Get What You Want from Your Content by Being SMART (Free Guide Download)

Have you ever felt like you’re posting content and getting nowhere? It’s likely because you haven’t defined your SMART Goals, chosen quality KPI’s, or figured out how to measure those KPI’s. These are the critical first steps you should take if you want to use content to grow your online presence.

Whether you’re a business or an influencer — you need to start thinking like a digital marketer if you want to grow an audience. That’s why I reached out to another digital marketing expert, G2’s content marketer Lauren Pope. I asked her about what to do first when trying to grow on social media. Here’s what she had to say about it:

With any project associated with growth, you need to have a North Star to aim for. There are a lot of ways to grow a social media following. The number of options and strategies can be overwhelming! It’s very easy to get lost if you don’t have that guiding light.

Lauren Pope, G2 Content Marketing Expert

So, how do you find your guiding light? 

The search begins with a question once powerfully posed by the great thinker Allan Watts, “What do you desire?” 

Understand what motivates YOU

Take this part seriously. If you don’t, you will face consequences with no easy solution including low quality work, inconsistency, fatigue, irritability, and burnout. 

Making content is not always easy. It can take a lot of time and energy, and consistency is key in any good content plan. There’s not a lot of room for you to take off all willy-nilly. When you are tired and overwhelmed, you will need to connect with what motivates you. I have had many days where I didn’t want to create anything for my blog or social media, but I did anyway because I connected back to my deepest motives and brought out the energy I needed to create more great content. 

Do you want to educate people? Do you aim to entertain? Do you want deeper relationships with people? Do you want to create things from your imagination?  If money and followers were no object, how would you most enjoy using your social platforms?

I have an easy exercise for you to help guide you through this introspection. It will only take a moment, so grab a pen and give this a try! 

The #WhyIMakeContent Exercise 

• Step 1: Get a pen and paper ready. Turn off your music and remove any distractions around you.
• Step 2: Write at the top of the paper “Why I Love Making Content.” 
• Step 3: Set a timer to go off in 3 minutes, don’t look at it again until it rings!
• Step 4: List every reason you can think of for why you love making content.
  •  If you’ve written all you can think of, but your timer hasn’t gone off yet, just sit and keep thinking about it. You’ll be surprised what comes up while you wait. 
• Step 5: (optional) Take a picture of your list and post it on your social media with the hashtag #WhyIMakeContent! 

After you’ve done this exercise, put your list somewhere in your work area where you’ll see it every day. Doing this has helped me practice gratitude and stay motivated even when it was hard to. I hope the same happens for you. 

I’m so curious to see your lists! If you post your list on social media, tag @RyanThomasContentCreation so our community can learn more about you and why you make content too. 

Define your broad goals

Once you understand what motivates you, think about what you are looking to receive as a result of publishing your content. Make a spreadsheet to organize your broad goals for your digital platforms. We asked Lauren to weigh in about how she sets goals when developing a growth strategy. She said:

I like to set three main goals for any project I’m working on that all scale to different outcomes. Then, I use those goals to track what is working and what isn’t. Setting more than one goal is especially important because it gives you more than one way to succeed.

Lauren Pope, G2 Content Marketing Expert

For most businesses and aspiring influencers, at least one of your goals should align with your bottom-line — income.

If you already have existing income streams, write down which income streams you want to focus on building the most. If you don’t have any income coming through the internet, where would you like the money to come from? What goals need to be accomplished before you can start earning money with your content? 

Write down some broad goals that don’t have to do with income too. Do you want more people commenting on your posts? Do you want posts to have more reach? Do you want more people contacting you through Direct Message? These goals are good to define and prioritize. It is easy to say “I want everything on social media to be better!” but goals are more achievable when they are focused on a specific thing you want improved. 

Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

If you have your broad goals together, you’ll need a way to assess whether or not you are making progress toward your goal. Just because you are working hard doesn’t always mean you’re making progress. It’s important you have a way to track your progress so you can understand when and how your strategy needs to change.  

In the world of digital marketing, we track success of our campaigns using KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators. A KPI is a quantifiable metric that you can track to see your progress toward a goal. Figuring out your KPI’s can be simple for some goals, but hard for others. In fact, there are entire books written simply about identifying the best KPI’s to track your success, like this one by David Parmenter. 

If you don’t have time to read a whole book about KPI’s, here’s some examples of KPI’s you might use for one of your goals. 

• Goal: I want a more engaged audience
  • KPI: Average likes & comments/post
• Goal: I want more followers 
  • KPI: New followers/month, New followers/post 
• Goal: I want more reach for my posts
  • KPI: Impressions/views per post

• Goal: Better public sentiment
  • KPI’s: Average shares per post, number of mentions in social media
• Goal: Increase sales using social media
  • KPI’s: # of times social media promo code used at transaction, website referral traffic from social media, average transaction value from visitors referred by social media
• Goal: Better customer service
  • KPI’s: Reply latency for inbound customer service inquiries on social media, number of customer service inquiries through social media, average view duration for videos resolving common customer service issues

If you’re still unsure which metrics you should use for your KPI, select a few from this list of metrics: 

