Last week I discussed the various social media channels my brand now has as well as their strengths and weaknesses. I will now expand upon this social media audit and discuss overall social media goals, resulting strategy, as well as how to measure these goals and maintain my online brand and persona.

Goals:

My number one goal is to improve sales. I am the only “employee.” I design, order, and physically make all of my products myself. I work part-time, go to school full-time, have many personal projects, AND do this business in my free-time. I see no reason that I can’t fill my free-time with production and shipping. If it eventually becomes too much for me, I can reduce my part-time hours to work on my own brand more, or I can shift my sales to higher price-point items.

My secondary goal is to expand reach in order to entertain and engage. Sales are most important as a business, but building goodwill, brand-image, and entertaining my potential customers is also important. I want to display my brand as one I would personally find engaging. If consumers identify my brand, I believe sales will follow. If not, at least I have created content I am proud of.

Strategy:

First, I want to start creating more entertaining content once again. When I first came up with the concept for this business, the idea was that I could use the shenanigans I and my friends get into to create interest in my brand. This worked great over the summer but now that school is back in full force, free time, energy, and ability to get into trouble with friends is dwindling quickly. I want to start having more adventures and recording them more thoroughly. Ideally, this will result in more interest in my brand, more loyal customers, and additional sales.

Secondly, I want to start outputting more “produced” content. I think people respect high production value and I want to use this to stand out from my competitors with similarly low brand awareness. People definitely appreciate “authentic” content recorded without setup and high-quality equipment. But that doesn’t mean I can’t add more professional touches like background music and transitions to videos or promotional text and overlays to images. I want to make each piece of content meaningful and intentional. Tailored specifically to either (1) entertain or (2) lead someone to an eventual sale.

Measuring goals:

Increasing sales is an obvious one. If my sales go up, I’ve done my job. I can can also use analytics to make sure that my products are what consumers were expecting and make sure my prices were in line with what they wanted. Instagram for instance will show the number of clicks on your website link. If I get 30 clicks on my website but almost none on my individual eBay listings, then my products are not matching their expectations. If I get lots of views on my product but not many sales, then I can conclude my price-point is off. Facebook also has a similar tracking feature for website buttons. This is the easiest and most effective way to measure this goal.

My second goal of more entertaining content is less tangible. The best indicator of this will be engagement. If it gets lots of shares, comments, friend tagging, and likes, then I can assume my content is entertaining. I have to watch overall trends to see if engagement and goodwill is going up over time. Additionally, I can use analytic tools to see which posts are performing better. I can then try to duplicate this content to gain more engagement.

Brand and Persona:

I have talked about this in previous blog posts, but I would like to reiterate in terms of my target audience. In some ways, it’s easier to describe my audience in terms of social media than it is in terms of products offered. While the group is the same, it’s easier to describe the tangible symbols and artifacts that the group identifies with socially. Understanding this lets me target them through my product designs and social media content.

Instead of trying to explain, I will simply “stream of consciousness” some brands, activities, and products that are of particular interest to this group:

Drifting, racing, fast food, tacos, cigarillos, Marlboro, Black & Mild, Japan, anime, Initial D, Dragon Ball Z, malt liquor, graffiti, vaping, BMX, skateboarding, etc.

This is obviously a subjective, non-comprehensive list. But these are some of the cultural references that my target market may identify with. Including these in my social media content will likely boost engagement — especially with these individuals who are my primary buyers.

 

The hootsuite social grader offered no real insight into my Twitter account. It said I need to work on reach and engagement. Not surprisingly, it’s tricky to have much of either when you have 3 followers. -_-