Social media campaigns need a new measure of success

Times have changed. Getting yourself out there is no longer about shouting as long and as hard as you can until you are blue in the face, trying to get people to listen to you. So why are we still measuring it by the same metrics?

Depeche Mode sang about it in the early 80s (wow that gives away my age) but their hit “Get The Balance Right” was not referring to marketing metrics; let alone digital marketing metrics for measuring return on social media campaigns.

As a viable marketing channel, social media is in danger; maybe a danger more grave than would-be practitioners care to acknowledge. Businesses large and small are all getting frustrated with the return they are seeing on their social media campaigns. Does this mean that social media doesn’t work? No. Does this mean that the campaigns in questions have not worked? Not necessarily. What this means is that we are not measuring it effectively.

These days there are both hard and soft metrics that need to be measured – especially in the case of a B2B business where you are not selling a product but rather offering a service. I am not for a minute suggesting that those who hold the purse strings need to relax them and throw money towards social media marketing because we don’t need to demonstrate a solid ROI anymore. Quite the contrary — I am saying that we all need to be committed to understanding what ROI we are trying to achieve with “new” marketing and agree to achieve, measure and report on this from the start.

There are basically four forms of ROI:

Return on Impressions — Impressions are the number of times that your article (if you are involved in content marketing) or advert has been viewed by those who potentially make up your target audience. I personally don’t like reporting on return on impressions as this is a VERY weak marketing metric that does not translate to very much. It is a good starting point, but the individuals making up those impressions do not necessarily make up my target market.

Return on Initiative — this metric also forces you to look at the softer aspects of evaluating a return. In other words, there is often times a long sales cycle and conversations that start today do not necessarily translate to a sale tomorrow. This is a very important metric to acknowledge though because business needs to be aware of how much time and effort is being allocated to “social marketing” and needs to weigh this against the returns of its other marketing initiatives.

Return on Engagement — arguably one of the most important metrics that business needs to measure today is how effectively your communication is being used to spark conversation. This is the real crux of a content marketing initiative – to get people discussing a solution you can offer. If you are not measuring how many conversations are created from a piece of content then there is nothing tangible to your marketing. Conversation is the new currency is a content driven world.

Return on Objectives — very tightly linked to the return on engagement metric, the return on objectives takes the concept slightly further. This is where planning and alignment with sales and business objectives comes into play. If your business objective is to gain brand awareness in the mining environment, then your social marketing needs to be aware that this is the business objective that it is being measured against. The softer metric here is the alignment to business strategy.

Ultimately the alignment between business goals and sales goals will form the marketing goals that need to be achieved. Just make sure that the yard stick that you are using is agreed upon upfront and that the metrics you use are a mixture of hard and soft.