5 Ways to Use Metrics to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Here are five ways metrics can improve your social media marketing.

Find 5 ways to use metrics to improve your marketing.

#1: Determine Which Stats Matter

Before you enter into any metrics analysis, decide what you need to track and how you’ll track it. Google Analytics is clearly the go-to, although there are other analytics sites. Most social channels have their own insights, as well.

For an overview, check out Kevan Lee’s article, Which Stats Matter: The Definitive Guide to Tracking Social Media Metrics on the BufferSocial blog.

Figure out which metrics you should be tracking.

The article asks this important question: “What are you hoping to get from your social media marketing?” What you track will be different for each answer, whether you want to optimize for sharing, click-throughs, signups or even just visits.

Lee delves into the types of metrics to track, key tools, metrics definitions and conversions. Plus he goes into detail in a variety of scenarios—engagement vs. reach, retweets vs. clicks, traffic/day vs. traffic/post, page views vs. attention and more.

This resource has plenty of information to help you prioritize your metrics.

#2: Analyze Your Content Strategy

In all social strategy, content is key. Find which content gets the best response so you can create more of it.

“At the heart of any content marketing strategy is the editorial calendar,” 

Find out which content performs best for you.

Ben suggests creating a table with your blog’s content data, and then track key performance indicators like site visits and conversions (per Google Analytics), as well as engagement.

Once you create a chart for your own original content, see what data you can compile from competitors, guest posts and even your social media posts.

With everything laid out by the numbers, look at what content gets the best performance and strategize accordingly. This will improve traffic and generate more engagement, conversions and customers.

“Taking a data-led approach to your content marketing not only gives you a stronger strategy,” Ben explains, “but also allows you to identify new opportunities from your competitors’ activity and your audiences’ preferences.”

#3: Track Post Performance

There is immense value in building and maintaining your online community. Equally as important to looking at what content is most popular is looking at what content converts best so you can create more of it to get more leads.

Ian Cleary of RazorSocial explains in his article, Social Media Tracking: 5 Simple Techniques to Track ROI, that you should have a goal—whether it’s visits, signups, sales, ad clicks or other action items.

Learn techniques for tracking metrics across social media.

The five techniques Ian recommends for tracking are:

• Conversions from guest posting: Guest posts can result in immediate and ongoing traffic. However, you must engage with your new audience to see which sites convert best, and also add value so the new visitors return. Check All Referrals in Google Analytics to see which sites give you the best traffic.
• Conversions from your own blog content: While some blog content converts well, some may not do as well. To see your content conversions, go to Google Analytics. Be sure to set up the goal in the Admin screen beforehand. Select Behavior > Site Content, > Landing Pages to see the conversion rate of your blog posts. Analyze what influenced the higher conversions.
• Conversions from social media campaigns: What social sites are most beneficial to your brand? Check Network Referrals under Social in Google Analytics to see which ones your readers are coming from.
• Tracking specific shared campaigns: To do comparisons when you share the same content on different social channels, use custom URL builders. This is also helpful when you want to compare results for advertised links vs. organic shares.

Tracking the value of awareness and engagement: Track where your leads come from, whether you use the social channel’s insights or an outside app. Ian recommends using a tool like LeadSocial to do this kind of research.

Technology makes it easy to see where activity comes from. Replicate the actions that have the most conversions so you can get the most benefits.

#4: Measure Marketing Success

Leads are great. Sales are even better. Use metrics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns so you can assess and alter them for future marketing efforts.

Discover how to adjust your marketing.

To do this, Heidi Cohen suggests three types of marketing success metrics: counting things, developing rates and assessing things over time.

• Counting things. At minimum, Heidi says, track numbers for the following: sales (gross sales, returns and net sales), purchasers (contacts, prospects, customers and advocates), costs (variable and fixed) and items (broken down by type and category, depending on your business).
• Developing rates. To understand marketing effectiveness, you need to examine certain items in relation to one another, such as people’s response and conversion rates, and items’ order rates and size of orders. In terms of sales, track sales per customer, average sale and value. For costs, look at costs per media viewer reached, costs per buyer and costs per contact.
• Assessing things over time. Analyze items over various periods of time, ranging from hours and days through months, years or marketing campaigns. Choose times based on your business so you can track trends, and also see what works best at what times for your business.

