Chapter 3
Making Decisions by the Numbers
IN THIS CHAPTER
Utilizing metrics to decide
Diagnosing and fixing problem campaigns
Keeping your online marketing grounded
The 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner showed that only 37 percent of professionals whose companies use social media said that they’re able to measure their return on investment (ROI). By using the tools for assessing qualitative and quantitative results, including ROI, you can certainly count yourself among those happy few who do.
However, there’s no point in collecting metrics just to save them in a virtual curio cabinet. The challenge is to figure out how to use the numbers to adjust your online marketing campaigns, whether they need fine-tuning or a major overhaul. This chapter shows you how to analyze problems, see what your data reveals, and then use the results to modify your marketing approach.
Using Metrics to Make Decisions
Despite of the hype, social media is, at its core, a form of strategic marketing communications. As a business owner, you must balance the subjective aspects of branding, sentiment, goodwill, and quality of leads with the objective performance metrics of traffic and click-through rate (CTR) and the business metrics of customer acquisition costs, conversion rate, sales value, and ROI. The balance point is unique to each business at a specific time. Alas, no fixed rules exist.
As part of your balancing act, you’ll undoubtedly also tap your instincts, incorporating casual feedback from customers, the ever-changing evolution of your market, your budget, and your assessment of your own and your staff’s available time and skills.
Even after you feel confident about your marketing program, keep watching your metrics as a reality check. Data has a funny way of surprising you.
Don’t become complacent. Continue to check your performance and business metrics at least monthly. How do they compare to what your instinct is telling you?
Knowing When to Hold and When to Fold
Watch for a few things in your metrics. As always, you evaluate comparative results, not absolute numbers. Keep an eye on these characteristics:
- Negative and positive trends that last for several months
- Abrupt or unexpected changes
- No change in key performance indicators (KPIs), in spite of social media marketing activities
- Correlations between a peak in traffic or sales with a specific social marketing activity
Layering activity timelines with metrics, as shown in Figure 3-1, is a simple, graphical way to spot this type of correlation. Establishing baseline metrics for your hub presence first truly helps in this process. It also helps if you add social media techniques one at a time — preferably with tracking codes.
Reproduced with permission of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing, watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 3-1: Correlating an activity timeline with key performance indicators provides useful information.
Don’t make irreversible decisions based on one event or from an analytical time frame that’s too short for the marketing channel you’re trying to implement. There are no rules for a time frame that is too short or too long. Your overall campaign may be designed to take off like a rocket in less than a week, or it may be set up to take 6 to 12 months to bear fruit. Be patient. Monitor your social media campaigns and rely on your business instincts.
You may find a time delay between the initiation of an effort and its impact on metrics, for these reasons:
- Viewers may wait to see a history of posts before engaging, let alone clicking through to your main hub.
- By definition, establishing a relationship with viewers or prospects takes time, just as it does in real life.
- Our brains haven’t changed despite the Internet: As every brand marketer knows, most people still need to see something seven times to remember it.
- Many types of social media display a greater cumulative effect over time as viral marketing takes hold.
- Your mastery of a new medium usually improves as you climb the learning curve.
With positive results, the answer is simple: Keep doing what you’re doing, and even more so. After you identify the elements responsible for your success, repeat them, amplify them, multiply them, and repurpose them.
Neutral or negative results force you to evaluate whether you should drop the activity or invest the effort needed to identify the problem and try to fix it. Ultimately, only you can decide whether you want to continue sinking time and effort into a social marketing method that doesn’t produce the results you want.
Make a chart for yourself like the one from Social Media Examiner shown in Figure 3-2. It shows how 2,800 marketers rank their accomplishments from using social media. How do your efforts stack up?
Reproduced with permission of Social Media Examiner
FIGURE 3-2: Compare the benefits you receive from social media with the benefits identified by marketers in other businesses.
Diagnosing Problems with Social Media Campaigns
Put on your business hat when you detect a problem. Some techniques may be worth modifying and trying again, but others should be dropped. Ultimately, it’s a business decision, not a technological one.
Be patient when assessing cost of customer acquisition and ROI, although a few trend lines in your metrics might give you pause:
- Traffic to a social media service never picks up or falls and remains low after an initial burst.
- Traffic to the social media site holds steady, but the CTR to your master hub or other sites is low.
- Follow-through on intermediate calls to action is low in performance metrics.
- Traffic and click-throughs increase, but the leads aren’t well qualified.
- Traffic and engagement, which had been increasing for quite a while, fall and continue to fall; small dips and rises are natural.
- A conversion rate tracked back to a social media service is unintentionally lower than from other sources, and average sales value is lower. (Good strategic reasons for these results might exist, of course. You might deliberately target the younger student audience on Yelp with less-expensive options than those offered to an older, more affluent audience on Facebook.)
- The cost of customer or lead acquisition is much higher than for other channels, making the ROI unattractive. For example, a high-maintenance blog may generate a few leads but be relatively expensive compared to prescheduled tweets that drive more traffic successfully.
