Elements Design

Last Friday, I was honored to be part of a panel at the Hartford Business Journal’s e-Marketing and Technology Summit. Our topic of discussion was measuring your e-ROI and I’ve been thinking about this topic all weekend. I thought it might be helpful to write a several part series on this topic. I hope you find this series helpful and I’d like to hear back on your thoughts and questions.

Part 1 :: Before You Begin:

• Marketing spend on social media marketing is on the rise. However, some marketers (not us!) still have difficulty validating their investments due to a lack of a formalized standard of measurement of e-ROI. One reason is that many of the benefits of social media marketing are not only measured in dollars and cents (although, these should be measured), but also in intangible gains such as brand awareness, customer interaction, referrals, customer service, search engine relevance increase, and so forth. There are many intangible benefits to social media marketing you will need to consider and measure.
• Having agreed upon social media goals and objectives, buy-in from key decision-makers within your organization and then drafting a social media marketing plan based upon those objectives are all critical first steps before you begin implementation of a social media marketing effort. When Elements is engaged to consult on social media planning and implementation, the very first question we ask for is consensus within the organization on the value and objectives of social media planning. Without it, there cannot be success.
• While it is important to have a social media plan, your plan is not set in stone. It is meant to be tried, tested, measured, adjusted as needed and tried again. Keep rinsing and repeating. This is a fluid document meant to be a continuous activity which requires time, commitment and persistence. Measuring is the secret to online success and will tell you which direction to head to make every marketing dollar and effort count.
• Merely adding up how many Fans you have on Facebook, for example, is of very little value. It is how you interact with those fans that is the basis for measurement. Having a handful of Fans return more than once after “Liking” your page, engaging in conversations, or sharing your brand’s news is far more valuable. This is true for all social media channels. How you measure is the key.
• When measuring, keep your initial objectives in mind. For example, if your goal was to increase your brand awareness and you measure your Twitter followers, retweets, mentions and hash tags you are missing the point. In this example, it is necessary for you to measure if consumers are able to recall your brand when inquired in an appropriate context. Just because I follow you on Twitter, let’s say, does not mean I am able to identify your brand. Therefore, if you do not measure consumer recall, it is impossible to know if your social media efforts moved the needle towards increased brand awareness. You need to pair each social media marketing objective with the correct method for measuring it.

There are many tools and methods for measuring your social media ROI. I will cover some of my best recommendations in next week’s post – Part 2 :: Tools to Use.

I always welcome your feedback, input and conversation. I hope you will leave me a comment or question below and I promise to respond.

~Amy

{image via weheartit}