the social metrics map - simply...

How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals

The Social Metrics Map

1The Social Metrics Map - How to Tie Social Media to Business Goals

In 2009, I found an internship with a small Seattle startup. It was my first marketing job. Over the next three months, I worked my butt off. I showed up early, worked extra hours, did everything they told me to. I was really hoping to get that full-time job at the end of my internship.

After three months, one of the founders came to me and said “We’d like to talk to you about your future with the company.” I was really excited. I was pretty sure he was going to tell me “We want to offer you a full time job and you can start on Monday.” He didn’t.

Instead, he told me that I was not meeting his expectations. Since they liked me, they wanted to extend my internship by three months so I had an opportunity to turn it around. I was devastated.

I went home that weekend and started by blaming everyone else. How could they not see how hard I’ve worked? How could they not recognize how much effort I’ve put into this internship? How do they not understand the value I bring to this company?

After some time I realized that what I was really upset about was why my expectations were so far off base. So I did a lot of thinking that weekend, and realized that it was my fault, for one specific reason:

I just expected them to evaluate my success the same way I do, without discussing this with them, or looking ahead. I was hoping that at the end we could all say “He did well.”

Introduction

Uri Bar-Joseph, Sr. Director of Marketing at Simply Measured

My definition of success was not shared by the people around me.


1.

2.

3.

Identify Objectives: Why it’s important to identify objectives, and how to do it

Organize Social Metrics: How to take all the metrics out there and organize them into simple groups that help prove success

Set Goals: Setting realistic goals with the appropriate objective and metrics

Over the years in marketing, I’ve realized that success needs to be defined up front, not at the end. If you leave it to someone else, or if you leave it undefined, you’ll be disappointed...maybe even fired.

In this guide, I’d like to walk you through a very simple 3-step plan to allow you to make your expectations a reality and avoid the mistake I made.

We’ll talk about:


AWARENESS

DECISION

ADVOCACY

ADOPTION

CONSIDERATION 1. Identify Objectives:This is the marketing funnel. Many marketers use the buyer’s journey as a framework, which is similar. The funnel is a linear representation of the buyer’s journey, designed to align marketing and sales activities.

These are the stages that a buyer goes through when trying to make a decision about a product or a service, and even after they purchase.

Companies create functions, programs, and campaigns that allow their marketing team to move the buyer between those stages. So we align each stage with an objective.

The objectives are very similar, but they include an action. For example, the action in the awareness stage is “create awareness”.

Create Awareness

Generate Demand

Drive Conversion

Delight Customers

Inspire Evangelism

This is important because it leads to the next step, which is identifying which social strategy will allow you to achieve that objective. We’ve outlined that here.

What TrustRadius found in a survey last summer is that 50% of them can easily identify these, but they still find it challenging to connect the dots.


Marketing Objectives

AWARENESS

DECISION

ADVOCACY

ADOPTION

CONSIDERATION

43%

25%

12%

6%

11%


When we asked which stage social media supports, 43% said they support brand awareness. Only 6% are focused on adoption.

What Marketing Objective Do You Support?

AWARENESS

DECISION

ADVOCACY

ADOPTION

CONSIDERATION

Expose target audience to brand content

Generate engagement with brand content

Drive target audience to brand offers

Drive customer engagement with brand product/services

Activate customer influencers


Do You Have The Right Strategy?Identifying the marketing objective you need to support will allow you to come up with the right strategy for execution.

AWARENESS

DECISION

ADVOCACY

ADOPTION

CONSIDERATION

2. Organize Social Metrics

ACTIVITY

While a lot of marketers are capable of identifying the correct objective and putting together the appropriate strategy, a lot of them fail in this stage.

We asked why, and the answer is that there are so many metrics out there. There is a lot of confusion about what is important, which metrics matter where, and what I should look at. On top of that, metrics with the same name have different definitions depending on the network you’re analyzing. It’s exhausting!

Each year Forrester Research gives The Groundswell Award to social media programs that apply, and all Forrester asks is that in that application, they share metrics that prove their success.

In 2015, 84 companies applied, and among them, there were 57 different success metrics. There is no way that each of these 57 metrics are relevant.

What we see from this is that the social media market has a metrics overload.

