Measurement Strategy

One of the most frequent objections we hear to social media marketing is the claim that results can’t be measured. In traditional SEO and SEM/PPC, well-understood analytics allow a marketer to measure results.

Over the last year, new tools have made it much easier to measure the results of social media marketing efforts. Marketers who have created a social media marketing plan and are following that plan to produce and share content can measure their results. Typically, social media campaigns are measured based upon leads generated or sales produced. Measurement Strategies in Marketing

The key to measuring is to create a baseline of all the vital statistics before you start your new social media marketing plan. Your baseline report should include metrics such as the current volume of traffic to your website, your current geographic reach online, how many (and which) keywords are used to find your website, which of your pieces of content is currently most popular, how well known is your brand (company name or product names).

As part of your baseline, you should also determine where referral traffic is coming from, how many subscribers your blog has or how well you are doing in any other online community where you engage your niche, such as a newsletter or special interest group. If the social media effort will be judged on how well it increases sales leads or sales, you must have accurate measures of these data points before the effort begins.

Create a spreadsheet with all the vital statistics and document the topics above as rows and create a column for each month starting with your baseline report. Update this report each month with new data using the baseline as the starting point.

You will likely make several observations as your social media marketing plans unfold and you are measuring results. First, it may take some time to notice results. This will depend on how solid your plan is, and how well you are executing your plan. It also depends on the quality of your content and the perception of your company and products. It’s been said that a social media marketing plan is not a magic wand for a bad product. If you have a good plan and a good product and you are executing it well you will begin to see results you can measure. Here’s what you might see.

The traffic volume to your website or blog may increase. The keywords referring traffic may change. You may see more referring traffic from brand specific terms such as your company name, product names and names of your employees if they are producing quality content. Employees who produce good content become drivers of traffic.

Measuring Traffic Driven to Your Blog or WebsiteYou may start to see traffic coming from other referring locations on the web. If your baseline report shows most traffic came from major search engines you may see other referring sites on your top ten list such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, industry blogs, etc. Study these stats. Do those visitors spend more or less time on your website? Do they visit more or fewer pages? Do they take your desired actions? What is the online sentiment of your brand?

Over time watch the bottom line metric you care about most. Are you getting more or fewer sales leads or sales? You can draw correlations between your bottom line and your social media marketing plans.  Which forms of content perform better? Which topics perform better? We use a mix of tools to measure results.

Remember, if you don’t have a good plan or if you execute it poorly you’ll get poor results.  We aren't afraid to experiment. We adjust your plan as needed. We measure as much as we can measure.

That's the secret to our success!