3 Steps to More Effective Social Media Marketing Metrics

This article discusses how to quickly and effectively develop relevant metrics to track and measure the effectiveness of your B2B social media marketing activity.

OVERVIEW

Social media marketing (SMM) is now a standard part of the marketing mix in the B2B world. Why? Because SMM offers marketers a way to connect, engage and interact with customers and potential customers in a unique, personalized and immediate manner. Social media marketing has low barriers to entry, is relatively quick and easy to learn and use, is easily scalable, has the potential to reach a huge audience, and allows marketers to interact with their audience in a more direct way than ever before.

In short, social media marketing sounds like a B2B marketer’s dream, but is it really? More importantly, how can you prove that your social media marketing was effective and accomplished what was required?

         

The answer is simple: prior to instituting a social media marketing program (either by itself or as part of an integrated marketing strategy), you must decide which metrics you will track to measure the results of your SMM.

WHY METRICS ARE IMPORTANT

In today’s business environment, marketing is expected to deliver more than just content and marketing materials. Marketing is no longer viewed as primarily a support activity, but has become integral to the growth and success of an organization and is expected to contribute to the revenue stream. As such, it is expected to show not only a return on investment (ROI), but also a direct correlation between how the level of marketing activity supports and contributes to the business goals and objectives.

While traditional marketing activities have more clearly defined methods for tracking and measuring their results, social media marketing does not. At least not to the degree that other, more traditional marketing activities have. This makes it difficult to show a direct correlation between SMM and a specific measurable outcome.

CHALLENGES IN MEASURING SMM

Measuring the results of social media marketing is difficult because there are no clear methodologies or industry standards that have been defined and/or officially recognized. Due to the many potential points of interaction and engagement that typically occur with a B2B marketing campaign there is also not a clear way to tie one specific B2B social media marketing activity to a specific revenue outcome. Some marketers may say that there are some exceptions to this, such as one SMM activity that has one and only one outcome (ex: respond to this tweet and get signed up on our mailing list), but that is just driving an individual action, not a revenue result.

As stated earlier, you may count how many ‘clicks’, ‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘shares’ or ‘re-tweets’ you have, or how many people have visited your website, viewed your video or joined your group, but what is the real value of those numbers?

Do those metrics reflect reach, engagement, conversion or advocacy? Do they show a direct correlation between marketing and a purchase action? How do you translate those metrics into something that relates back to your corporate revenue goal or shows the ROI of your SMM? More critically, what are the “right” metrics to track?

Truthfully, those metrics do not provide much value, at least when they are presented as standalone metrics out of context of an overall marketing strategy, which is how they are often used. They are simply what are known as “activity” or “vanity” metrics and many marketers use them to try and justify their activities without delving deeper to understand what the real insights are or to assess how effective their marketing really was (or wasn’t).

The problem is that because social media marketing has become so easy to enter into and use, marketers often make the mistake of assuming that using social media as part of the B2B marketing mix means that it is also easy to track and measure. As such, they often don’t take the time to develop a marketing plan specific to the social media channels that will be used, they don’t determine how SMM will fit into the overall marketing mix, or determine how to track and measure the results. That is a certain recipe for disaster.

THE 3-STEP PROCESS

To counter that problem, there is a very straight-forward three-step process to help develop your social media marketing metrics. This simple process helps you define and understand what you need to measure to show how your marketing supports the business goals and objectives.

STEP 1 – KNOW YOUR BUSINESS

The first step in the process is to ensure you understand exactly what the specific business goals and objectives are that need to be accomplished. This information may be given to you as key performance indicators (KPIs), which are performance metrics linked to one or more of the strategic goals or objectives and help translate execution into quantifiable results.

Too many marketing programs are conceived without understanding this information, leading to results that are less than optimal. To ensure your social media marketing is in alignment with and supports the business, it is critical to understand the goals and objectives.

For example, the business requirements may be to increase market share by xx%, increase the customer base by yy% or increase revenue by zz%. These KPIs then drive the next level of activity, which is determining what is required to make those KPIs happen. This involves steps such as understanding how many new customer leads need to be generated, determining the percentage increase in customer downloads of a new software package, or calculating how many new sales appointments need to be scheduled.

Knowing this level of detail helps you in step 2 of the process.

STEP 2 – KNOW YOUR MARKETING

The second step is to know specifically at whom, or what level, marketing is targeting (audience), what marketing needs to do (activities), what marketing needs to accomplish (results) and why you want to use social media marketing (reach, engagement, conversion, advocacy) as opposed to other, more traditional marketing activities and channels.

To ensure your social media marketing will reach your intended audience, you must understand how each social media channel that will be used is unique and different from the others. Each channel tends to have slightly different user profiles and typically allows people to engage and interact in different ways. Understanding the unique aspects of each channel, the membership, how it is used by people, what types of interaction occur there, the type(s) of content that can be posted, etc. is critical to your decision-making process when evaluating the use of SMM. Knowing the characteristics and parameters of the various social media channels provides you with the knowledge to select the channel(s) most appropriate for your marketing needs.

Knowing this information brings you to step 3.

STEP 3 – KNOW YOUR METRICS

The third step is to determine the metrics you will track and measure. Although throughout the course of a B2B marketing campaign you may track a variety of metrics, at the end you will typically only need to report on one to three high-level metrics that tie your overall marketing results directly back to the business goals and objectives, so identifying and developing the relevant metrics is critical. It is also important to note that there is not only one set of metrics to use for every SMM activity or campaign, they will be different for each activity, campaign or business goal.