Marketers are using the metrics that are easy, instead of using the right ones. So let’s organize this mess.

We identified three main types of metrics that will allow us to take this mess and put them in the right buckets.

Posts & Promotion


Less than 50% of marketers have identified the correct metric to evaluate their success.

““

IMPACTTraffic &

Conversions

SUCCESSImpressions & Engagement

I chose brand awareness since it’s the most popular stage among marketers. The corresponding strategy would be to expose the target audience to our content and message. In order to do that, we need to go out there and post and promote on social. This means that the activity metrics would be posts and promotions.

Once we do that, there’s a result of that activity. We capture that with the success metrics, which are impressions and reach. Finally, the impact on the business is Share of Voice (SOV) and Top of Mind Awareness (ToMA).

Stage: Brand awareness

Marketing Objective: Create awareness

Social Media Strategy: Expose audience to brand’s content

Activity Metrics: Posts and promotions

Success Metrics: Impressions and reach

Impact on Business: SOV and ToMA

It’s that simple. We took these 57 metrics, and we narrowed them down to two success metrics. If your objective is to create brand awareness, in order to prove success you need to measure impressions and reach, and to connect it to the business, you need to focus on SOV and ToMA.


Here’s an example:

Social Metrics Map

Expose target audience to brand content

Posts, promotions (boosts)

Impressions, reach SOV, Top of Mind AwarenessCreate awareness

Generate engagement of target audience with brand content

Posts, responses # of engagements, types of engagements Visitors/traffic (online or offline)

Generate demand

Drive target audience to brand offers Posts, promotions Link clicks

Conversions (purchases, lead sub-missions, app downloads)

Drive conversion

Drive engagement with brand product/services

Responses (i.e. social customer care)

(positive) earned mentions, customer care metrics (responses times & qty)

Sentiment and satisfactionDelight customers

Activate customer influencers

Posts, outreach to influencers, reshares

Earned impressions, earned reach, social UGC

Referrals, influencer activity, positive word of mouth, NPS

Inspire evangelism

OBJECTIVEBUYER’S JOURNEYSOCIAL MEDIA

STRATEGY SOCIAL ACTIVITY SOCIAL KPI’S BUSINESS IMPACT

PRESENTED BY:

BUYER'S JOURNEY STAGE A person relative position to a buying decision

MARKETING OBJECTIVE The brand’s desired outcome from a marketing activity

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY The brand’s plan of action to achieve the marketing objective

SOCIAL ACTIVITY The social actions the brand must take to execute strategy

SOCIAL KPI’S The results of the social actions taken

BUSINESS IMPACT The downstream effect of the social results on the business

DECISION

ADOPTION

AWARENESS

ADVOCACY

CONSIDERATION


We created this process for each stage of the marketing funnel, and mapped each stage of the buyer’s journey with the objective, strategy, and different metrics you need.

This will allow you to tie the way you prove your value with the buyer’s journey and your overall business objective.

Social Metrics Map

3. Set Realistic Goals

Setting goals with no information is a gamble. We don’t have to gamble as social marketers, because we have an abundance of information.

Setting realistic goals is about a reference point. A goal is taking one of the metrics we’ve discussed, and attaching a value. So if impressions is the metric I’m focused on, the goal would be a certain number (a value) of impressions, during a specific time frame, with a specific audience, etc.

The first step is to set a reference point. To the right you’ll find five ways to do this, ranked from most effective to least.

they’re generic, and not always relevant

Common sense (guesstimation): If you have a good idea of what your goal should be, this is better than nothing

5.

4.

Establish a Point of Reference


1.

2.3.

Your own baseline: If you did it before, use your own baseline to set realistic goals

Peers: What kind of success have like-minded companies seen?

Competitors: What type of results have your competitors seen?

Industry Benchmarks: These can be difficult to navigate because

This process of mapping metrics to the buyer’s journey is the key to taking control of social media goals.

Start by using the funnel to identify your objective, take all the metrics you have access to and narrow them down to two, and finally set goals by identifying good reference points.

Conclusion

If you don’t define what success means for your social team, who will?


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Copyright © 2010–2015 Simply Measured, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

About Simply MeasuredSimply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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