Heidi shares a simple framework that can be scaled down to suit smaller businesses or expanded for larger ones, based on need. The key is to keep these numbers in mind for future business so you can develop it and increase sales over time.

#5: Review Website Traffic

If people can’t find your site, what’s the point of having one? Make sure your site is getting consistent and growing traffic. If it isn’t, find out why.

In 3 Steps to Diagnosing Declining Website Traffic, explains that the way to understand your website traffic is audience, acquisition and behavior. Christopher takes you along on his journey to diagnose and correct his own site traffic problems so you can do the same.

Learn how to read website traffic patterns.

• Audience: Go to Google Analytics and look at new vs. returning visitors inAudience reports. If new users are declining, it usually means you have an acquisition problem. A decline in returning users could mean a content problem. If it’s both, it could be a structure problem. Christopher was having challenges with both.
• Acquisition: If you’re losing traffic, it’s important to locate the disconnect. Lost traffic from returning users means people have lost bookmarks, forgotten to type in the domain or don’t look for your site via search. For new visitor decline, organic and search are the culprits.
• Behavior: To look into the problem, Christopher went over to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Turns out his sitemap panel wasn’t indexing all of his pages. It was actually reporting one of every five URLs. So he resubmitted his sitemap, which should make all the difference.

To solve audience problems, start by looking at the numbers. Once you identify the problem, you can fix it. And ideally get back to growth for both new and returning visitors.

Conclusion

Performance of your website, content and social media all impact your bottom line, whether it’s your sales, customer acquisition or any other business goal.

Monitor your metrics regularly and alter your strategy accordingly to get the most return on your social media time and effort. Metrics may pose a challenge; however, once you make the numbers work for you, it could mean more customers, business and sales.

What to Do When Social Media Is Not Working For Your Business

Why Your Social Media is Not Working?

If you feel like you’ve tried everything to connect with your audience, but it’s just not working, you’re probably looking to social media experts for advice. Maybe you’ve followed that advice, but your audience still isn’t responding. What’s going on?

Not all social networks match your audience. Image source: iStockPhoto

Well, it may not be the advice or implementation that’s your problem. The problem may be your choice of social platform, your industry’s expectations or even your audience’s comfort level with social media.

To find out, I suggest looking closely at age and demographic matches, the size of your audience, industry standards and your audience’s interest in engaging online. In this article I’ll discuss each of these and how they can affect your social engagement, then offer advice on how you can work on those issues.

Know Whom You’re Talking To

A recent Pew Internet study revealed that 73% of online adults use a social networking site of some kind, but only 42% use multiple social media sites.

The following chart demonstrates how these percentages break down.

A Pew Internet study reveals the percentage of online adults using different social websites.

Considering the data from the study, let’s talk about how it can apply to you.

Imagine your audience is primarily made up of middle-aged women who, according to the study, are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users.

If you’re focusing your social marketing efforts on Facebook because of its high adoption rate but not seeing engagement, it could be because your primary audience is spending its time on Pinterest.

It may be time to reevaluate who your target customer is. When you know your audience and their social platform of choice, it’s much easier to engage them.

Understand That Size May Be a Factor

Another reason you may not be making a strong connection with your customers could be related to the size of your audience on a given social channel.

This infographic from Mediabistro shows interests across Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Not all interests are represented equally on all social networks.

If you’re selling a high-dollar product, you’re more likely to have a very small and specific audience. As a result, sending out broad messages via social media may not be the best way to connect with them.

Consider Your Industry’s Culture

In some cases, a company may not see high engagement simply because of industry culture. Perhaps the overall industry is behind the times technologically. That could be because either their customers or the industry as a whole aren’t familiar with social media or comfortable using it.

If you’re in a very personalized industry (e.g., the funeral profession), getting your clients to engage on social sites may be a challenge simply because they don’t think to look for you online unless it’s to look up your phone number. In those cases, it’s unlikely they’ll reach out via social media.

Not all businesses exist in industries that naturally lend themselves to online engagement.

Some industries have a harder time engaging with their Facebook fans.

