Measuring Social Media Marketing Success

You’ve established your goals, your tactics in reaching your goals and ways to use Social Media to engage an audience. These are the first and most important steps as they will stick with you throughout your project. As soon as you forget your end goal, your business will begin to suffer. 

So how are you to know if your tactics in pursuit of your marketing goals are working?  Time spent on pursuits that aren’t working is time wasted and in the world of Social Media Marketing, time is money.  It is easy to set goals and make the steps to reach them, but how do you know which of these steps are working and to what degree?  The following steps should help in measuring the return on investment when working to market your product in social media.



First, set business and marketing goals with relation to social media.  Are you hoping to achieve more traffic, more buzz, more sales, a stronger product community?  If you set a clear and concise goal, you are more likely to know when you’ve achieved it.  When working in an online niche, it should be clear what the exact goal is of the marketing campaign.  It is especially important to establish good communication and clear goals when working from home to sell your offer.

Create specific Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each area of performance (e.g. brand loyalty, customer satisfaction).  These KPIs should use the SMART criteria meaning that the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.  The KPIs should have a pre-determined business process with requirements, have a quantitative/qualitative measurement of the results, and variances to achieve short-term goals.  For example, if your offers are great quality and price but not selling well, perhaps you need to work on your customer satisfaction.  The first step would be to garner more traffic using the tactics already outlined. 

Once you have customers on your site, offer them great deals, , and a survey to measure their satisfaction level.  This will give customers the opportunity to see that your brand cares about their satisfaction while also garnering feedback about how to improve.  Take their feedback seriously.  Advertising is about the customer, NOT about the product!  Monthly audits and checks should be put into place to ensure that once customer satisfaction levels have improved, they are maintained.

Search for appropriate tools to help measure outcomes.  There are many free sites such as Hootsuite and Google Analytics to perform cursory checks.  Will you need further, more in-depth measurement sites?  Use the internet to guide you to the best measurement site for your specific brand. 

Finally, focus on all the available data.  While working to fix one specific problem, never lose sight of the original goals.  If your goal has always been to sell more  of your offers , do not focus exclusively on soft metrics like fans, followers and likes.  Remember that these minor goals are all just tactics on the way to a broader, perhaps more lucrative goal.  Having a high number of fans, followers and likes is a great first step, but it is equally as important to turn these fans into buyers.


For social media marketing success, always measure your marketing effort no matter what.After all, would you invest your money in something without being able to measure the payoff? No, of course not. So, all ways  make a  way to determine if your marketing investment is paying off or not..

           

To Your Success    

Lucy Bieri