We’ve touched on various marketing metrics and conversions to monitor in order to get the most out of your marketing budget. Now we’re looking away from the core website to all of the other places your business shows up online. Below are some social marketing metrics that you don’t want to ignore.
Google Metrics
Google has proven to be an incredible tool for both consumers and businesses. Having an online presence, identifiable by google, enables your business to be seen by just about anyone in the world. As mentioned in previous blogs, Google Analytics is a go-to tool for monitoring key metrics for lead sources and SEO purposes. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is another resource for business owners to manage their online presence.
Google Business Profile
This platform gives business owners the ability to manage their online reputation, create posts, view analytics, and share more about their businesses. Google My Business is an exceptional tool, especially for businesses that provide in-person goods and services such as clothing boutiques, catering, dog grooming, professional services, and medical care. Business owners can view the following insights:
- Total activity (website visits, calls, photo views, direction requests)
- Views
- Searches
Google Reviews
One of the most important factors of an online presence is your public reputation—most frequently expressed in reviews. Google reviews are a top resource for consumers seeking just about any imaginable product or service. As a business owner, it is crucial to manage and respond to both positive and negative reviews.
Side note: While no one likes to see a negative review about their business, Google reviews give the business the opportunity to publicly respond to the consumer. It’s up to the business owner to attempt to make it right with the consumer, and in some cases, it might not happen. Business owners can learn from these reviews and adopt any necessary changes to remediate issues within to avoid future negative reviews. That being said, negative reviews happen to everyone. A few sprinkled among an overwhelming amount of positive reviews won’t have a long-term negative effect. The absolute best defense against negative reviews is a long-term commitment to regularly asking satisfied customers to leave a review. In this way, you’ll quickly bury the negatives.
There are additional industry-specific review sites that should be monitored closely to maintain a positive online reputation. These can vary widely depending upon your industry; be sure you are aware of the places where people may be mentioning your business.
Email Newsletters
Email lists should be a top priority for every business, regardless of size and industry. An email list is a reliable way to reach your contacts when social media algorithm changes prevent people from seeing your posts. Sending out a regular email newsletter to your subscribers is a great way to stay connected, share new services or products, gain valuable insights, and even ask for customer feedback on current or new ideas. Below are the key metrics to track when it comes to email.
Number of emails sent
This is the total number of emails sent for each campaign. In the majority of email management tools, users can create target or segmented email lists from the master list. If the number of emails delivered differs significantly from the number of emails sent, your list likely has a high bounce rate and should be cleaned.
Opens
Opens refers to the total number of emails that were opened by subscribers. When performing A/B tests, you will want to monitor opens, which can help you identify which subject headlines catch the interest of your subscribers best. Due to a variety of factors, email open rates aren’t 100% accurate. It’s important to benchmark your list performance against past campaigns (as opposed to looking at the open rates other businesses are getting). Open rate is a useful metric when you see a different number than what’s typical for your list.
Clicks
Clicks are one of the most important metrics to monitor when sending email campaigns and newsletters. Clicks are the total number of times a link in the email was clicked. This could be based on your call to action in the email, a blog post you shared, a specific product or service, or simply your website. Monitoring clicks can help business owners identify where a new lead came from as well as how attractive the content was for subscribers. Again, like open rates, clicks aren’t 100% accurate. Look at the links that are getting more clicks vs fewer to see where the interests of your audience members are strongest. Compare click rates with website traffic data to get a more complete picture of the ways email is driving traffic.
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Social Media
If your business is utilizing social media for marketing and as a part of an online presence, it is important to understand the associated metrics and what they really mean. The significance of each of the following metrics is dependent upon your goals and how social media fits into your marketing strategy.
Followers
Depending on the social media platform being used, followers may also be referred to as page likes. Knowing just how many followers your page has can be important to track over time, especially if your goal is to grow your social media presence. That said, no platform guarantees a follower will see your content consistently. To that end, engagement is the metric to watch.
Engagement
Engagement might just be one of the most important social media metrics to analyze. Generally, engagement is a measure of the total number of actions taken on a given post or piece of content, including likes, shares, comments, mentions, and saves that can be tracked per post or as a page total for a period of time. Tracking engagement rates can help to determine what kind of content resonates with your audience, the best times to post, and whether you’re making progress on your social media marketing goals.
Engagement can also help to identify how responsive your audience is to your content and whether your followers are actually seeing the things you post. Are they following because they are truly interested in the brand and content, or were they told to follow in order to get a one-time discount and have yet to interact with your posts?
Depending on your social media goals and call to action, a post with a high number of likes and few comments or vice versa can be a great tool for growing your audience. Be aware that consistent high engagement is a pay-to-play game on the majority of social media platforms these days.
Clicks and Click-Through Rate
Clicks can be considered a form of engagement, but generally they take the user off the social media platform. By monitoring clicks, you can see whether your posts are driving traffic to your website. Perhaps a more useful metric than clicks alone is the click-through rate (CTR). A post’s CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (i.e. number of times your post appeared in someone’s feed). CTR becomes a critical metric when sharing content offers and posting paid ads because it helps to provide context and meaning to the number of clicks.
But do these numbers tell us everything? Not necessarily. Here’s why content marketing metrics don’t tell the whole story.
Marketing without monitoring key metrics can be a gamble, filled with guessing and wasted marketing dollars. Identifying your goals, knowing what to look for, and how to adjust your strategy as needed is key to making your marketing perform. We regularly monitor key marketing metrics as a part of our marketing strategy for all clients. If you’re ready to get more out of your marketing budget, send us a message.
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