Did you know that over 5 billion people are now using social media? That’s more than half the world’s population! If your brand isn’t making the most of social media marketing, you’re leaving a massive opportunity on the table.
In fact, 83% of marketers in 2024 said that social media helped them boost brand exposure. And let’s be honest—who doesn’t want more eyes on their business?
But here’s the thing: just posting randomly won’t cut it. To stand out, you need clear social media marketing goals. In this post, we’ll break down how setting the right goals can skyrocket your brand awareness and engagement—plus the strategies that will help you shine across platforms.
Let’s dive in!
What is Social Media Marketing, and Why is it Important?
Social media marketing is all about using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Formerly known as Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, etc., to engage with your audience and promote your products and services.
According to SproutSocial, over 5.17 billion users are estimated to be a part of one or the other social media platform. Thus, this marketing approach is practiced by a majority of businesses today as it not only helps them build brand loyalty but also connects with their target market and increases sales.
Here are some of the real-life scenarios of how businesses apply social media marketing:
1. Launching a new product? Promote it through sponsored posts, ads, or influencer collaborations to get it in front of the right audience.
2. Want stronger customer relationships? Respond to comments, answer questions, and participate in discussions to build trust and engagement.
3. Showcasing your brand? Use eye-catching images, videos, and reels to highlight product features and tell your brand story.
And that’s just the beginning! Social media marketing is a powerful tool, but to make it work, you need the right strategy, which is covered in the next sections.
How to Set and Exceed Social Media Marketing Goals?
Whether you are selling clear handcrafted soaps to end users or cloud solutions to enterprises, your social media marketing goals must align with your business’s objectives.
Social media marketing goals are the end destination where you want to reach. However, the route you choose to reach your destination (your strategies) also plays a crucial role in motivating the entire journey.
Here’s the step-by-step on how to set clear social media marketing goals to maximize its potential:
1. Define your business objectives
It’s worth spending time on this stage by setting your social media marketing goals and establishing KPIs. This involves identifying your core goals by determining what you want to achieve through your social media efforts. Some of the common goals include:
- Reaching new audiences – Making people aware of your products or services.
- Boosting brand visibility – Ensuring your brand stays top of mind.
- Communicating brand values – Showcasing what your business stands for.
In fact, you must follow the KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure the success of your goals.
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For example- If your primary objective is to increase your audience reach, use metrics to measure success like the number of new followers, reach, or impressions. Or, if your goal is to sell more products and services, some important KPIs you should look out for include traffic and conversions.
2. Use SMART Framework
Ensure you utilize the SMART framework while setting goals by putting it to work. This states that your social media marketing goals should be:
- Specific: Clearly define what you aim to accomplish. Gone are the days of vague objectives like “improve our social media presence.” It’s time to get specific! For instance, we want to Increase our average post engagement rate on Instagram from 2% to 3.5%”
- Measurable: Keep an eye on the following metrics to track progress on social media. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. For example, for Facebook, you need to track your conversion rate from post-clicks to website purchases
- Achievable: Set realistic expectations based on the resources available. Keep it real, instead of straight away aiming for 1 million new followers, target for a 25% increase in your current follower base
- Relevant: Align goals with broader business objectives. If you are launching a new product, aim on awareness metrics, such as reach and impressions
- Time-bound: Establish deadlines for achieving these goals. For example, increase Instagram engagement rate by 4.5% in the next 2 months.
3. Determine who your target audience is
It is important to research your target audience to create content that caters to your users. This will optimize your marketing efforts to the specific group who are most likely to engage with your brand.
Let’s get into the world of social media and understand which platforms are best suited for different audience segment:
- Facebook- Adults 18-65+, with a strong presence in the 25-54 age range
- Instagram: Primarily 18-34 year-olds, with a growing 35-44 segment
- LinkedIn: Working professionals, business leaders, and job seekers, typically 25-65 years old.
- Twitter: News-savvy individuals, typically 25-49
Pro tip: Don’t post your content on any social media platform, and hope for the best. Knowing who your exact audience is will allow you to run low-cost and effective campaigns that resonate with them.
4. Plan your tactics
Once you have defined your business objectives, key metrics and identified the target audience for developing a social media marketing strategy, it’s time to brainstorm elements to achieve your goals. This may include:
Create engaging and relevant social media content:
Your content is the lifeline of your social media strategy. If it’s not engaging, people will scroll past without a second thought.
For example, take a page from Nike’s playbook—use authentic storytelling, UGC, and engaging videos to create content that resonates emotionally with your audience!
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Establish a posting schedule:
Consistency is key—posting randomly won’t help you build a loyal following. Set a content calendar and stick to it!
Here’s a breakdown of the best times to post on each platform based on the latest research:
- Facebook – Weekdays between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m
- Instagram – Weekdays between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m.
- LinkedIn – Weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
- Twitter/X – Weekdays at 11 a.m.
- TikTok – Mondays at 2 p.m., Wednesdays at 4 p.m., and Sundays at 8 a.m
- YouTube – Fridays between 3pm and 4pm
Pro Tip: Use social media scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or HubSpot to automate your posts and maintain consistency.
Actively engage with your audience and build a relationship:
Engagement isn’t just about getting likes—it’s about conversations and community building. Responding to comments and messages can boost brand loyalty and trust.
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Delta Airlines, for instance, replies quickly to a customer’s complaint on Twitter. They apologize and ask the customer to send a private message for help. This shows they care, respond fast, and protect customer privacy.
Increasing eyeballs on your content by running social media ads boosting posts:
Organic reach on social media is declining (Instagram’s average organic reach is just 9% per post!). To expand your audience, investing in paid social ads is a must.
