I hate the term ‘digital marketing strategy’ – in fact I hate a lot of terms used in the marketing world – it’s all unnecessary jargon, because what’s wrong with calling it a plan?

Essentially, that’s exactly what a marketing strategy is – a plan – and it doesn’t have to be as daunting and as complex as it sounds.

Ask yourself: what exactly do you want to get out of your social media? Do you want to encourage sales from your following? Or do you want to grow your brand to reach a new audience?

For social media goals to be useful, they need to be realistic and trackable, as well as tied to clear objectives that are going to make your business progress.

Not sure what your goals are, how to set them or track them? Here’s a few ideas that should help…

Increase brand awareness

Telling your story, reaching new audiences and building your image, so that they get to know you, what you’re doing and what your unique selling point is.

Drive traffic to your website

Turn those likes into clicks and set a goal for how much more web traffic you’d like to gain this year.

Increase sign ups

Got a mailing list? Try and increase the number of people that receive your newsletter / subscribe to your blog, podcast or YouTube channel, or just follow your feeds.

Effective customer service

Got an idea of typically how soon you’d like to respond? Set a target and see if you can meet it!

Grow an engaged audience

Through regular and consistent posting of engaging content, using hashtags, interacting with your followers via their own posts and encouraging engagement by hosting competitions, giveaways and tagging other accounts and pages you can work to grow a more engaged audience – one that interacts with all your posts, from likes to comments and shares.

Increase conversions and sales

Whilst increasing brand awareness is an important long term marketing goal, having more direct objectives in your social media marketing plan helps prove its worth. What are your targets for this?

Create engaging social content

The content you create is likely going to be the backbone of your social strategy so you need to ensure that your content plan is focussed directly around the goals of your company.

Increase mentions in the press

Check your PR game and target some local publications – remember start small, and work your way up to the BBC!

Win awards

With much of this done online through online submissions, and many announcements shared on social media – this is great goal to set for your business – it’s great kudos and creates a fantastic buzz on social streams.

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