In this day and age, setting goals is incredibly important for determining ROI, especially for Social Media (we like to call this your Social ROI). If you want to justify your work accurately, then your goals should relate directly back to your business objectives as a whole. We want you to skip the vanity metrics and create realistic and achievable business goals for your social media campaigns.

But you may be wondering, where do I start? So we are creating a three step guide for creating your goals, applying business objectives and finally tracking conversions to measure ROI.

Step 1: Select Social Goals By Industry

eCommerce Brands

We started off our list with an easy one, as it’s pretty obvious, an e-commerce brand wants to drive purchases. Your goal as a company is to drive purchases and so your social goal should reflect that as well.

Goal=Purchases

Publishers or Media Companies

In most instances, as a publisher you have tons of content and you want users to see the content. So your social media goal should be both page views and video views, if you have videos.

Goal=Views

B2B Brand

A brand whose primary focus is helping other business can often be a bit of a longer cycle so you should be looking at potential customers taking a step toward using your product. Your goals should focus on customer trials (or demos) or subscribers & information request submissions.

Goal=Trials, Subscribers & Submissions

B2C Brand

If your brand is straight to consumer then you would always be looking with product in hand. As with your overall objectives, in social you would want to be driving user sign ups and/or app downloads if you have as app for users.

Goal=Sign Ups & Downloads

Financial Services

Being centered around monetary products, customers may include existing clients looking to add additional products or brand new customers. As each part of the sector is slightly different you are overall looking at users signing up for a trial or more information or for a product redemption.

Goal=Sign Ups & Redemptions

CPG

As a consumer product your main concern will be to drive purchase, but if you do not have an ecommerce aspect you will need to find ways to create goals from a digital perspective. Having a place for users to subscribe to learn more or receive a coupon for redemption can help clearly track users from Social.

Goal=Purchases, Coupon Redemptions & Submissions

Industrials

With any large purchase or need based item, the sales cycle is extremely longer for consumers so with Industrials, looking at brand recognition and contact us metrics will allow you to measure.

Goal=Sign Ups & Brand Awareness

Health Care

Such a hot topic these days and more and more American consumers are starting to take longer to decide on their coverage. Even during closed periods consumers may be looking ahead and tracking learn more submissions along with any free trials offered will help you measure your goals.

Goal=Trial & Learn More

Now that you’ve got your goals set and ready, run them by senior management team and ensure everyone is on the same page. Next week we will walk through assigning values and objectives to each of these social media goals. Soon enough you will be analyzing your Social ROI.