What you can do is show your product to people who visited your site but didn’t buy. Also, A/B test different ad creatives (image vs. video, CTA variations) to see what performs best.
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This ad by Olipop is a great example of retargeting on social media. It targets users who may have visited their website or shown interest in their products but didn’t make a purchase, reminding them of the product’s benefits with an eye-catching design and a clear “Shop Now” CTA.
5. Evaluate and improve your social marketing campaign
Now that social media marketing is up and running, keep tracking your progress. It will help you identify the key areas to improve the efficiency of your campaign and determine what aspects are bringing the best results.
This way, you can evaluate whether the social marketing campaigns are meeting your goals. If not, then assess and optimize to ensure your efforts are working towards your goals.
Some Other Strategies to Build Brand Awareness on Social Media
Here are some other top strategies that can help you achieve your social media marketing goals:
1. Create content that resonates with your audience
You can boost engagement by creating content that invites participation. There are various ways of doing it, such as:
- Use platform-specific features like Instagram stories polls to gather opinions and boost interaction. For example, to connect with their customer base, Samsung started a poll. In this Instagram poll they talked about making kids ready for their first mobile
- Leverage live streaming to connect directly with your audience and answer their questions in real-time. You might not know that Sephora, a leader in the beauty industry, launched “Sephora Live,” a platform that brings the in-store experience directly to customers’ screens. This helped them get thousands of viewers, with high interaction rates and obviously more sales.
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- Focus on storytelling in your content. People connect better with stories than with sales pitches. Share behind-the-scenes moments, customer success stories, or even your brand’s journey to create an emotional connection. For example, Airbnb’s “Made Possible by Hosts” campaign uses storytelling to highlight the unique experiences travelers have while staying at Airbnb properties, fostering a sense of community and adventure.
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- Consider creating diverse content for different platforms. Don’t share or repost the same message and content between platforms. You should always create content that is specific to the social media platform that you are using. For example, use short, snappy videos for TikTok and detailed, thought-leadership posts for LinkedIn.
2. Encourage your audience to share your content
Social sharing is one of the greatest marketing powers. When your user shares your content or posts, not only do they get visible to their network, but the reach of your content significantly increases.
Here are some of the ways you must consider to encourage your customers to share your brand’s content:
- Create shareable and relatable content. Content that resonates emotionally or provides value is more likely to be shared. Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign focused on self-esteem and body positivity, encouraging people to share the message widely because it struck a chord emotionally.
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- Create unique, memorable hashtags that your audience can use to share their own content featuring your brand. Coca-Cola’s “#ShareACoke” campaign invited customers to share photos with personalized Coke bottles, turning it into a viral trend.
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- Run contests or giveaways that reward users for sharing your content. GoPro’s “Photo of the Day” challenge rewards customers with prizes for sharing amazing footage using their cameras, creating a cycle of user-generated content and brand promotion.
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3. Leverage social media trends
Jumping on the latest social media trends is an effective way to keep your brand relevant, boost engagement, and connect with your audience on a personal level. Here’s how you can leverage trends smartly:
- Joining popular challenges can skyrocket your visibility. Guess was one of the first brands to use TikTok’s viral hashtag challenge with #InMyDenim, encouraging users to show their denim transformations. It resulted in millions of views and user-generated content.
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- Use trending sounds and filters. Trending sounds and effects on platforms like TikTok and Instagram can help your content reach a broader audience, as these are often prioritized in algorithms. Duolingo’s TikTok account cleverly uses trending sounds and humorous skits featuring their mascot to create highly engaging, shareable content.
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Stay topical. Create content that ties into current events, holidays, or viral moments. Oreo’s iconic “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the Super Bowl blackout became a case study in trend-driven marketing, garnering massive engagement.
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Leverage memes. Memes are a lighthearted way to connect with your audience while staying culturally relevant. Netflix frequently uses memes related to its popular shows, fostering a strong connection with fans while encouraging shares.
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Pro Tip: Don’t just jump on a trend for the sake of it. Always ask yourself, “How can we contribute to this trend in a meaningful way and benefit from it?”
4. Partner with influencers
The global influencer marketing market value was $21.1 billion in 2023, having more than tripled since 2019.
Are you also wondering how to tap into your established audience? Partnering with relevant influencers who have a strong online presence in specific niches will benefit you in many ways. This may include boosting your brand awareness, reaching a broader audience, and enhancing credibility by leveraging the trust they hold with their followers.
Influencers already have an engaged audience that trusts their recommendations, making their endorsement of your brand more impactful than traditional ads. To make the most of influencer partnerships:
- Choose influencers whose values align with your brand and target audience.
- Let them create authentic content in their unique style, as this maintains trust with their followers
- Collaborate on creative campaigns, such as product launches or giveaways.
- Track the success of your campaigns using metrics like engagement and conversions.
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Gymshark, a fitness apparel brand, partnered with fitness influencers to showcase their products during workouts. By allowing influencers to share their personal fitness journeys while wearing Gymshark gear, the brand created a strong emotional connection with their audience.
Wrapping up Social Media Marketing Goals
Now, you have a big-picture understanding of how you can transform your social media game with these potent strategies.
It might become a hassle to track the performance of your social media efforts because of the inconsistent metrics and KPIs, difficulty in measuring ROI, fragmented data, and time-consuming manual reporting. This is where social media management tools can be the savior.
Using a potent social media management tool like , you can create, schedule, publish, manage, and monitor your content at scale. With this platform, you can pave the path for your brand to make its mark and boost your social media presence.
Ready to start your social media revolution today? Sign up for its free trial and watch your brand awareness reach new heights.