As an example, take the partnership my company recently had with Self Storage Finders. They’re a service that helps consumers identify and evaluate different storage providers in their area.

While this type of service is valuable to the customers who use it, those clients don’t necessarily think about discussing their storage experiences on social sites.

While these variables and their impact on engagement are frustrating, it’s not impossible to market to difficult audiences.

The following three tips should help you adapt social media marketing recommendations and best practices to suit the needs of your specific (if challenging) audience.

Keep in mind, though, that your social media marketing strategy may necessarily follow a different path than it would if your audience were more amenable to social conversations.

Know Where To Be

Conventional social wisdom says that all businesses need to maintain a Facebook and Twitter profile. We believe that creating social identities and then essentially abandoning them because of lack of engagement does more harm than good to a business.

What did you discover when you reevaluated your audience? You may have discovered that the most active community engagement portals in your industry aren’t social sites at all—they’re forums and “old-school” message boards.

If that’s the case, you have to set conventional wisdom aside and focus your efforts on the arenas where they’ll be noticed in the first place!

See What Sticks

You’ve looked at your audience, you know where they are and you’ve set up shop there. Now let’s suppose you’re getting ready to start a social promotion for an audience you’re pretty sure is going to be difficult to engage.

There are plenty of different templates out there for possible social posts. I recommend trying as many as you can. I call this the spaghetti-flinging approachbecause it’s as if you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Paid ads can grab the attention of your target market.

If you’ve chosen to focus your efforts on Facebook, try posting text-based status updates, images, links, polls, paid ads and more. Post at different times of day and on different days of the week.

While it’s nice to see engagement at this stage, the true goal of early social posting to difficult audiences should be to gather data.

Remember, you can’t trust the industry pundits to tell you what will work best for every audience, so use your own metrics and gather your own data.

Look For Your Loudest Fans

As you post more updates, you’ll likely find the members of your community who are more highly engaged than others. Make sure these people aren’t your employees, close friends or relatives!

When you’ve found your most active fans, pay attention to the exact types of content they’re engaging with. Use this data to refine your posting techniques to include content that’s likely to appeal to these users.

Take a look at the following screenshot from the Self Storage Finders Facebook page before we started working with them. This particular update didn’t resonate with audience members, so it had no engagement whatsoever.

An early Self Storage Finders Facebook update falls flat with followers.

When we started working with them, we began experimenting with different types of posts and content and we noticed that fans reacted well to cartoon images.

Below you can see how catering to fans’ favorite type of post results in more likes, all because we were willing to experiment and base future posts on actual audience data.

Extensive testing revealed that Self Storage Finders’ Facebook fans respond well to cartoons.

Know When to Cut Your Losses

Unfortunately, there are audiences out there that simply don’t respond to social media marketing. But that doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel.

Take another look at the data you gathered from your audience analysis and post experiments. Compare it to your established metrics and install analytics tools that will provide additional data to help you figure out whether your social marketing is working.

Let’s say you determine that including man-hours, image subscriptions and other investments, you put roughly $500 per month into your social campaigns. What does your data tell you? Are your social channels sending you visitors that result in more than $500 per month in sales?

That example is a simplification of social marketing’s value, of course. It’s true that social media can lead to extensive brand awareness that may indirectly lead to sales. But if you consistently see that your profits are falling short of your investments, it may be time to either refocus your strategy or pull the plug on your social efforts entirely.

The Bottom Line

If you’re not getting traction with your social media marketing, take a break from researching broad advice that promises a quick fix. Reevaluate your efforts:meet your customers where they are, consider the size of your audience and set your expectations accordingly.

Not every business will have success with social media marketing no matter how hard they try, but it’s worth the time to experiment with different tactics and gather data before calling it quits.

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3 Steps to Build a Social Media Marketing Sales Funnel

Why Is Your Marketing and Sales Funnel Such a Big Deal?

Social media marketing is about using social networks and tools to guide prospects through a series of steps–a funnel–to get them to take the actions you want(e.g., becoming a fan, sharing their email address or buying your products or services).

There are tons of social media tools, networks and options that include everything from Facebook and Twitter to landing pages and email marketing to SEO and ads. Each of these social marketing channels is one more way to guide your prospects through your sales funnel.