• KPI’s for Reach
  • Impressions
  • Follower count
  • New followers
  • Mentions
  • Unique views
  • Share of voice : how many people are talking about your brand compared to the competition
• KPI’s for Engagement
  • Likes
  • favorites
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Ratings and reviews
  • % engagement ratio
  • Inbound website links traffic: indicates content is interesting enough to click through to your site
• KPI’s for Website Effectiveness
  • Click-thru rate
  • Website leads generated
  • Sales from website
  • Website bounce rate
  • Returning visitors
  • View duration
  • Web traffic sources
• KPI’s for Return on Investment
  • Direct sales revenue
  • Lead conversions
  • Support costs per customer
  • Lifetime value
• KPI’s for Retention and Loyalty
  • Reviews and ratings
  • Issues resolved
  • Service level agreement
  • Time to resolution
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Public sentiment

Some of these metrics can be found directly in Google Analytics or using analytical tools on social media, but others are more complex. Some social listening and social monitoring tools can report metrics like Public Sentiment, but often you will need to use a combination of other metrics to establish a quantifiable KPI. If you’re new to using analytical tools, keep it simple and stick to metrics you can find on your Google Analytics dashboard and in your social media analytics. 

Once you’ve defined a few broad goals and your KPI’s, it’s time to refine your goals using the SMART goals framework!

Build your SMART Goals 

Now that you know your KPIs, take that metric and build SMART goals with them. 

SMART goals are a tried-and-true method for setting and achieving ambitious goals. The framework was born in 1990 when two researchers, Locke and Latham, researched effective goal setting. Scholars like Robert Rubin have called this framework “unparallelled in its utility.” Once you try it, you’ll understand why. Here’s how it works:

SMART Goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timed. 

To show you how to make a SMART goal, we’ll take a broad goal and refine it using the SMART framework. Here’s our broad goal: 

I want more engagement on social media. 

Now we’ll go through the SMART framework step-by-step to refine it. 

Specific – We need to make the goal Specific, meaning we need to refine our target. Instead of saying “I want more engagement on social media,” let’s say this:

I want more comments on my original content on LinkedIn.

That looks better already, but there is still more to do before it’s perfect.

Measurable – Next, we need to make this goal Measurable, meaning make the success or failure measurable by a quantifiable metric, like a KPI. 

For this example, I’m going to track the ratio of comment/views on my posts. If our data has shown on average 2 comments for every 100 views for per post, our comment/views ratio is currently 2%. Our measurable goal might be:

I want a 15% average comment/view ratio on my original content on LinkedIn.

Even better! We still have some tweaks to make though. 

Attainable – When you set a goal, it’s important that you can actually achieve it. This is especially important because if you make all of your goals unachievable then you will never truly understand what is working and what isn’t. Be ambitious, but realistic. 

Looking at the goal we just set, we plan on increasing our engagement ratio by 7.5x what it was before! Maybe we should cool our jets and start with something more achievable. 

I want a >5% average comment/view ratio on my original content posted to LinkedIn.

That is still an ambitious goal seeing as that’s more than double what our current comment/view ratio is. I could possibly still achieve a 15% comment/view ratio, but if I achieve a 6% comment/view ratio I can still say that I achieved my goal and set a higher goal for next time.

Relevant – Before dumping time and energy into achieving a goal, you want to be sure you’re working toward the right ones. Is the goal you’ve set actually going to move you forward toward your ultimate goal? If my ultimate goal was to increase direct sales through social media, I may want to reevaluate why I decided to set a goal about how many comments I get. 

In this example, my ultimate goal is to build a relationship with my audience to increase trust in my brand and develop as a thought leader. Increasing my comment/view ratio definitely contributes to that goal, so this goal is relevant. 

Timed – Lastely, we need a deadline for every goal we make. Setting a deadline establishes a time when you’ll evaluate your progress toward your goal. If this step gets skipped, you can never “fail,” you just “haven’t succeeded yet.” That’s a slippery slope to wasting a lot of time on strategies that aren’t working. 

People skip this step often because of fear of failure. You can’t be afraid of failing in your pursuit of meeting a goal, it is a part of the process. Partial success counts as success too! Just because you didn’t reach a milestone by your deadline doesn’t mean you’ve done poorly. 

Now, let’s make this goal timed: 

I want a >5% comment/view ratio on my original content posted on LinkedIn by the end of this month. 

We’ve done it! It’s a perfect goal. 

Go through this process for every broad goal you have. Write your SMART goals down somewhere so you can revisit them. Make a note in your calendar when goal deadlines are coming up so you know when it’s time to evaluate and strategize. 

Be Consistent and Get Creative! 

Once you’ve set your goals and defined how you’ll track your success, get creative with how you’ll achieve those goals and work hard to do it! Lauren shared one last thought to help businesses and influencers maximize their potential on social media; 

Growing on social media is as much about strategy as it is creativity. Everyone wants to focus on going viral — but there can be a lot of success is just showing up, sticking to a good plan, and delivering consistent value and content. Very few people go viral on accident. Behind almost every big social media presence, there was a strategy that took a lot of fine-tuning to get to that one “a-ha” moment.

Lauren Pope, G2 Marketing Expert 

I guarantee, when you start publishing content, your journey will be speckled with successes and failures. Growing online takes persistence and flexibility! Stay-with-it and continuously refine your process and you will see results. 

To help you out with your goal setting process, I want to offer you the goal planning sheet that I use when I’m planning content. You can download it here! It should make your planning process a lot easier and more organized. 

Thank you to Lauren for sharing her great thoughts. Check her out on LinkedIn or Authory!