Participant Strategy & Development, Vanguard
One of the things I love about social media marketing is the data. My team and I like to talk about the immediate feedback we get as soon as something is posted. Within hours, we know if a piece of content is a hit or miss. We’ve trained ourselves to watch engagement, track reach, respond to comments and keep an eye out for influencers. And at a time when metrics are becoming more important, savvy social media marketers often lead the pack in terms of analysis and an understanding of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
There’s a dirty little secret, however, when it comes to tracking all of those real-time numbers: No one cares about your social media metrics.
I know, you may not want to hear it, but it’s true. Hear me out.
What KPIs Marketing Cares About
Metrics are absolutely important to marketers, but the metrics that interest you and your team on a daily basis are not the same ones your senior leaders and CMO care about.
For example, my team and I oversee both social media and content marketing, so we’re interested in not just how content performs, but the quality of the content. I look at clicks on links as one indicator of how well a story’s headline was written (in addition to the social post itself).
Social shares are the greatest indicator of quality because it means that not only did your audience consume your content, but liked it enough to share it with others. Average engagement per post offers a general benchmark to assess the overall quality of content.
While these KPIs are important to my team as we develop slam-dunk content, these aren’t necessarily metrics I’m going to share up the executive ladder. What our leaders care about is behavior, or how our social media accounts influence activity and revenue.
That’s a tough nut to crack, especially in the B2B space.
The KPI Senior Leaders Care About
Essentially, the question that senior leaders want you to answer is: What is the ROI of your social media effort?
If you want more budget, headcount or respect within your organization, then you better have an answer to that question.
For us, social media ROI is about getting content in front of the audience outside the workplace. Like most B2B companies, it’s hard to get calls returned, emails opened and meetings scheduled with clients.
But, let’s say it’s Sunday morning. One of our clients is home, sitting on her couch with a cup of coffee and an iPad. She’s catching up on emails and checking LinkedIn.
If she sees one of our infographics or blog posts in her feed, she’s much more likely to consume it at that moment on a Sunday morning, rather than during business hours, when she’s busy with work and other content bombarding her.
I can measure that engagement, tie it back to behavior on our website and maybe get her to consume more content or follow up with her relationship manager.
If I can tie those behaviors to a specific call to action (CTA) that my sales and relationship team wants, then we can prove social media is adding value to other efforts.
A Direct Revenue Link
While I’d love to show a direct revenue impact, it’s more realistic to illustrate that social media activity leads to clients who are more engaged and have a more positive opinion of our brand in the marketplace.
Your version of ROI likely will be different, and it should be. Social ROI should reflect the priorities of your leaders and their desired outcomes. Maybe it’s lead generation or repeat visitors to your website. Perhaps it’s calls or touch points with your sales force, or incoming calls to an 800 number. It also could be attributes such as brand awareness and recall.
Whatever the goal, I encourage you to take a hard look at your social media metrics and see how you can convert them into a few KPIs that matter to your leaders. It’s a great first step toward true ROI.
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