Use varied social marketing channels to guide your prospects through your sales funnel.

With all of these marketing channels at your disposal, how do you decide which ones fit within your sales funnel?

To answer those questions, you have to know who your potential customers are and how you can reach them most effectively. You also have to know your company’s goals, how you’ll measure those goals (i.e., the metrics you’ll analyze) and what your target numbers are for those metrics.

Without those key facts, your marketing and sales funnel will be skewed. Excessive focus on one part of your funnel can cause problems elsewhere. If you focus only on owned media like follower numbers and email addresses, you may have trouble with conversions. Or, if you only focus on brand awareness and neglect email marketing, you’ll likely miss out on sales.

Every decision you make about how to create brand awareness, garner engagement and make conversions and sales should be a reflection of your funnel.

The rest of this article shows you how to build, track and test your marketing and sales funnel to give your company the big results it wants.

#1: Define and Implement Channels and Jobs

Did I mention you have a ton of social marketing tools at your disposal? Frankly, it can be overwhelming to think about using all of them at once as part of your marketing and sales funnel. So don’t.

Start by determining what your high-level sales path should look like. In the example a little further down, I’m using Awareness, Repeat Visibility and Engagement and Sales.

Next, prioritize the social channels and tools your audience is already using and that you’re familiar with, then organize those by their primary function (or job). For example, Facebook is great for raising awareness and driving leads, but not for converting sales. Email blasts are excellent for conversions, but not awareness.

As you’re deciding which marketing channels go where in your funnel, consider which ones are most relevant to your short-term and long-term goals, what each channel’s strengths and weaknesses are and what job you’re expecting that channel to do.

Use your funnel to organize your channels and hold each accountable for its role in the process.

As you see in the illustration above, you may have channels that overlap; for instance, different kinds of social ads in the Awareness part of the funnel. In addition, each channel may have different facets (e.g., Facebook ads versus Facebook fans). Each facet builds upon its own functions, as well as the functions of other networks, to lead to your ultimate goal: sales.

Your funnel should be stable, but not inflexible. If your company cares more about email marketing than its number of followers, adjust your tactics accordingly.

For example, instead of using Facebook ads to increase brand awareness and gain more fans, jump straight to an ad campaign targeted at list building. Create an ad that sends leads to an optimized landing page on your website where you ask them to share their email address to access content, a download, etc.

#2: Assign and Measure Key Metrics

Any bottlenecks in your funnel will slow your momentum or stop it completely. Depending on where the bottleneck happens, you could miss out on brand awareness opportunities, growing your owned media lists or conversions and sales.

To measure the health of your funnel, you need to assign key metrics to each stage. That usually looks something like this:

Set a key metric for each tactic in each part of your funnel to quickly diagnose where the funnel is anemic.

With your key metrics in place, look at each tactic in each funnel section and set any industry benchmark standards.

Use these benchmarks to compare your company to your competitors and your industry as a whole. How do you stack up? Look at which of your tactics and funnel sections are best or worst compared to industry averages and adjust as needed.

Speaking of benchmarks and comparing, are you making the most of your analytics and tracking what you need to track? Awareness metrics, Facebook Insights and Google Analytics all have flaws, but I have a few tips for you.

If you’re tracking awareness, we suggest looking at impressions instead of reach. Tools like AdWords don’t give reach data and Facebook’s reach data is inaccurate.

Have you noticed that you’re getting inconsistent results from your Facebook Insights?Start exporting your Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet so you can consistently track and compare the right metrics and get a better idea of how your tactics are working long-term.

You’re probably using Google Analytics on your website, but if you’re not using the Google URL Builder or event tracking, you’re missing out on a lot of useful data.Google URL Builder allows you to customize URLs for posts and ads so you can track visitors from social networks and how they move through your site.

Yoast’s Google Analytics WordPress plugin tracks events.

Event tracking gives you information about button or link clicks, which is especially useful if customers have to go offsite to buy your product. If you have a WordPress site, you can even install this plugin that automatically creates event tracking for you!

#3: Test and Tweak, Then Test Again

The number-one thing you can do to boost your results is test everything. Every good idea you think of is something to test.

