Social media has become a staple of marketing, but why should you measure your marketing strategy’s effectiveness in the digital age?
A prominent social media presence is almost a prerequisite for business success nowadays. But between the seemingly endless new platforms and the various data and analytics connected to your posts, it can be difficult to plan an effective digital or social marketing strategy. To simplify planning, we’ve broken digital marketing metrics into four distinct outcomes.
The effectiveness of each of your social media channels can be measured through a combination of “hard” and “soft” goals. Hard goals focus on audience engagement and measure quantifiable metrics such as views, likes, shares, website click-throughs, and so on. Soft goals are more difficult to quantify and include objectives such as establishing a social media presence, creating brand awareness, or promoting events.
Audience engagement can also be broken down into four outcomes: Consuming, Sharing, Funneling, and Accomplishing. The Consuming, Sharing, and Funneling outcomes are part of your hard marketing goals, while Accomplishing fits into your soft marketing goals.
The Consuming metric can be quantified by likes, views, comments, and downloads on your social media content. These measurements all indicate how well your content is reaching the eyes of your audience. Since the Consuming metric is the foundation of your digital and social marketing success, low numbers here mean that your content won’t even have the chance to perform well by other metrics.
The Sharing metric is more social media-specific than the other digital marketing pillars. It is the measure of how many shares, reblogs, repins, and other app-specific sharing methods your content is receiving. One of the main benefits of marketing through social media is the social aspect–your audience can help disseminate your content organically. Thus, it is important to make sharing easy and, if applicable, incentivized. You can also earn more shares by creating content that is highly relevant to current trends, or that provides information your audience will naturally want to share with others.
Funneling includes the most important marketing outcomes such as website click-throughs, customer service inquiries, or other kinds of leads. Ideally, your efforts in the Consuming and Sharing metrics will naturally lead to increases in this kind of lead-generating engagement. If your digital marketing campaign doesn’t lead to results in this final hard goal, you will want to analyze why your views and shares aren’t translating to genuine leads.
The final metric of Accomplishing is the most difficult to quantify. Whereas the previous metrics create a chain of data you can trace from views to shares to clicks, the Accomplishing metric encompasses soft goals like increasing brand recognition. Although it is more difficult to connect your digital marketing strategy to tangible results in a soft goal, you may see overall trends of growth in your various hard goals. For example: the more aware your audience is of your brand, the more likely they are to like, share, and otherwise engage with your social media content.
You can increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy by ensuring that each of your hard goals feeds into the success of the others.
As part of our Digital Services, CTComp can provide the expertise needed to optimize each metric of your digital marketing strategy. We can help build your social media presence so that your posts feed back into the success of your company. If you’re interested in learning more about how CTComp can take your digital marketing to the next level, fill out our interest form and start getting the results you want.
