fans, new customer acquisition and interaction, i.e. the regular exchange and keeping on our social media channel, we are now talking about the central economic argument for social media marketing, the increase in sales.

Almost all companies pursue the goal of increasing sales on social media.

  • How can we increase sales in the online shop?
  • How do we get more newsletter subscriptions?
  • How can we market digital products even better?
  • How do we lure fans into our local shops?

In order to optimize sales, there is the described way of organic growth but also the possibility of advertising. Advertisements can be controlled extremely precisely by various possibilities in the Advertisement Manager. A small example, for real estate companies, advertising on Facebook can be targeted and placed separately, women aged 45 to 50, 50 to 55, but also men. These target groups can in turn be subdivided into different clusters, some are leisure-oriented, others are interested in saving money and investing capital. Different small advertisements are designed for all target groups, which are then tested against each other in a split test. The ads that generate the most deals will be equipped with more budget.

Whether organic sales or targeted sales through advertisements, especially content, that is the photo and video content but also the text or the use of certain classifications plays a large role. Which visual language is convincing and which visual language produces the desired effects? Not only for our goal of increasing sales, but also for other social media marketing goals such as personnel recruitment.

Personal Recruitment in Social Media

Many companies are growing and are desperately looking for qualified personnel. In the classic job portals for vacant jobs, many companies go under. Especially if you don’t have 200 vacancies directly available like large corporations, but maybe only three. But even with 20 jobs, there are reasons why it is worth switching to social media marketing for personnel recruitment, because job advertisements are expensive.

An important goal in their social media strategy should be to recruit their staff. Because in social networks you will not only find older and experienced staff, especially the young audience is at home here. Motivated young people for vocational training, internships in the agency or even for permanent employment in the company. Social networks are excellent for finding personnel.

On the one hand, you can use your own community for recruiting personnel. Many people know friends who are looking for a job and recommend you as a company. This might not only bring you a good application but maybe even a new fan! Here you can also see how powerful the development of your own social media community is, not only for boosting sales and winning new customers, but also for recommending people within circles of friends, e.g. when looking for a job. On the other hand one can fall back naturally also on advertisements, here one invests indeed a little budget, for it one can go extremely exactly to target groups. For example, if you are looking for new trainees in the Berlin area, you can optimize the advertisement exactly to the Berlin area, select young people between 16 and 19 years, they can even consider interests, for example, if they come from the real estate sector, furniture or even sports manufacturers. In this way you will find new personnel even more targeted and cheaper.

Service and support for questions and suggestions

In the area of customer retention, service and support is of course an absolute A&O and thus also one of her goals for the social media marketing strategy.

Social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are ideal for interacting with your target audience. No matter whether you are interested, a new customer or a regular customer, everyone can inform themselves 24 hours a day about products, call up news or even send questions.

Community management must therefore also be taken into account in personnel planning. It is not only about the publication of new content, the service also plays a major role. Before products are returned directly or before purchases cannot be made at all, users can inform themselves independently and immediately. For all questions you should always have an employee, because if questions are not answered, this will be noticed by other users and they will not even interact with their channel. When other users see that they are responding to questions, they will also feel encouraged to ask a question if you are interested in your product or service but are not yet fully convinced.

As you can see, all goals of our social media strategy are conditioned by each other. Therefore, keep an overview of all aspects and, depending on your internal capacities, weight in which of the goals you are investing more or less personnel resources.

Market research and opinion poll: crowdsourcing

Those who can provide sufficient capacities can also use their own social media channel portfolio for market research. In the past, 1,000 people from 20 employees would have had to be called to get a picture of a certain opinion, but today it is enough to start a survey on Instagram or Facebook. If your own community is large enough, you get enough feedback to develop your product further or to optimize new products in advance.

