PR campaigns that don’t consider measurement from the onset are doomed to operate at a serious disadvantage. Before the advent of digital communications and the rise of social media, the discipline struggled with accurately proving the value of its work. Now that there’s a veritable cornucopia of means and methods to provide data to senior leaders, there’s no reason to go back to working in the stone ages when PR lacked the bounty of measurement that it now enjoys.
No matter how great the current state of analytics is, the experience of putting together a visual campaign on social media may bring back nostalgia for the old days. There's just too much to measure. With the various types of media available—video, still images, infographics, etc.—the task of developing a fitting measurement framework at the beginning of a campaign can be uniquely tricky.
For communicators who have doubts about how to use a data-minded approach to visual campaigns, Karen Lee and Natalie White of Stanford Graduate School of Business have these seven steps for setting and evaluating KPIs for visual campaigns.
Step 1: Know Your High-Level Communication and Marketing Goals
The very first step in building any social media campaign is to understand what bigger picture goal you want to help achieve. Is your team looking to engage a particular audience? Are you hoping to drive awareness in a new market? Think about what overall success for your social campaign would look like, and identify specific sub-goals and a target audience that fold up into the larger communication and marketing goals.
Step 2: Identify Relevant Social Platforms
Now it’s time to consider the platforms. Where does your audience spend their time? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, something else? Select one or two platforms to start. Consider the metrics you’ll need to show you hit your goals, and the metrics the platforms actually provide. If you need demographic information on your Instagram followers, you may need to invest in a third party platform—for example, Iconosquare for Instagram.
Step 3: Build Your Content With Metrics in Mind
Before you actually create or source the visuals for each platform, spend some time digging into the performance of your past posts and what others (even if they’re in a totally different industry from you!) have published. For example, what formats (photo collages versus still images versus gifs versus videos, etc.) received the most likes or drove the most traffic to your site? Focus on the metrics you care most about for your campaign and take cues from top-performing posts when building your content.
Join PR News at the Visual Storytelling Boot Camp on Aug. 9 in San Francisco to hear more from Karen Lee and Natalie White and get a comprehensive look at what it takes to succeed with visual storytelling on social.
Step 4: Boost Your Campaign With a Paid Budget
As you’re writing and gathering images for the posts, another element to consider is whether you want to experiment with a paid promotion for your social media campaign. If you have the budget, you can layer on a paid component that reaches more of your existing followers, extends your reach to a target audience or drives a specific engagement action like video views. Even a small $10 budget on some platforms can be a worthwhile investment to give you some data points to support a larger paid campaign in the future. Then, it’s time to launch your campaign!
Step 5: Optimize Your Posts
Keep your key metrics in mind during the entire run of your campaign. If you’re aiming to engage a specific audience on Twitter, make sure you’re monitoring frequently so that you can comment, like, or RT when target users share a photo with your hashtag, for example. This allows you to build relationships with the people who are engaging with your brand. Or if you notice an Instagram photo isn’t performing well compared to other photos you’ve shared, think about posting another photo from a different perspective. Let the metrics guide how you optimize and refine your campaign.
Step 6: Pull Metrics & Evaluate
After your campaign ends, carve out some time to pull metrics for each social platform and your website. Drop the raw numbers into a spreadsheet and then analyze! Look back at the specific goals you set. Did you reach them? If yes, what do you think were the biggest reasons why? If not, what challenges did you face? Where were your shortcomings? Extract three actionable lessons you learned from the metrics and explain in plain terms how they can inform your campaigns going forward.
Step 7: Build a Narrative & Share Your Results
With your raw metrics and analysis in hand, it’s time to develop a report. A few things to remember:
- What is your goal in sharing your results? First, who is the audience for the report and what is meaningful for them? Do you want to influence your boss to give you resources to run another campaign next month? Do you want to empower your marketing teammates to use lessons you learned in their own projects? Then sketch out a narrative that can help you achieve your desired next steps.
- What is the best format to share your results? If you’re just sharing the metrics with your boss, maybe a one-page recap report will suffice. If you’re looping in multiple teams, consider a slide deck. Tailor the format of your report to make it efficient and relevant to who will be reading it.
- How social media-savvy are the people reading the report? If they’re not familiar with the definitions of “impressions,” “RTs,” etc., you’ll want to consider adding an appendix or explaining certain sections of your report in broader terms.
Follow Karen: @karenlee
Follow Natalie: @nataliemwhite
Follow Mark: @MarkRenfree