Last week, the nucleus of my household – the fridge, suddenly started acting weird. How did I know this? Well, for starters, when I stepped into the kitchen at an acceptable post-midnight hour and opened the fridge, the light didn’t come on, causing a hiccup in my snacking activities. I concluded that my best friend had perished, so I went to bed with a sour mood and an empty stomach. The next morning, however, my mother seemed unaffected by this damage. Turns out, the fridge was perfectly fine and it was only the light that had stopped working. Obviously, I was devastated that I had to give up a night of snacking for my error in judgment, but my fridge’s behavior brought to light an interesting thought. What’s that? Let’s find out.
What is it that tells you your fridge is functioning? Yes, the cool air coming out of the vent. But even before the air hits your face, what you first see is the light. It is the primary indication of the fridge being active. So, in a way, you could say that your fridge tells you it’s on through its light. Similarly, how do you know that a car engine has started? It starts to make a noise. These seemingly natural responses that machines offer are nothing but indicators of their functioning. In media, we call this ‘market response or feedback’. And it’s one of the most important considerations in our field.
Social media marketing is no longer a novelty; companies are finally taking the strategy seriously, and countless brands have found tremendous success in building communities and driving leads and traffic through social campaigns.
If you aren’t already measuring your marketing, you need to start there. Without evaluating your ROI, you can’t figure out which of your strategies are successful and which ones need to be re-evaluated. So how do you know if your social media strategy is working?
First, you need to define what you mean by ‘working’ because a social media strategy that works for you may not work for someone else. That’s because social media marketing can hypothetically address many goals at the same time, and you may favor one of those goals over another.
I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. Afterall, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.
Like Lord Kelvin rightly said, “If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.”
In other words, success is subjective, but usually relates to one of these key ideas:
Traffic: If your site is capable of generating revenue, any traffic you receive is inherently valuable. It’s therefore reasonable to tie your social media success to how much traffic it can generate for your site.
Conversion Rate: First, you can measure conversions, or set up “goals” in Google Analytics to determine how many social media users, specifically, are taking a meaningful action on your website. You can define this “meaningful” action however you like, and even assign a value to it; what’s truly important is that you know what percentage of your social media traffic is actually taking that action, and how much value those actions are creating.
Engagements: Instead of looking at how many followers you have, look at how many engagements you’re getting. Engagements include things like shares, likes, and comments, and shows that these people aren’t just passively seeing you post things—they’re actively interested in what you’re posting.
On-site behavior: Take a look at your social-specific traffic within Google Analytics. How is this traffic behaving on your site? What pages are they visiting, and how interested are they in your content? If they tend to bounce after a page or two, you might be targeting the wrong audience.
Revenue: On the other hand, not all traffic you generate is going to make you money. If your social media traffic visits your site but never takes meaningful action, it isn’t going to return any money to your brand. Accordingly, you might measure conversions that originated with a social media visit, and use that as a gauge of success.
Visibility: Revenue is the ultimate bottom line for most companies, but it isn’t the only indication of success. Social media is an important channel for building a brand and increasing its visibility, which can lead to more loyal customer relationships and long-term purchasers, ultimately increasing your revenue more than just securing some short-term conversions.
Growth velocity: You can also get more meaningful information by comparing a variety of metrics to those same metrics in the past. How fast are you growing? Are your numbers in every dimension increasing? Where are they falling stagnant, or worse, declining? These are valuable pieces of information.
Like I mentioned earlier, engagement is an essential facet for media planners. But what’s even more vital than that? What is the main factor that helps your media plan clock? Sorry, I meant click. (Did I give away a hint?) TIMING! Viola!
Similar to peak traffic hours of cars and bikes on the roads, social media channels also have timings when the traffic of the audience is high. A proper understanding of your audience behavior for your business is imperative. If you know when your consumers are online you can get maximum engagement from your audience.
If you ask any marketer, what is the success of a brand’s marketing campaign? The answer always is the right campaign executed at the right time. Timing is everything in your marketing campaign. No matter how strong is the campaign, if performed at a time when there are low traffic times in the chosen marketing platform, your campaign will not get the desired eyeballs on your content.
Anyway, circling back to the first world crisis that I was facing- that is- no ‘feedback’ from my fridge (pun most definitely intended); which is why, I sincerely requested my mother to get the light in the fridge fixed because using my phone torch to raid out my disloyal companion each night was starting to irritate me as a midnight snacker. In response, all I got was a thrashing (my mom must have been in a sour mood, so I guess I did get my TIMING wrong on that one). Well, not all feedback is worth it. Sadly, there is no light at the end of this tunnel.
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