9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success?

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success? 

Before we answer HOW to measure, we need to answer WHY we measure.  We measure first to ensure our efforts are meeting our online marketing goals, and second we measure to continuously improve our efforts. 

Before beginning measuring, you want to know what you are measuring, here is where we refer back to Step 1: Purpose. We want to have what you are measuring strategically align with the your online marketing goals we set out earlier. For example, if one of your online marketing goals was to be known as an expert in your industry, you could measure how many retweets and shares you've had from industry giants. What is the reasoning behind measuring this? Well, All social media posts should be written to achieve this goal. Some will be shared, retweeted and covered by identified giants. This works to achieve our overall goal of becoming a go-to person for our industry.

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Make sure your chosen metric for measuring your success is indeed measurable! Therefore, you need to understand what can be measured, and then list those you will track to measure your success. A “clicked on” in your eNewsletters, Facebook pages, websites, online ads, and landing pages can also be tracked. You can change one word on a post or heading of a blog to see if it is then clicked on more or less often. 

Call to Action (CTA) 

Whatever online presences you chose, once you have your targets’ eyes on any one online materials; your post, online ad, website, business link, or eNewsletter, in just a few seconds your target audience needs to know what action you’d like them to take, otherwise you will lose their attention and waste the opportunity. 

For example, if you wanted your clients to buy tickets to an event, you'd want to have your client be able to identify what you want them to do, and be able to find the link to the tickets very easily, as people online have extremely short attention spans. Knowing what you want them to do makes it possible for you to measure your online success.

Having a clear and intriguing CTA is a good practise in decreasing your bounce rate. 

2 Critical Elements to Measuring your Online Marketing 

When measuring your online marketing efforts, there are two key variables you want to keep in mind. These two elements are your website traffic and the engagement of your efforts. You want to keep those two variables in mind when measuring your online marketing efforts. 

An easy way of tracking your website traffic is through a tool called Google Analytics. Make sure before setting up your Google Analytics account that you use an email that identifies with the company or organization, not your personal email. After getting set up, Google Analytics will generate a code for you to place in your search engine optimization account settings area. After completing that step, analytics will begin to work within 48 hours, and you will be able to view all of Google's analytics reports. When analyzing website or blog traffic, a few key measures you will want to look at include: number of unique visitors, average amount of time on the website, and traffic sources (where your web traffic came from). 

When considering the engagement of your online marketing efforts, you want to know what exactly you are using to measure your success. A few great examples of elements you could measure are an increase in quality followers, increase in clicking on links back to your website, increase in number of visitors, or downloading your app. Once you have recognized what you are going to use to measure your success, you can then use various tools to help measure these elements. One great tool that will help is Klout. Klout measures your online marketing efforts across the various social media platforms you allow it, and it gives you a score out of 100. It measure your engagement, likes, comments and overall post quality. You want to aim to have a score of at least above 50. 

Now that you have the tools to begin measuring your success, try it out!