Two Must-Haves for Baseball and Softball Coaches to Grow Their Social Media Accounts | SMART Goals and Pro Visuals

Despite offering baseball and softball coach entrepreneurs in-depth guides and other resources on the strategies, tactics, and tools they need to grow their personal brands and businesses elsewhere, we’d be remiss if we never covered two prerequisites for all successful digital marketing efforts these days.

These two things are:

1. Paper goal setting

2. Creating and deploying visual assets. 

So, without further ado, let’s dive headfirst back to the bag, before we’re called out on a quick-move pickoff play. 

#How to Set Goals for Baseball and Softball Entrepreneurs

It’s impossible to have an effective strategy without a crystal clear target informing every step of your action plan. 
Are you looking to sell affiliate products and collect passive income, start an online baseball or softball coaching empire, or monetize your instructional brand's Instagram following some other way?

You should set goals that are slightly out of reach to keep momentum going and always strive for more. 

But it’s also important to know what each goal is really for. 

To avoid working hard but not knowing what you’re investing all that energy into – and why – use SMART goal formatting to guide you and your ambition. 

This framework applies to every area of life, of course. 

But, the general noise of social media platforms can easily lead even the most seasoned marketer’s attention astray.

Instagram, for example, has near-limitless posting and interaction options. 
There’s the main Feed, Stories, Guides, Reels, and DMs – and each channel has its own content types, formats, trends, strategies, users to respond to, and unspoken rules.

Even outside of all these different posting formats, there's ways to grow your Instagram account  without even making new posts.

This is why employing the SMART framework on social media is so important.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-sensitive.  

#Specific

Your goal or goals must be clear and precise. 

To achieve any goal, you must first clarify:

• What the goal is?
• Why you want to attain that specific goal?
• Who will be collaborating with you?
• Where it will happen – as in online somewhere or at a physical location?
• How much you have to invest in this specific goal? 

Again, we have so many coaching guides and resources to help you answer these questions, but they still must be asked. 

Just like when teaching someone to hit, a physical foundation and common terminology must be understood first in order to ensure success.

#Measurable

By measurable, we mean things like:

• A specific date for starting a promotion or campaign
• A target amount of new followers by a certain day
• An increased engagement level percentage for the quarter

Each goal you set has to be something you can quantify. 

To track your growth progress and to know that you've succeeded, what are the specific results that will indicate having accomplished the goal?

You'll need measurable information that can be compared to previous results.

This data will help you see where your actions might be lacking and where you can do things better to improve. 

Also, if the rise of analytics and metrics in baseball and softball have taught us anything (and they’ve taught us quite a bit), it’s that measurable metrics tied to personal goals are very motivating.  

#Achievable

Can the goal be attained? 

Make sure your set goals are more or less reasonable for what assets and abilities you have right now. 

Your skills and your business objectives as an entrepreneur will continue to grow over time. 

But your goals must be tied to where those capabilities and other resources (like budget or employees to help you) are at a specific moment in time, in order to be attainable.  

They shouldn't be too easy, nor too hard. Goals that are too far out of reach carry with them a risk of discouragement that can hurt your momentum. 

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#Relevant

Is it the right time? 

Is that individual post, or promotion, or new product beneficial for your business right now? 

If it will be beneficial in the future, how long into the future specifically?

All of your goals must go hand in hand with all of your other goals. 

Construct logic-informed road maps to guide your growth. Inconsistency and spending energy on irrelevant pursuits will only result in a waste of your valuable time. 

#Time-sensitive

Have a set deadline for everything. 

You may have noticed that “time” and “dates” play a role in every other part of this framework explained above – that’s how essential this final concept is for success.   

This will keep you accountable, focused, and in-sight of your long-term primary goal. This part of SMART goal making sounds simple, but it’s deceptively difficult in practice. 

Creating feasible deadlines and doing everything in your power to make them is genuinely a make-or-break attribute in all businesses. 

Luckily, like most things, you can actively practice and improve upon this learned skill.

#A SMART Goal Example for Coaches

Many baseball and softball entrepreneurs want to grow their audience on Instagram these days.

But you actually don't want to say, "My goal is to grow my presence on Instagram."

Where would even start and what exactly does this mean? 

SMART goals that actually move the needle for your business look more like this example:

#Must-Have Image and Video Creation Skills for Baseball and Softball Coaches

The next prerequisite for coach entrepreneurs looking to grow on social media is to start thinking more deeply about the visual aspects of your brand’s presence online. 

Just like having SMART goals, this step of codifying a brand’s visual storytelling has been essential at least a century before anyone had heard of the internet. 

The chosen letter font style and fresh paint on the sign above an old time shopkeeper’s storefront and how their products were presented in the shiny store window often could mean the difference between success and bankruptcy. 

Once that same shopkeeper’s business grew enough to include print advertising in catalogs, magazines, and newsletters, the importance of affirming visual depictions of their products or services continued its ascendency. 