When it comes to market research, you can not only ask questions to wait for feedback from your fans, you can also use the existing user generated content. User Generated Content means that users have created independent content. This User Generated Content can, for example, consist of comments that were posted below their last posting. In these comments, some users will react positively and some may react negatively. You can absorb these negative aspects, of course also the positive ones, directly and immediately. All social networks, as well as search engines, offer the possibility of evaluation. From the ratings they can read praise but also criticism, another indicator for the opinion of their interested parties. There are of course several other aspects, for example the amount of interactions on a single photo, that is the amount of information and comments I like. The more often you interact with a photo or video, the better it will be received by the community.

However, market research does not stop with your own community; of course, the social media channels of your competitors are also publicly accessible. What do your competitors do? What do the fans of your competitors like and what can you perhaps incorporate into your concept? These and other questions can be asked when looking at other social media channels. This in turn provides valuable insights that ultimately make market research one of the major goals of social media marketing.

Influence on Social Web and PR

Just a decade ago there was a clear transmitter receiver model. Few media had a large reach and very many tried to position themselves within these media. Any form of communication must of course be adapted accordingly. This means that forms of information must be changed. An immediate and direct communication of the own opinion or the own, desired contents was not possible. Whether it’s the species or the quantity. With the changes of Web 2.0 and the associated development of social networks, this model has changed fundamentally. Today, anyone can reach a worldwide audience free of charge and without delay. Placing the right content quickly attracts attention. No large medium is needed for publication, only a platform that is accessible to everyone free of charge.

There are glaring examples from politics, for example. The U.S. president uses the social network Twitter as the channel. While press representatives from renowned newspapers and TV stations have to queue up at his desk, he communicates his opinion several times a day via Twitter. He can publish his words directly and unadulterated. This is a complete paradigm shift. Just think of the influencer phenomenon. 19 year old, 20 year old people, who unite millions of fans behind them through their hard work. Without a large network, without the help of TV or magazines. A whole new world.

This is exactly what makes social media indispensable as a PR tool and makes the immediate flow of information one of the goals of your social media concept. And this is not always about the great world politics, they can send everyday messages without being subject to any limitation. From a small savings offer on Friday to a change in the team. Any kind of information can be sent directly and immediately to the audience.

Competition monitoring of the competition

What’s your competition? Instead of sending employees to the shops of the competition, as in Hollywood films, it is now enough to take a look at the competitors’ social media channels.

  • Where do you see the new trends?
  • Which videos or photos work very well for you? Have you found any new features such as Facebook Shopping and Instagram?
  • How do you make YouTube work?
  • How do you send users to the online shop?
  • Uses our competition advertising and if so how?

As open as they are in their strategy with their audience, so is their competition. Therefore, one of the big goals in social media marketing is to always keep an eye on the competition. So you can constantly improve your own online presence, whether social media or the way to the online shop. Therefore, also include the observation of your competitors in your social media concept.

As always, all goals are closely linked, the data from market research within our community, the information we get from the social media channels of our competitors, all of which ultimately flows into the optimization of our appearance. Think back to our first social media marketing goal, brand awareness. In order to continue to optimise our success, we should also always work on improving the image of our brand. Here our brand defines, the more accurate and compact the information, the more success your company will have with social media marketing.

Image optimization and positive images

Once you have successfully mastered all the goals, you can now come to permanent image optimization. Starting with the graphic preparation for the cover pictures, up to the profile picture and of course also the regular publication on our social media channels up to more complex procedures, like the aforementioned optimizations of different advertising campaigns, in which we play out different media contents to different target groups in order to find at the end the advertisements, which bring the largest turnover increase.

In addition to the visual image, of course, there is also the content. What are the messages in our text and how are they structured? Often only two or three lines remain, after which our texts are interrupted by a “read on” or “read more”. This forces social media managers to optimize the descriptions.

From the visual and textual to the emotional level, of course. Post only sales content, the social media channel will deliver little performance. That’s why we also need content that appeals to the emotional side of our community. From the cute office dog to the fun of lunch. Depending on the company, the concept looks different, but they see that they also have to bring in the emotional side and not only rely on advertising content.

By this constantly optimized and positive image of your company you achieve a lot in the area of image. From the mentioned recruitment of new and motivated employees to sales optimization.