Here in Indianapolis, like most of the midwest, we woke up to 9 inches of snow on the ground. There are a number of thoughts that go though your head when this happens but one is how to continue to do your job while out of the office. Social media has become a great tool for marketers to use any day, but especially on one where a majority of your audience is out of the office.
I recently read an article based upon a BtoB Magazine survey that showed 56% of B2B marketers were planning to increase their social spend in 2013. Increasing the marketing spend means that we will be looking for ways to justify the time, effort and money spent on this channel. This can be challenging for any marketing spend but especially for a channel that is new and changing as quickly as social.
I have found that the best way to quantify the returns from social media is to clearly define objectives and expectations you hope to get from it.
Some companies use social media to generate new sales leads or recruit new talent. Others set out to better engage with prospects and strengthen customer relationships. Social media channels also serve as an excellent way to provide customer service or offer discounts to customers who interact with the brand. All of these objectives help enhance the prospect and consumer experience with your brand.
Once you’ve established the specific objectives of your social media engagement, the next step is to figure out what you want to track. Here’s where you begin to paint a picture of what success will look like.
General Indicators include buzz on social media channels, like getting your brand to “trend” on Twitter. You also build engagement by generating likes and impressions and sharing or re-tweeting information relevant to your customer base. You can also track the number of downloads from a free whitepaper on your website or the number of comments on your blog.
At the end of the day you want to track the impact that your social effort has brought to your organization. Here at Right On Interactive we use our own marketing platform that pulls in the social conversation and then add it to the 360 degree view of our prospects and customers. This helps to show how social can drive website, email and 1 to 1 conversations. Being aware and reacting to social threads and trends is a key part of our social strategy but having a platform to enable and track this is mission critical.
It’s also important to note, that no matter what tactics you decide to use, successfully measuring social media engagement starts with providing your network with content that’s relevant to them, easily shared, and furthers your original objectives. We call that, Lifecycle Marketing.
Contact Right On Interactive today to learn more about Lifecycle Marketing, or tracking the success of your next social media campaign.
