Measuring the effectiveness of social media and Internet marketing campaigns blogging content may seem an inexact science, but marketing types are actually relying on metrics to help them make their case for adding these options to their budgets.
But imagine, as a Kansas City business owner, how you can turn all that focus into a measurable ROI (return on investment) for your marketing program. A few of the steps considered to be ‘best practices’ include:
Analyze ‘referral traffic.’
Once you’ve determined the difference sources of your online referrals, you can focus on tweaking your messaging to reach those customers with specific campaigns and promotional offers. Referral traffic is often overlooked, but can shed light on the value of your offline partners (via their websites). Your KC SEO consultants may also be able to leverage your partners’ online strength by driving SEO to the pages on their sites that indirectly benefit your own site’s rankings and visibility.
Go beyond the ‘vanity metrics.’
Don’t base a campaign on the feedback you’re getting from the ‘Likes” and ‘Retweets’ your getting on those accounts—vanity metrics do little to generate leads or bolster your brand and messaging. What’s needed is an analytic (Google) to measure time-on-the-page and total pages viewed, for example. On the other hand, social signals on your own site are very powerful. Getting a like on your company Facebook page is very different than getting a like on your website. Make sure your investment in social media includes your actual website.
What is your Share of Voice?
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to track your company’s ‘voice’ alongside that of your competitor? Believe it or not, you can measure those conversations; it’s referred to as ‘Share of Voice,” or SOV. Share of Voice in Online Advertising is an ad revenue model that focuses on weight or percentage among other advertisers. For example, if there are four advertisers on a website, each advertiser gets 25 percent of the advertising weight. This method ensures one ad will not be seen any more than the other three ads. In other words, Share of Voice is used to “represent the relative portion of ad inventory available to a single advertiser within a defined market over a specified time period.”
Community and Engagement.
Track the extend that your customers are involved in their on-line communities. Look at how they are interacting with your brand. Integrate customer data with their social profiles. Monitor the different levels of customer engagement as you launch that next promotion. Make changes to the campaign once you’ve analyzed the feedback.
‘Sentiment’ analysis.
Study your customer’s reaction to your promotions—and your branding—by monitoring all the social media channels being used. Rank the feed back your getting. Indicate the trend as Positive, Neutral or Negative. Over time, track the positive changes in sentiment to your campaigns, or make adjustments when too much negative feedback arises.
