1. SMART-goals
Make sure that your goals are so-called “SMART-goals”. To set SMART-goals, they should be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. This will make the goals clearer and easier to use when working with strategy and analyzing results.
Here are 2 examples of SMART social media goals you can set in 2024:
1. LinkedIn: Grow following by 20% in Q1 (4 months)
- Specific: Increase the number of followers on the LinkedIn company page.
- Measurable: Aim for a 20% growth.
- Achievable: Increase organic posting from 3 times a week to 5 times a week, and comment on 4 posts a week.
- Relevant: More followers can lead to increased brand visibility and potential leads.
- Time-Bound: Accomplish this within the first quarter of the year.
2. LinkedIn: Generate 50 new German leads and 50 new USA leads in Q1 (4 months)
- Specific: Target and acquire new business leads from the US and German markets through LinkedIn.
- Measurable: Aim for 100 new leads total.
- Achievable: Created a wide variety of content in both English and German and use LinkedIn's organic and paid advertising to reach the right audience. (Content tip: You can translate videos made in Storykit to multiple languages in just one click).
- Relevant: Acquiring leads is essential for business expansion and market penetration, especially in a key market like the USA and Germany.
- Time-Bound: Accomplish this within a four-month timeframe.
An important reminder when crafting SMART social media goals:
The SMART goals provided are examples to inspire your social media strategy. In our business, we operate on a tertial basis, meaning we set and aim to achieve our goals within a 4-month period before reassessing and setting new objectives. I encourage you to adopt a similar approach for your business, aligning your goals with your specific operational timeline and using the social platforms that are best for your business. This method ensures continuous progress and adaptability, key factors in the dynamic landscape of social media marketing. If you find that certain goals aren't met within this period, it's not a cause for concern. Instead, it provides a realistic benchmark and valuable insights for future planning.
2. Create a solid content strategy using your 2023 content
You've read about the importance of having a solid content strategy in place a million times, but it's because it's true! Especially when working on social media.
Few brands have ever grown on social media by posting every now and then—and when you don’t have a solid plan in place, that is what happens.
If you want a successful social media content plan, you need to specify goals, define target groups and create a plan on WHO, WHY, WHAT, HOW, and WHEN content will be published.
Publishing and distributing your content consistently is key here.
And how can you do that in an efficient way that won’t burn you out? Well, it’s simple, use the gold mind of content you have from 2023.
Follow these steps which should complement the SMART goals you've established:
- Define your WHO: Who is your target audience? For personas, we utilize 2-week sprints to concentrate on various groups and use cases, allowing us to efficiently address our broad audience. For instance, we may dedicate two weeks to sales professionals, then shift focus to marketers, HR, etc. This approach helps us maintain efficiency and relevance.
- Define your WHY: Remind yourself why you are targeting these people. What value does your service or product bring to this audience? For example, sales professionals use video to influence buyers on social media and in email campaigns, making our product an ideal solution. Similarly, HR professionals might use video to communicate company policies effectively.
- Define your WHAT: What are you going to use to get their attention? Select your most impactful blog articles, case studies, and email newsletters that already exist and resonate with the challenges and needs of your target personas. Compile these already approved and under-utilized pieces together and make them the foundation of your strategy.
- Define your HOW: How are you going to distribute your content? For example, we will transform these content pieces into concise videos, each tailored to engage at different stages of the marketing funnel. This approach aims to educate and guide prospects through their buying journey. The next section will detail how to execute this efficiently.
- Define your WHEN: You may have already outlined this in your SMART goals. For example, we will post 5 times a week organically and run three full-funnel paid ad campaigns to both the US and German markets during this 4-month period.
Achieving your social media goals becomes significantly more attainable once you've set clear objectives and matched them with the necessary content. Dive into our comprehensive guide to smash out a social media plan in 2024 with repurposed content here.
3. Transform your content into video and distribute it
In 2023, 92% of marketers said that video gave them a positive ROI, and 96% said video was an important part of their marketing strategy (Wyzowl, 2023). And these numbers will definitely not decrease in 2024. We are certainly not impartial, but there is plenty of proof showing that video is the number one content in social media marketing. You can get all the juicy statistics here (if you need to convince yourself/your boss/your colleagues/your grandma).
But how will you find the time to create all of video that you need in 2024?
Easy… You just turn the content you listed above into video by copying the link or the text into Storykit AI and it will transform your already approved and on-brand text into engaging videos for social media.
For instance, one blog article can easily be turned into 5 unique videos for social media. The same goes for repurposing other content like web pages, case studies, etc.
And the best part is, you can create one video at a time or you can use "Campaigns" and create five videos at a time from one text.
Here is a video showing how the "Campaigns" feature works:
And then if you have goals like we set above, to focus on multiple markets, you can just translate the videos that you have into the different languages that you need (Psst… Localizing to the local language of the market you are targeting makes a huge impact on social media).
And we know what you’re thinking. What about paid campaigns? How do we determine what to invest money into? When it comes to paid advertising here are some resources to help you know what to run and how to set up your campaigns:
- 4 top LinkedIn video ad examples and why they work
- Maximize social media video ads: The full-funnel approach
4. Keep an eye on new social media trends and features
When you’re working with social media you need to keep up with all the new features, platforms and trends. It’s an area that is continuously developing and new exciting digital tools are always launching.
What worked yesterday, might not always work today.
Therefore, keep an eye on what’s happening and if you’re one of the first trying something out, you might find a golden spot! A tip is to follow the social media platforms' own updates but also other stakeholders that you appreciate.
To get some insights about social media trends for 2024, read this report from Hootsuite.
5. Find a productive workflow and GO!
As marketers, we are often great at making plans, budgeting and discussing new creative ways of reaching target groups. But, we also need to take ACTION. We need to produce, publish, and follow up.
This is especially important in social media where we should create consistent content. So, to get some action we need to stop overthinking ideas, waiting too long for the right mandate or trying to create the most perfect content. Just do it!
