Every business and organization has different criteria to measure success and it is very important to measure the results of your digital marketing and social media marketing campaigns. As the trend with Web 2.0 continues to change and grow, make sure your social media analysis provides a complete assessment of the reach and impact it is having on your business.
Many tools are available that can deliver real-time results for your social media marketing initiative. Make sure you are measuring and looking at the factors that will effectively evaluate your success in relation to your company’s goals, objectives and lead generating activities to name a few.
Measuring the results
Are you getting the desired results that you are after? You can monitor your campaign on various social media channels such as blogs and micro blogs to see where your message is heading. There are many online tools available that can help you with the monitoring of your campaign and they provide you with the ability to keep track of all your social media efforts. Some of these tools can also help you analyze your message and the overall impact it has on your brand. You can also use the built-in statistics that some social media channels offer such as Facebook and LinkedIn to measure if you are getting the best results.
Your message
Follow your message and check how it spreads online. Pay close attention to what messages resonate and where they appear all over the web. If you follow your message through different channels, you can determine the appropriate messages for each platform and create a plan to maximize the reach of your message.
Benchmark
Always measure your outreach in the best way that makes sense. Judge your campaign and results against other similar organizations sharing the same niche as you. Whether it is a direct competitor or another business with a similar business model, choose something that is comparable. If you are in a niche where you compete with more well known competitors, monitoring direct results at product level instead of the company may give you the best analysis of comparative success. Constantly monitoring your brand together with your competitor’s will improve your overall strategy. Knowing what content and messages works for them can help you identify similar content and messages you can use.
Learning
Do some research and find out what is already working in your industry so you can better analyze the results. Discover which techniques and platforms have had the best impact and who they have influenced. By comparing and tracking your activity and efforts against your results, you can see what activities are the most effective. Use the information from your research to determine which messages works and why.
Overall results
At the end of the day with any digital marketing campaign, demonstrating your overall results will have a strong impact. You can measure how much traffic your social media initiative have driven to the website, where the traffic is originating from, where your visitors are looking for information, and ultimately, is that traffic bringing you any leads or sales?
Provide the key executives of your company with a dashboard so that they can immediately see how much tangible impact social media has had on their business. Getting results is great, but if no on knows about the results, it will never show the value in your campaign.
Every business which engages in SMM needs to have results out if it’s doing. A positive ROI is important, because only when the activities make dollars, they make sense! Great article Anton 🙂
Thanks Dragan. This doesn’t just count for SMM, but for any digital marketing campaign. If you can’t measure your results…what is the point of running the campaign at all?