How to Master Social Media Marketing Metrics - Easy Lessons for 2018
As a digital marketer, you already know the important role of social media for your business.
Social Media marketing can take your brand to great heights, streamline the conversion and retention process, and facilitate the promotion of your brand promotion through user-generated content.
To use social media optimally without wasting precious marketing dollars, you must master metrics, even if numbers and graphs make you go “ugh” instead of “aah!”.
Mastering social media metrics help to improve your ROI (return on investment) by showing you where to adjust your campaigns for more targeted content and proactive customer care.
Metrics are just numbers.
Metrics are numbers (number of likes, number of newsletter signups, number of sales…).
Recorded over a specified time-period, they chart the up (or down) graphs of your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
If you produce 36,000 screen-printed T-shirts annually and your goal is to clear the inventory each year, then your KPI might be ‘sell at least 3000 pieces per month’.
The metric to watch would be ‘number of sales’.
Sales might spike on weekends, and drop on Mondays, but come month-end, they should add up to 3000 pieces, and match or exceed your KPI.
A standalone metric rarely gives the full picture.
Metrics on their own are quite useless. KPIs are best seen as a correlation between metrics.
Along with ‘number of sales’ you should also be watching out for helper metrics such as number of likes, shares, backlinks, conversions to newsletter subscriptions, unique visitors to your landing page, or bounce rates (how many left the page immediately?).
For instance, a high ‘number of sales’ on your page from ‘Facebook ad clicks’ sounds great, until you notice that the ‘number of unique visitors’ is even higher - and so is the ‘bounce rate’.
It means you got a large number of click-throughs (ad is working), but many visitors simply left quickly, without buying anything (something is wrong on the page itself).
If the metrics show most purchases were via desktops, yet half the visitors were on mobiles, maybe the page needs to be mobile-optimized. If metrics identify a clear demographic group in the bounced visitors, maybe target them again, but this time with a 10% off coupon code?
Marketing ultimately has one purpose: convert, then retain customers. Metrics data gives an unambiguous picture of what needs to be improved, without relying only on intuitive guesswork.
By correlating metrics, you can identify failure points and adjust your social media marketing strategy accordingly.