Fixing Problems
Underlying problems with low traffic on social media usually can be slotted into a few categories:
- Problems locating your social media presence
- Mismatch between channel and audience
- Poor content
- No audience engagement
- Problems with the four Ps of marketing: product, price, placement or position (distribution), and promotion
After these problems are diagnosed, they can be handled in roughly the same way, regardless of the social media venue used. The following sections help you solve some common issues that your small business may have.
Before you panic, make sure you’ve set reasonable expectations for performance and business metrics. Research the range of responses for similar companies or view your competitors’ social media sites to see how many responses, comments, and followers they have. Although you can’t foretell their ROI, you can assess their traffic and inbound links. Your results from social media may be just fine!
Be careful with interpretation. If your competitors began working on their social media campaigns long before you did, they’re likely to have very different results.
Remember that the social media audience is quite fickle. A constant demand exists for changes in content, approach, tools, and tone to keep up.
Your social presence can’t be found
Driving traffic to your social media presence is as challenging as driving people to your site. If traffic is still low after about four weeks, ensure that all your social media sites are optimized for external search engines such as Google and internal (on-site) search tools used by different social media services. Turn to Book 2, Chapter 5 for optimization techniques.
The source of the problem may be poorly selected search terms or tags, a headline or description that contains no keywords, or content that hasn’t been optimized. Unless your hub presence, whether it’s a blog or website, is well optimized itself, your social media presence may suffer, too.
Be sure that posts occur often enough for your social media page to appear in real-time search results.
Inappropriate match between channel and audience
The symptoms for a mismatch usually show up quickly: People take little or no interest in your social media postings, you suffer from low CTR, and your bounce rate is high whenever visitors do click through.
To start with, you may have chosen an inappropriate social media service or the wrong group within a network. For example, young tech males like Reddit, but if you want a social site about weddings and interior decor, try Pinterest instead.
The solution: Return to your Social Media Marketing Plan (see Book 2, Chapter 3). Review the demographics and behavioral characteristics for the social media service you’re using. They may have changed over time; for example, Facebook is still enormously popular with 18- to 29-year-olds, despite recent growth in older users, but that may not last. The youngest of social media users are already migrating toward Instagram and Snapchat! Find a social venue that’s a better fit, revise your plan, and try again.
Use Quantcast or Alexa to check demographics on social media sites if you aren’t sure.
Your site has poor content
Content problems are a little harder to diagnose than visibility problems, especially if the problem appears with your first posts. In that case, the problem may also look like a channel mismatch, with content that simply doesn’t appeal to your target market or is inappropriate for the channel.
However, if you experience a persistent dip in traffic, comments, or CTR from your blog, Facebook stream, Pinterest, podcast, YouTube, or any other social media account, you have other difficulties. Perhaps the content isn’t timely, or isn’t updated frequently enough.
Or perhaps content quality itself has degraded. Content creators are commonly enthusiastic at the beginning of a project but may lose interest after a period of time. Or they may have a backlog of media and ideas that can be repurposed and posted initially; after that’s depleted, they may run out of ideas. As a result, later content may not be as valuable to your market, lack appropriate production values, or simply become boring.
Watch for burnout. After the backlog of media is used up, the insistent demands for new content can easily become a burden. Creators often lose interest, or they focus on quantity rather than on quality.
Compare the individual posts that produced an increase in traffic, responses, or CTR to ones that are failing. Tally posts by the names of their creators and what the posts were about. Start by asking previously successful creators to develop new material along the lines of older, successful content. If that doesn’t work, watch the most popular tags to see what interests visitors and try to tie new content into those topics, if appropriate.
Finally, try assigning fresh staff members, recruiting guest writers and producers, or hiring professionals for a while. If this change produces better results, you have indicators for a long-term solution.
Lack of audience engagement
If you see traffic to the social media service holding steady but lack follow-throughs from calls to action, or you have an unusually low CTR to your hub site, you may not be engaging your audience. Watch especially for engagement parameters that never take off or that dip persistently.
Review user comments, retweets, and other interactions on each service. You can use the internal performance metrics for Twitter, Facebook, and your blog to assess numerical results of engagement. Then review the chain for interaction between social media visitors and your staff. Are visitor responses being acknowledged? Is there follow-up? One of the biggest challenges in social media is establishing a relationship with your visitors and maintaining a back-and-forth conversation. A lack of engagement may presage a lack of brand recognition, loss of customer loyalty, and reduced referrals from visitors to their friends or colleagues.
You’ve forgotten the four Ps of marketing
Perhaps you’re getting traffic and click-throughs to your hub site and generating plenty of leads but still not closing or converting to sales. It may be time to go back to the basics.
Review a web analytics report generated before you started your social media marketing efforts. Make sure your website is well optimized for search, your online store (if you have one) is working well, and your conversion rate is solid. Fix any problems with your website before you try to adjust your social media campaign.
Product, price, placement or position (distribution), and promotion — the four Ps — are considered the basic elements of traditional marketing. These terms apply to social media and other forms of online marketing, as well.
