Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When it comes to content marketing, your Chief Marketing Officer wants to see real, metrics-driven results. From storytelling to generating thought leadership, facilitating customer engagement and moving prospects through your sales funnel, it’s imperative that you develop a solid analytics strategy to navigate your content marketing maze and measure success.

Be sure to pinpoint areas of low engagement so you can make improvements, but also look beyond the numbers to fully understand why performance may be weak.

When thinking about virality, look at who made it go viral in the first place and understanding the quality of your audience and those who are reading and sharing your content.Word of mouth is powerful. When people value your services, they are more inclined to make their perspectives known....

In social media we have no shortage of data; our key challenge is to understand the data and to create insights that will help us improve what we do. Generating actionable insights from social data has been the core focus of the Zuum team. This week in the SMToolbox, we take a look at their tool and how Zuum's reports and analytics can benefit social media marketers.

Zuum bills itself as a social content strategy tool; in essence, it is a social analytics tool, but with a difference. The Zuum team are really focused on helping you to understand what causes things to happen in the social world. Thus, if you see a spike in engagement or rapid growth in followers, Zuum will help you identify what caused these particular changes. Zuum also allows you to compare your company's performance with that of other brands and gain insights that will help you improve your own performance....

Studies analyzing the value of Facebook fans, like this one from Syncapse, have been attracting lot of attention recently. So what really matters in measuring marketing results?

Studies analyzing the value of Facebook fans, like this one from Syncapse, have been attracting lot of attention recently.

The primary results of that study were that Facebook brand fans are:

- 80 percent more likely than non-fans to be users of a brand

- Spend 43 percent more than non-fans in respective categories

- 11 percent more likely to continue using the brand than non-fans (loyal consumers)

- 85 percent more likely to recommend your brand compared with 60 percent of non-fans

And that consumers like brand pages for two reasons:

- Coupons, discounts, and rewards

- Showing support for brands or receiving regular updates

While this study and others like it point to positive attributes of Facebook fans, it’s critical for brand marketers to really stop and ask themselves: Isn’t this just pointing out that good customers are more likely to like our Facebook page?...

With all the marketing technology available it is much easier to track key marketing metrics, leverage marketing analytics, and measure the influence of marketing programs....

With the B2B customer journey being almost 70% digital, marketing program results can be measured more than ever before. But what’s curious to me is that most CEOs are not insisting on showing how a company’s investment is paying off. Manufacturing is measured, sales is measured, customer service is measured. But measuring marketing and its impact on revenue is not standard fare.

Most CMOs can tell you how many leads their organization generated last month or last year. But most can’t tell you what happened to those leads. They can tell you how many Website hits this month and whether the number of interested parties is growing or shrinking. But CMOs often don’t know how that activity is connected to revenue. Many CMOs can tell you how a nurture campaign is working to drive new leads but they can’t tell you if the quality and quantity is sufficient or whether sales has done an effective job in following up and developing sales from the leads. Mostly I think this is a lag in technology adoption. Here’s how I see it....