To determine the “right” metrics for your specific situation, you need to be able to answer and understand as many of the following questions that are relevant to your social media marketing as possible. These questions help you drill down to ensure you are focusing on and tracking the details that are important, helping to determine which metrics to use in your social media marketing campaign.

The following list provides a representative sampling of the types of questions you need to ask:

• Does your target audience use or communicate via social media?
• Do your competitors use social media?
• Which channel(s) are they using and why?
• What will you do better/differently to differentiate yourself?
• What exactly is it that you want to accomplish with SMM that you cannot accomplish via other marketing activities/channels?
• What specific social media channels do you want to use?
• Why do you want to use those specific social media channels?
• You know your target audience uses those specific social media channels
• You have been asked by customers to use those social media channels
• You have seen your competition successfully use those social media channels
• Other
• Are those the right social media channels to use or are there others that might work better in your specific situation?
• How exactly do you intend to use those social media channels?
• What are your expectations for your SMM?
• What type of content do you intend to post?
• How often do you intend to post to those channels?
• Will you post the same or different content to every channel?
• Which metrics are critical to your specific marketing goals and objectives?
• How do those metrics support the business goals and objectives?
• What KPIs do your SMM metrics need to tie back to?
• How exactly will you tie the metrics back to the corporate KPIs?
• Do you know which metrics reflect reach, engagement, conversion or advocacy?

SUMMARY

By following this three-step process and evaluating and answering the above questions, the relevant metrics to use will become obvious. Defining these metrics at the beginning of the marketing campaign development process ensures your social media marketing aligns with and supports the business goals and objectives, thereby allowing you to prove the value of social media marketing to the business.

NOTE: This article does not go into the specifics of what tools are available to help you measure your SMM, how to manage your SMM or how to present your results. Those topics will be addressed in future articles.

© 2015, 2019 - Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing 

All rights reserved.

 

Professional Network Gardening

Overview

Professional networks are a lot like trees and shrubs. They can grow uncontrollably and quickly get out of hand. As such, you may need to manage and control that growth by pruning.

Professional Networks – The Good

If you belong to a social media site designed for business professionals, such as LinkedIn, you know the value of having a strong professional network. In addition to providing opportunities for both personal and professional growth, your network helps you stay in touch with what’s going on in different industries, allows you to stay abreast of current trends in technology, and also helps you develop new clients or promote your business.

One of the greatest benefits of cultivating your professional online network is that it expands your reach by allowing you to see articles and topics posted by people you follow, which in turn greatly expands the type and amount of information you are exposed to, read and learn about. Other advantages include being able to discuss a variety of topics with people all over the world, having people respond to articles you post, and having them contribute to discussions you initiate or questions you ask.

That’s a strong professional network. A good professional network. One that has people learning from, contributing to and sharing with each other. In other words, a well cultivated network.

Professional Networks – The Bad

Unfortunately, there are also some less than desirable attributes that you will run into on a professional networking site. Things like people creating fake profiles, people exhibiting rude, boorish behavior and those promoting extreme viewpoints (on almost any topic). You will also see things like cute animal pictures, family pictures and memes that really don’t belong on a networking site that is supposedly designed for business professionals.

But the biggest issue and primary drawback to this type of professional networking site is the amount of unwanted spam you will receive on a regular basis. This spam typically shows up in the form of people wanting to connect with you and then once you’ve connected, they immediately try to sell you something. Depending on how you’ve configured your profile, you may receive these annoying requests only as messages on the site, but you may also receive them via email or even on your phone.

This is a network that has grown out of control.

Network Gardening

Once you begin experiencing these type of problems, it becomes necessary to start pruning your garden, or perhaps more specifically, your professional network.

Did you know that you should prune your network just like you prune your shrubs? It's true. And while this may seem extreme to some (especially those who describe themselves as being open to accepting any and all network connection requests, regardless of whether there is any value to be gained or given), it’s actually a good practice, as it helps maintain a strong professional network that provides value, both to you and to the members of your network.

Mirriam-Webster defines pruning as "to cut away what is unwanted or superfluous." This is also a great description of what you should eliminate from your professional network. What this means in terms of your network is that there are some people you should either disconnect from, unfollow, or sometimes, in extreme situations, block. Ultimately, the criteria for this decision and level of action will depend on your personal definition of value.

For example, if there are people that always ask you for help but then never respond back when you reach out to them, Disconnect from them. For those who people continuously post non-business-relevant articles or pictures, Unfollow them. And for those people who are always trying to sell you something, Block them.

Those are the ones you should prune.

While some people may think this is harsh, it’s really not. It’s simply good gardening. At the end of the day this is your professional network, so you need to maintain your network so that it provides you with value and is worthwhile to continue.

Remember, the value of your professional network lies both in the value you provide to the other members, as well as the value that you receive from the people in your network. It’s a two-way street. If you don’t provide value to the people in your network, then you may be the one on the receiving end of the pruning shears. Both cultivating it and pruning it are necessary steps that must be taken to maintain a healthy professional network.

Summary

Trimming the deadwood and lopping off some of the uncontrolled growth is an essential part of good gardening. The same thing applies to your professional network. Without the necessary pruning, your professional network may grow so large that it gets out of control and no longer provides value, so don’t be afraid to trim when and where needed.

© 2019 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing

All rights reserved.