Product
Your product is whatever good or service you sell, regardless of whether the transaction takes place online or off. Product also includes such elements as performance, warranties, support, variety, and size. Review your competition to see which features, benefits, or services they offer, and which products they’re featuring in social media. If you have an online store, look at your entire product mix and merchandising, not just at individual products. Ask yourself these questions:
- Are you selling products that the people you’re targeting with social media want to buy?
- Do you have enough products or services to compete successfully in this environment?
- Are you updating your offerings regularly and promoting new items often?
Price
Price-comparison sites such as Shopping.com and discount stores online already put price pressure on small businesses. Now mobile social media shopping sites, with the rapid viral spread of news about special offers and price breaks, have put cost-conscious shoppers firmly in the driver’s seat.
No longer can you check only competitors’ websites and comparison-shopping sites for prices. Now you must check to see what they offer visitors to their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages; their blog readers; those who receive their e-newsletter; and social shopping page customers to gain new customers and hold onto them as loyal, repeat buyers. Any single product or service may now have multiple prices, depending on who’s buying.
Use social shopping and other sites to assess your prices against your online competition. Are yours significantly higher or lower, or are they price competitive?
Your small business can have difficulty competing in the market for standard manufactured goods such as baby clothes or DVDs unless you have excellent wholesale deals from manufacturers or distributors. But you can compete on price on customized goods or services or by offering unique benefits for buying from your company.
If you must charge higher prices than your social media competitors, review your value proposition so that people perceive an extra benefit. It may be a $5 promotional code for a discount on another purchase, a no-questions-asked return policy, exclusivity, or very accessible tech support.
Be careful not to trap yourself into matching prices against large companies with deep pockets. Make tactical financial decisions about loss leaders and discounts for users of particular social media. Consider a less-than-fullfeatured product or service package for social media users if needed (sometimes called the freemium business model).
Placement or position
Placement or position refers to how products and services are delivered to consumers (distribution channels). Where and how are your products and services available? Your website needs to serve as a 24/7 hub for customer research, support, and sales online, but social media offers brand-new opportunities to serve your clients. Best Buy, for example, has already become famous for its twelpforce, in which employees use Twitter to field customer support questions and make product recommendations.
With multiple social marketing outlets, you must be alert for the effects of channel cannibalization (the use of multiple distribution channels that pull sales from each other). Products or services sold directly from social media outlets may depress the sales numbers on your website.
Promotion
Your online and social media marketing plans fall into the promotion category, which includes all the different ways you communicate with customers and prospects, both online and offline. This also includes making people aware of your multiple points of visibility online, almost as though you’re marketing another product. Careful cross-promotion among all your online venues is now as critical as integrating online and offline advertising. Are people aware of all your social media pages? Are you using the right calls to action on those pages to get people to buy?
Don’t continue investing in a social media technique just because everyone else is doing it.
Adjusting to Reality
Many times, expectations determine whether a marketing technique is seen as a success, a waste of time, or something in between. It isn’t possible for a particular social media service to produce extraordinary changes in traffic or conversions. In most cases, though, your victories will be hard-won, whereas you cobble together traffic from multiple social media sources to build enough of a critical mass to gain measurable sales.
Achieving that goal usually involves many people, each of whom may become a committed champion of the method she has been using. When you decide to pull the plug on one of your social media techniques — or just decide to leave it in a static state — try to still keep your employees engaged.
Unless social media participants have proved themselves to be nonperformers, try to shift them into another channel so that they can retain a direct relationship with customers.
Avoid the temptation to recentralize your social media marketing in one place, whether it’s PR, marketing communications, management, or customer support. Instead, try to maintain the involvement of someone from each of those functional areas, as well as subject area experts from such diverse departments as manufacturing, sales, and research and development (R&D).
Marketing is only part of a company, but all of a company is marketing.
As wild a ride as social media may seem, it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. Given that it may take months to see the return on your marketing efforts, you may need to nourish your social media sites for quite a while.
Feeding the hungry maw of the content monster week in and week out isn’t easy. You need to not only keep your staff engaged and positive, but also keep your content fresh. Take advantage of brainstorming techniques that involve your entire team to generate some new ideas each month. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
- Create unique, themed campaigns that last one to three months. Find an interesting hook to recruit guest posts or writers, perhaps letting a few people try your product or service and write about it.
- Distribute short-term deals using social media channels, such as providing location-based coupons on cellphones or distributing offers to Meetup attendees.
- Write a Wikipedia entry about your product or business from a consumer’s point of view.
- Make friends on Facebook by incorporating an interactive application, such as a poll or sweepstakes entry.
- If you aren’t gaining traction with groups on LinkedIn or Facebook, post on someone else’s old-fashioned forum, message board, or chat room on a relevant topic.
- Tell a story about your product or service in pictures or video and upload it to Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, YouTube, or another image service.
Every marketing problem has an infinite number of solutions. You have to find only one of them!