Of course, each new medium, from radio – where there were no visuals, but brand pictures were painted with the sounds of ambient noises, wonderfully talented voice actors, and catchy jingle composers, which together amounted to something analogous – on to the television era, and finally the rise of the internet has continued the importance of how brands are consistently depicted to potential clients and customers. 

Aside from few and far-between places like Clubhouse, social media is first and foremost a visual medium.  

And a keyword to focus on here is: consistency

Ideally you want your posts to have a distinguishable appearance with a consistent color scheme, personalized editing style, or even applying identical or similar filters across all your images or videos. 

We must also address the quality of these images and videos. 

For promoting your services and your personal brand, it's important to have professional looking videos and images as much as possible. 

This may be slightly less necessary in a place like Instagram Stories – where behind-the-scenes, off-the-cuff vibes can still play well. 

But even with Reels and TikToks, where raw authenticity briefly reigned supreme, higher quality video and audio (up to a point of dimishing returns) is now favored by audiences and algorithms alike.     

And just in case you needed any convincing about whether investing time in video creation was worth it for some reason, it might interest you to know that sports lovers watch twice as much video content online than the average users of social media platforms.

But who says you need a fancy camera or equipment to take amazing photos and videos? 

With these universal tips and tricks below, you'll be uploading crispy-clean and business-attracting assets in no time. 

#Grid Lines

When this function is enabled on your phone or tablet device in your settings, you'll see two vertical lines and two horizontal lines on your screen with each photo or video you take.

These lines are called grid lines and they help you better arrange the visual elements in your camera’s frame of view.  
That arrangement is technically called composition. And it’s one easy to do thing that’ll set your images and videos apart from the average, random social media post. 

The key to capturing great shots with grid lines is positioning your subject in designated places among the lines that’ll make them look good to our human eyes and sensibilities. 

This idea is based on the rule-of-thirds, a technique that revolves around placing your subject points either along the lines or in the intersections of them, rather than in the middle of your frame.

#One Main Focus

Great photos or videos tend to have one primary point that they want people's attention to be focused on. 

Use the grid lines hopefully now permanently on your phone or tablet’s camera to place your focal point properly. 

But because your camera doesn't always focus where it's supposed to intuitively, don't forget to tap on your screen to optimize your camera's focus and exposure levels (not over-exposed and not under-exposed) to ensure overall image or video sharpness. 

This is especially the case if you shoot subjects in motion – as will likely be the case the majority of the time for baseball and softball coaches.

#Perspectives

To make your videos and images stand out, don't be afraid to experiment with shooting from different angles – even extreme ones.  

Try getting on your knees and taking an upward photo. Or standing on top of supports (like buckets, chairs, or plyo boxes) for downward angled shots. 

A mixture of unique camera angles while employing grid lines is a winning combination. 

Perspectives alone can help you stand out from other instructors and entrepreneurs in our industry.

#Flash

Using your camera's flash outside during the day can help soften up certain dark areas. 

But, do not use your phone camera's flash when it's darker – like inside a particularly darkened training facility or during night games. It will hurt your shots way more than help them. 

This is why it's always great to shoot your shots during the day or the afternoon outside in order to take advantage of those prime light rays. 

Sunrise and sunset, in particular, make for stunning images and videos. 

However, if indoors, a simple lamp light or Amazon-purchased ring light can do wonders. 

Luckily, most indoor baseball and softball training facilities are well-lit enough for safety reasons, which means you can still get incredible footage without ever using the flash and at any time of day.

#Clean Lenses

We often don't take this into consideration but after a while our mobile devices lenses tend to get blurry due to all the dust and lint that they gather.

This is especially true for baseball and softball coaches, as ballfield brick dust gets everywhere. 

Make sure to quickly clean your phone or tablet’s cameras before every use. 

#Editing

Those little finishing touches between your social media output and your competitors can add up to a defining difference in brand.

Here are a few editing apps that might come in handy:

Snapseed, with their photoshop-like, smooth easy to use platform. 

VSCO, deemed the best by even photographers with their high-quality filters, particularly suited for outdoorsy (ballfield) types of images. 

Canva, gets you access to infinite amounts of templates to use to craft custom designs to suit your brand’s theme. 

They also have tons of high-quality stock videos and images that, when used sparingly and creatively, can really elevate your game on social.

For editing video footage on your phone, the app we recommend most, due to its ease of use and robust features, is called Filmmaker Pro Video Editor.

#Next Steps for Baseball and Softball Coaches Looking to Grow Their Social Media Accounts

Okay, with these must-haves in place, the next step depends on where you were in your entrepreneurial journey when you found this article.  

If you haven’t yet established your unique baseball or softball brand – and all that entails – then we highly recommend checking out this ultimate coach’s guide before you do anything else.

But, if your brand is firmly in place for the time being, the next logical step is to learn which equipment we recommend – after hundreds of hours of testing what’s out there – for upping the audio-visual quality of your social media and online lesson videos even more. 

Wherever your brand's currently at in its journey to the top, if you're looking to take all this editing and content creation to the next level and scale, then you'll want to save time and batch your baseball or softball social media output like the big business do. 

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