A solid social media strategy can help you maximize your business’s digital marketing success, but it also requires constant tracking. That’s why you must set your goals and define metrics to measure your social media marketing results. If you find that your money is not getting you results, it’s time to revamp your current strategy.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media channels to help businesses achieve goals through a strategy that focuses on content, engagement, and customer relationships.
Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great assets for companies because they can maintain existing customers and reach new ones. One of the greatest benefits of building a social media presence is the possibility to target very specific audiences that share characteristics with your potential buyers.
Social media channels are cleverly designed to collect information on users’ demographics, behaviors, and interests. The more information people provide about themselves, the easier it gets to target them with an effective social media marketing strategy.
Setting Social Media Goals
What are your goals?
There is no right or wrong here. Marketing is not an exact science, which means there is a lot of trial and error involved. Therefore, always track your results and adapt your strategy on the fly. Also keep in mind that by choosing a goal you don’t necessarily give up on the others. If you’re looking for brand awareness, you’ll likely end up driving more traffic to your website and vice-versa.
Here are examples of goals for your social media marketing plan:
Increase brand awareness: Use the reach of your posts and social media campaigns to ensure people will be able to recall or recognize your brand.
Increase engagement: Get more people to like, retweet, share, or comment on your social media posts. You’re looking for actions that show they’re engaged with your content.
Drive website visits: Send more people to your website or blog so they can become customers after reading about your products and services.
Get more sales: Leverage your social media presence to get more sales from new or existing customers.
Social Media Metrics
In the land of social media, one of the biggest challenges is to regularly evaluate your marketing efforts. You need to define KPIs to measure your social media marketing results, otherwise you’ll never know how close you are to achieving your goals. When it comes to digital marketing—social media included—the problem is not lack of metrics, but the excess of them.
With so many metrics, it’s easy to feel lost. That’s why we selected only the most important for you:
Impressions: How many people have seen your ad or post.
Link clicks: How many people clicked on the links you posted. These might be links that direct users to your business’s website or other websites.
CTR: Short for click-through rate. It’s a ratio that shows the percentage of people who clicked on a link. If 100 people saw your ad and only 5 clicked on your link, your CTR is 5%.
Leads: Leads are prospective customers. They’re classified as leads because they show intent to buy your products or services.
CPA: Short for cost per acquisition. Put simply, an acquisition is a new customer.
Conversion rate: The percentage of people who perform a desired action like making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter. If 100 people saw your campaign and only two performed your desired action, your conversion rate is 2%.
Different social networks will have different metrics. While likes are present in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, retweets is a metric exclusive to Twitter. On the other hand, taps forward and taps back are an Instagram metric.
Once you decide which social channels are relevant for your business, you need to start learning about their particular metrics to effectively measure your social media marketing strategy. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the digital marketing jargon, just leave the hard work for the experts at Quick Marketing Group.
Tips to Measure Your Results
Measuring your social media marketing results gets easier after you have set your goals and defined your KPIs.
- Choose a timeframe to measure your results (daily, weekly, monthly) and stick to it.
- Track not only your regular content, but also your campaigns.
- Make sure the metrics you’re using match your goals.
- Use the free built-in analytics tools on most social channels.
- Don’t make several changes to your social media strategy at once. You should do them gradually, so you can understand what’s working and what is not.
- Attribute a value to your acquisitions, but note that some things like branding have intangible value. You have to live with that.
- Hire agencies like Quick Marketing Group that have specialized software to automate tasks, generate reports, and extract insights. It’s faster and more efficient than doing all of it by yourself.
Social Media Optimization
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a set of strategies to make search websites—like Google and Bing—give your business more visibility. Social media optimization borrows some techniques from SEO to make sure your social media strategy is on point.
Keywords are vital not only for SEO, but also for social media optimization. Whether you’re a plumber or a restaurant owner, you can benefit from keyword research to make better use of hashtags and increase your chances of search engines featuring your content high in the search results.
Another lesson that we can learn from SEO is the importance of updating your profiles. Unfortunately, many brands rush when they are creating their social profiles and they end up forgetting to fill out information like description, website URL, and business hours. As a result, they don’t take full advantage of search engine results.
Last but not least, quality always beats out quantity. If you’re on social media, you have to concentrate your efforts to provide your audience with original, creative, and relevant content. Don’t just copy and paste stuff that anyone can find all over the internet.
There’s a famous quote attributed to the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde:
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”.
Now that you learned how to measure your social media marketing results, let our team of experts help you develop a solid social media strategy. Quick Marketing Group has offices in Toronto, New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. For more information about our services, contact us through our website.
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