Our Blog

When measuring social media ROI and performance, it's hard to focus, because there are so many different variables being thrown at us. There are users, followers, posts, comments, visits, views, uploads, referrals, reviews, discussions, check-ins, likes, updates, interactions, video plays, audio plays, topic trends, sentiment, relevance, resonance...

Most of us agree that there is a way to quantify social media interaction and to understand how it affects business. On the other hand, there is nu consensus on a standardized measurement process and numerous vendors have developed different methodologies for measuring social media interaction and influence. It's one thing to collect data using one of these platforms, but it's a whole different thing to actually draw business conclusions from that data.

Marketing Sherpa just published their annual email marketing benchmark report, and one of the questions they ask is how important a number of factors are to determine the value of an email marketing program. I wasn't really surprised that the main factor is ROI (65% this year compared to 57% last year), but marketing sherpa was. In previous years, metrics such as # of leads generated, sales conversion ratio, opens, click throughs and bounce rates outperformed ROI in this research. This year was the first year where this was different.

Kashmir Hill, of Forbes, wrote an excellent blog post on behavior targeting. In it, she tells the tale of how target uses buyer pattern analysis to decide whether to send customers coupons for baby stuff, or not. To quote: Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

In today's world, nothing is more important then showing your plan will pay off - that it will deliver ROI. A lot of us are struggling with how to get there though, as it's not that easy to demonstrate ROI in the case of, for example, Public Relations or Social Media. In addition, although ROI is important, it should not be the only thing you are focused on, and neither should your CEO be. So here are a few pointers on how to figure out which metrics matter.

A lot of time and effort is spent on trying to figure out what metrics to use to measure social media performance, the challenges being that it's still a fairly new marketing channel, along with the fact that although there are lots of self-proclaimed social media guru's, there are few people who really know what they are doing (and they rarely proclaim themselves as guru's).

I think analyzing your marketing efforts is one of the most important tasks of every marketing professional, along with reviewing that analysis, and coming up with an action plan. Today though, someone told me that they could not be expected to track the performance of their QR codes, because they were just out their in the open world, so how could they possibly be expected to know which one performed, and which one didn’t. The thing is, I do expect my people to know, so here are just a few ideas on h0w top create QR codes that you can track.

We’ve seen a lot of companies commit the same mistake over the last year. Their marketing team realizes they need to jump on the social media band wagon, so they hire a marketing assistant, preferably from the millennium generation, and task that person with the entire social media strategy and implementation for the business. Six months to a year down the road, they realize they have not gotten any real traction with their social media strategy, and they are faced with the dilemma of having invested in something that isn’t working for them, but at the same time feeling that they have to do it.

I’ve been asked a few times now how to set a marketing budget. It’s not that hard really, but you do need to have a good handle on your numbers. Here’s how I recommend doing it, at a very high level. There are two scenario’s:

Years and years ago I was the VP of marketing of a reasonably small company. I was doing what I did best: analyze past performance and target market, implement a new campaign, analyze the results, adapt the campaign if need be,..you get the picture. Analysis for me is more then just counting leads. It’s figuring out which list responded the best. How many of those responses turn into leads, and off those leads turn into opportunities, and off those opportunities turn into sales. It’s looking at cost per lead, and average sales value. And it’s looking at how those ratio’s look when I tie them back to my marketing managers.