Setting achievable goals for your social media marketing efforts is essential to ensure you’re not wasting time, money and resources.
Don’t you agree?
Yet so many tourism and hospitality businesses still do not have a plan in place to help them with their online marketing.
Let’s be honest, social media can be a time waster!
It is all too easy to lose track of the amount of time you’re spending on social media networks. Especially if you lose sight of the point of social media in terms of using it to promote and market your business.
To assist you stay on track, here are a few easy to follow steps to build an effective social media marketing plan.
First step is to understand your goals
In order to set goals you need to be able to write down what they will be.
A goal is something like – “Increase traffic to website by 50% or grow blog followers by 100%”.
Once you have developed goals you will need 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. [Tweet this]
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 measuring your efforts, it’s impossible to ever know if you’re achieving anything. Right!
Some of thereasons businesses fail is they don’t have a plan; or they don’t follow the plan, or they just don’t track the metrics to ensure that the plan is working and the goals are achievable.
Always have a plan
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 50% 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 50 percent growth in one year.
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. See below for a rough draft of a social media calendar:
- (10 am, 4 pm and 9 pm) Monday & Wednesday — Mention new blog post on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn ensuring to alternate between the 3.
- (8 am, 1 pm, and 6 pm) Monday to Friday — ReTweet and post useful information, videos, articles and blogs from other sources.
- (11am, ) Tuesday & Thursday — Introduce or advise of new products in development
- 8am each day spend 1 hour answering direct messages personally and reading/researching new ideas
- Monday — Post 1 article each week to article marketing sites, share said articles with social media
- Wednesday — Write & post 1 blog on relevant social media topic
Once you write it down; really do it, or outsource 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!
Metrics
Before you start any new campaign check your current metrics using whatever system you like such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights etc.
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 newsletter subscriber rates, new comments, visitors to your website, and even by how many people re-tweet and or share your information.
Repeat
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.
We love to hear if you’ve put this plan into action and how it’s helping you with your social media marketing efforts. So please leave us a comment below.
Until next time…..
