The importance of tracking and setting goals

Author

Andrew Southworth
January 08, 2024

Hey everyone!

Today we’re going to talk about the importance of tracking growth online and setting goals.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Meaning, if you don’t know how much you’ve grown over a set time period you can’t really improve that growth going forward. This goes for social media platforms, music DSPs and pretty much everything.

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An Example

Let’s say you really want to grow your Instagram profile. Maybe you create a content strategy where you’re posting a set type of content 4 times per week, and you stick with it for an entire month.

If you know how much your Instagram account was growing in the months prior, you can compare that to how things went this month. Then you can adjust your strategy and compare next month to this month.

Instagram even has an analytics platform in the app you can use to track your growth (and my other stats) over time.

One Step Further

Often you don’t just want to grow on one platform. It’s pretty normal for music artists to have profiles on at least 3 social media platforms, and their music will be on pretty much every DSP.

It’s common to create universal content that gets posted on several sites, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. Either exactly the same on each platform or potentially customized for each platform.

Tracking your overall growth across all these platforms is a little trickier. Yes each platform has it's own analytics dashboard, but how do you keep track of your overall growth over time?

The answer is: you use a spreadsheet.

While there are tools that can track some of this stuff for you, such as Later’s analytics, you’ll be hard pressed to have a site that tracks the exact metrics you care about.

It’s in Google Sheets so you can either download it or make a copy to edit.

Making Goals

The other important thing tracking gives you is the ability to set goals.

You can’t set realistic goal if you don’t know what is realistic or what you’ve achieved in the past. Tracking your month or weekly growth allows you to extrapolate into the future and make educated guesses on where you could be in 3, 6 or 12 months.

Here’s a structure for how to think about goals:

  • Decide which metrics are the most important to you

  • Set annual goals for how you want those metrics to change based on historical data (if you have it)

  • Break those annual goals into quarterly or monthly sub-goals

  • Decide which activities you’re going to do every month to reach those sub-goals

For example let’s say that you’ve decided once again that Instagram followers are an important metric to you:

  • Based on the fact you gained 3,000 followers last year you’re going to set a goal of gaining 5,000 followers this year

  • This means you need to gain 417 followers per month

  • You decide that posting 4 times per week instead of 3 times per week will support this goal

  • You also decide that you’re going to spend 10 minutes per day replying to comments and DM’s, or posting on other people’s content in your niche

Your initial goal was to grow by 5,000 followers, which is 67% more growth than the year before. This is a pretty big improvement, but to support that growth you’re posting 33% more often and committing to a daily activity that is sure to increase your followers.

It’s possible this won’t be enough, and as you’re tracking your stats monthly you’ll quickly see if you need to make adjustments.

If you never tracked these metrics you’d have no idea what you’re doing.

Conclusion

It’s important not to become obsessed with metrics. It can be pretty unhealthy if you’re taking your phone out 30 times a day to measure your progress (I know this from experience watching YouTube stats).

When you do this right it actually becomes freeing, because you can focus on taking action when you need to.

If you’re second guessing everything you do it can cause you to do nothing, and it’s exhausting. Spend some time focusing on strategy, goals and planning and then put your head down and do the work and check back in at specific intervals.

At first spending the time to write down your numbers can be boring, but eventually it becomes a great source of motivation. It allows you to see how your work is valuable and is helping you reach your goals.

If you want 10+ hours of music marketing content from over 15 experts covering different topics and approaches, consider registering for our free music marketing summit.

New Content

This is exactly how you can go from 0 to 1 million streams in 2024, with specific actions you can take and examples from my experience as a music artist.

News

Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.

  • Soundcloud is preparing to sell the company with a price tag of $1 billion.

  • TikTok’s focus in 2024 is on ‘social shopping’, aiming to compete with Amazon

  • Spotify pulls its support from 2 French music festivals after the proposed ‘streaming tax’ in France

Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

  1. My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.

  2. My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.

  3. Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.

  4. 1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.

My Links:

Discount / Affiliate Links:

If you’d rather just purchase the e-book, or physical book or audiobook you can do so here.

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