Key metrics to measure your social media marketing and social media ROI
Analysing the success of your social media campaign is vital not only to understanding which strategies are effective, but also to convince C-suite executives that your marketing approach is generating a measurable ROI. Creating a metric to measure this success means understanding how social media reaches audiences.
A recent survey of social media marketing executives found that 52{21dc2fe1b43c4cf57a2e25a56b286f09fbb32a45ddf34dcf04be366972dd7b06} of respondents said that ‘social media has positively influenced their revenue and sales with Facebook and Linkedin providing the highest value for businesses.’
So what parameters can be used to measure the cost-effectiveness of a campaign? The following 6 metrics allow you to analyse and present the data in a way that is quantitative, not only qualitative.
Traffic
Tools, like Google Analytics, show on a single dashboard the direction of your incoming traffic, making it easy to understand how different platforms are working for your website. The next step is understanding what prompted the click from the social to the site.
What is important is not just the status of traffic, but what share of your traffic is driven by social media. Knowing that 25{21dc2fe1b43c4cf57a2e25a56b286f09fbb32a45ddf34dcf04be366972dd7b06} of your traffic is from social media is more valuable than knowing that 200 visitors came from social. This presents the data in context and allows executives to understand how strategies are influencing traffic. The analytics tools can help campaign managers to understand what content is really connecting and driving traffic, and also why. This focus helps marketers to target audiences in the most effective way.
Click-through Rate
Your click-through rate is indicative of the quality of your content. However, more than knowing what content is directing traffic to your website, you also need to know the conversion ratio for click-throughs on gated content which requires user registration or downloads.
Click-throughs need to be assessed in relation to the bounce rate. The bounce rate is a clear indication of how effective your targeted content or website/landing page is. If a user clicks on your social link and then immediately leaves the page, the ‘click through’ rate gives a false reading. It is the bounce rate that matters. If a user leaves a page immediately after clicking from your social media, it means that likely the content was somehow misleading and that means that your marketing is not going to connect, and it potentially weakens your brand image. Your content needs to be consistent, offer values and not use hooks, but deliver on promises.
Content
Knowing your traffic, click through and bounce rates helps you understand what content is connecting with your target audience, and which platforms perform best when presenting that content.
While likes, shares and retweets are great for vanity metrics, they do not indicate the engagement rate. Your content will perform differently on different platforms and it is an aggregation of data that will indicate which content forms should be placed in which settings to reach audiences. For example, LinkedIn tends to perform better for professional content such as white papers, while Twitter and Facebook are better for shorter blogs or entertaining content.
Engagement
Meaningful engagement that promotes brand awareness, generates leads and even secures sales is the goal of content marketing, so measuring it is essential to understanding what is connecting with target audiences.
Your engagement needs to be honest and genuine. This means that more than just posting to social media, you need to have a dedicated person or team who also respond using social media. This can be measured by starting your engagement in increments and testing the time spent versus the response rate over a period of time. The metric is intrinsically more qualitative than quantitative, so it needs to be assessed in a way that can be measured. This can be measured by asking for a specific response from readers and judging the response rate in comparison with the view rate. This gives executives a tangible measure of the work and allows marketers to understand what is working and how your audience prefers to engage.
Competitor Benchmarking
It is important to know who your competitors are and watch their strategies to understand how they are connecting with customers, how successful they are and how your brand offers a unique position for customers.
It is easy to find out, for example, what follower numbers your competitor might have on Facebook, but this does not necessarily directly correspond with the success of the company or the number of conversions they have. Some of the biggest brands have only a moderate social media following, and this is because quality, not quantity converts engagement to leads. While knowing the number of followers of your competitors is interesting, their actual conversions and sales data are far more relevant in creating a baseline metric for you to measure your business against competitors.
Customer Service
Social media has made it easier for brands to respond to customers in fast and effective ways, without intruding on their personal space. For example, brands can connect via email, chatbot and social media messaging. The reality is, for customers the expectation of timely response has increased, and that response needs to be actionable, considered and appeasing.
Making customer service measurable is simple. A customer service satisfaction survey offered at the close of a ticket gives a measurable rating of the effectiveness of the service your brand offers. The number of people who accept or decline the survey, also knowing the category of the complaint or service required, gives executives an indication to not only measure the marketing effectiveness, but also the product quality and alignment with messaging. For example, a customer who sends an email complaining about the landing page, but who then completes a sale after customer service has made contact is potentially a satisfied customer and the error might have been technical, but if this is a consistent pattern it could indicate a bigger issue with the communication of brand and product delivery.
Knowing your Social Media Value and ROI
Measuring social impact in a tangible way is essential for proving the ROI and knowing how to grow your business. The only way to truly understand how to measure what is usually considered qualitative data is to apply quantitative metrics. It is when data is made accessible and dissectable that it can be used to further marketing. It is not enough to take a look at the surface to make informed decisions about advertising spending.
While costs are lower for social media advertising on the whole, as compared with traditional media, it can also offer higher returns on investment if the time is invested in exploring which content is effective, and which content is missing its mark.
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