As you test, always think in terms of your key metrics and make use of your analytics to find out what works and what doesn’t. Let’s use Facebook as an example.

You can constantly test your Facebook success by trying a variety of status updates. Which has the best engagement rate—photos, text, links or video? Does your audience prefer news or funny videos or memes? Take the time to analyze your previous and current posts to see what worked and what didn’t.

If you want to find your engagement rate for a given post, I suggest dividing its total engagement (likes, shares, comments, clicks, etc.) by total post impressions. If you’re using Facebook ads, the Facebook ad display algorithm shows which posts get the most engagement.

Pay attention to which posts your fans respond to.

The key is to look at your best and your worst posts. In both instances, keep an eye out for differences in post type, topic, colors, sentiment, message and graphic style.

What do your 10 most engaging posts have in common? What do your 10 least engaging posts have in common? Just knowing the commonalities of those top and bottom posts can help you dramatically boost your post engagement.

When I went through this exercise for a client, their page had a month-over-month increase of seven times as many likes, comments and shares and 31 times as many link clicks!

Are you using ads? Then you definitely need to be testing!

Ads burn out fast, so it’s important to create and test ads weekly. If you have the budget for it, you can create, test and optimize new ads three times a week or more.

If you’re using AdWords, create new ads until the point of diminishing returns. Check actual search phrases to see if you need more negative keywords. If your AdWords manager is slacking, get an AdWords Audit.

Do you use Google AdWords?

Not sure which channel ads to spend money on? Compare your options. Run Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit ads to see which works best for your audience and gives you the best awareness or conversions for your money.

A Quick Note About Content Calendars

A lot of brands use a content calendar to create a month of posts (for Facebook, Google+ or any other channel) ahead of time and then submit it for review. This seems organized and diligent, but in practice I believe this approach makes you less likely to improve your posts and get better results.

Every month you need to analyze your key metrics and learn from any mistakes. It’s hard to implement those lessons when you’ve already assigned content for the next month (without the benefit of analysis).

In place of content calendars, I recommend submitting examples of types of posts you want to test or creating your posts daily, or at least weekly.

Conclusion

Customers like to make decisions on their own terms. In most cases, they’re looking for a relationship with a company, not necessarily a hard sell. You can use this human nature to your advantage.

Take note of the social channels your audience is using most, then use those channels to guide them through your sales process.

Set up a funnel that allows leads to jump in wherever they need to. If your funnel is stable but flexible, you’ll be able to adjust its use to fit your customers’ behaviorsand needs—and make sales.

Your biggest sales results will come from constant measuring and testing. Be prepared to make changes quickly and match your customers’ reactions to your efforts. You’ll be seeing intensified results in no time.

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3 Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results

#1: Quantify Your Social Media Listening

“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.” – Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media (@FrankEliason)

Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing the point of social media.

But how do you measure listening and how does it impact your revenue?

In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter to answer that question.

• In Twitter’s search field, enter your business name.
  

  Twitter’s search field.
• You can then select whether you want to view Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all” tweets containing your business name or tweets that contain your business name from only those people you follow.
  

  Twitter search.
• As you filter the tweets, look through them and decide whom you’d like to follow. These are likely either potential customers or your current customers.
• Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever possible.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too, especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to search specific terms related to your business that people who are near your location are talking about.

Twitter is an amazing tool for providing real-time customer service. You can learn things like:

• Exactly how many people you’re helping
• If you’re growing that number of people
• The issues customers are experiencing with your business
• What’s broken in your business

At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and improvements within your business. You canmeasure the direct impact on your business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new fixes give you.

#2: Create a Rating System for Your Social Engagement

“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media (@scottmonty)

This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when you’re trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.

Here’s how it works.

Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.

Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.

At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective to a numeric goal. Then,use a tiered point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.

Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:

• Likes: 1 point each
• Comments: 5 points each
• Shares: 10 points each

During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal or not.

Assign a point system to likes, shares and comments.

You can create similar point systems on any of the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.

#3: Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure

“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.

The Corcoran Group, a NYC real estate firm, adds value via their social media outlets.

For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend.

Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.

Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can quantify.

Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:

• Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
• Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
• Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful your campaign is.

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