Before getting started on any social media marketing campaign, you need to develop your strategy. Your social media strategy is like a guide that tells you what you're trying to accomplish, how you're going to accomplish it, and how you'll know when it's been accomplished. And the first step in developing your social media strategy is setting goals. In this video, we'll discuss why it's helpful to set goals and how to use the SMART method to define your goals. Setting goals for your campaign is important for several reasons. First of all, goals hold you accountable. By defining the goals of your social media campaign, you make yourself accountable for accomplishing them. Goals can guide your budget. Once you've set your goals, you can define the actions you'll need to take to achieve them and determine the cost of each. Goals can also help you measure your success. Analyzing data related to your goals can help you measure how effective your efforts are and identify areas for improvement. Common social media marketing goals include: building brand awareness, managing brand reputation, sales and lead generation, increasing community engagement, increasing web traffic, and gaining customer and competitive insights. Determining which of these goals to prioritize in your strategy depends on the goal of your business. Social media goals should align with your company's overall marketing objectives. This helps you prove the value of your work and gain support from stakeholders. Once you've established what the general goal of your social media marketing strategy will be, you need to make them SMART. The SMART goal setting method can help you define and measure the success of the goals of your campaign. As we discussed earlier, SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Let's discuss each of these words in terms of your social media campaign's goals. What does it mean for a goal to be specific? Specifying exactly what you want to achieve helps you determine when you've achieved it. Let's say you want to improve brand awareness for your business on social media. That is such a broad goal that it's hard to pinpoint what exactly you're trying to accomplish. Are you aiming to increase your number of followers or are you striving to increase likes, shares, and mentions? Which platform are you targeting? Answering questions like these will help you make your goals more specific. Next, your goal should be measurable. A goal is measurable when you can determine objectively that it has been met. You can tell if a goal is measurable, if you can answer how much, how many, and how will I know when it's accomplished. To make your goal measurable, determine what metrics you want to use. Going back to our brand awareness goal, let's say the metric you want to track is the number of followers you have on Instagram. An example of a related measurable goal might be to increase your followers on Instagram by 15% over the last quarter. Once you've made your goal specific and measurable, you need to determine whether it's attainable. An attainable goal is realistic given any constraints. Is there anything that could get in the way of increasing your Instagram followers by 15%, such as a lack of time, budget, or other resources? Remember, you want to set goals that are a little challenging in order to encourage growth. Next, decide if your goal is relevant. Does it make sense to try to reach this goal? Think about how the goal lines up with your company's other marketing goals, priorities, and values. A relevant goal will benefit your business. For example, if you're a company that wants to attract a younger demographic, then it makes sense to try to increase your followers on platforms like Instagram, whose largest audience is between the age of 25 to 34 years. Finally, you need to make your goal time-bound. This means your goal will have a deadline. Making your goal time-bound, helps you plan your schedule and set milestones. So your final brand awareness goal made SMART might be something like: by the end of the quarter, increase followers on Instagram by 15% over last quarter. Great! You have learned that the first step in developing your social media strategy is defining your goals. We've discussed some of the reasons it's important to set your goals for social media campaigns, and you've learned how to make your campaign goals SMART. Coming up, we'll talk about the other important components of a social media strategy.