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Is social ineffective or just invisible?
But the challenge for social media—and for word of mouth marketing—is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative.
Forrester Research suggests that word of mouth is part of 80% of all purchase funnels. At least some of this word of mouth is occurring via social media, with brand or product mentions spawning searches and/or direct URL entries that are included in this data. But, because social media wasn’t the final link in the chain, it gets none of the creditfor the desirable consumer behavior it spurred....
The influential blogger you’ve been pitching name dropped your product with a link back to your website — high five! The WSJ business and technology article mentioning your company just published, cheers! Your company just made the top 10 list of best companies to work for, party on! The blog post interviewing your CEO as one of the industry’s leading innovators just went viral thanks to his inspiring quotes, company happy hour!
How do you measure all that digital ink?
With today’s access to advanced technology, the public relations industry must keep up with the data pace. Although dealing with numbers and statistics is a relatively new practice for PR specialists, it’s now part of the requirement to access and analyze public relations ROI. In the past, it was acceptable for PR to be a bit fuzzy when it came to measurement. For instance, an article about your business may be published in multiple publications, and may even result in an overall successful campaign, but how you do know which publication brought in the most traffic? Was it all of them or just one or two? This is where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics 101 Webinar hosted by Sally Falkow, Digital PR Strategists, and Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Website Promotion Specialists, gives us an overview of this valuable — and free — tool....
WPP CEO Martin Sorrell told analysts on a Wednesday morning conference call that he’d like to see Rentrak and comScore “come together” to devise a solution for what Sorrell described as the “faulty measurement” for media that exists in the U.S. WPP has made investments in both those companies.
Asked if he meant that the two media research companies should merge to create a new business entity, Sorrell replied that he would “welcome cooperation of any nature” by the companies to address U.S. media measurement — particularly online video measurement, whose value is being increasingly questioned by clients. Marketers are worried about viewability levels and related standards and verification issues, Sorrell said.
Sorrell added that the current two-second viewability standard is “pretty ludicrous,” and that some clients are rolling back their commitments to online video because they can’t justify the investments based on current measurement and verification standards....
“Measuring KPIs depends hugely on the client and their specific goals,” says Mangiaforte. “We also go deeper for clients, identifying and reporting on the number of influencers who participate in campaigns and breaking down their demographics to give our clients an enormous amount of intelligence about their social audience.” She completes this measurement through a mix of proprietary software and tools such as Keyhole and on-platform analytics, using this assortment of tools to, “identify influencers and measure their impact in terms of reach and engagement once we deploy them for our clients.”
It is important to consider the big picture when choosing the specific data to collect. Ask yourself, does this directly contribute to my company’s bottom line? How can we correlate brand awareness to lead generation or conversions? Once you have taken a step back to establish priorities, you can take a deeper, more informed dive into the data that matters most – ultimately, benefitting you and your team. Collecting data points for data’s sake isn’t going to solve anything....
Using analytics to come up with a directed strategy for developing content has become second nature. Did you know that you also can use analytics for your content auditing? Let’s take an inside look at content audits and how analytics figure into them.
Content auditing involves a detailed analysis of a website’s content to weed out poorly performing pages, identify outdated pages or wrong information, and learn which pages have poor SEO built into them. The aim is to fix these problems to streamline the operation of the site and to keep visitors (both new and returning) happy. Content auditing also allows you to revamp existing content to increase its search ranking or to develop content similar to previously successful pages. It’s one of the best ways to maintain the ongoing quality of your content....
Before you can determine whether or not your content marketing strategy is successful, you need to know what behavior you’re looking to create in your audience. The go-to assumption is that content marketing will drive sales, but if you’re hoping to push more towards thought leadership and positive branding through your strategy, you may be looking at the process differently. You might want to see: • An increase in newsletter sign-ups
• An increase in the number of customers who click through to a targeted sales site
• An increase in the number of shares or comments on your posts
These different metrics drive different goals. Let’s look closer at some of these objectives to determine what might help you determine content marketing success....
Despite all the overwhelming interest in content marketing, there is often little to show for it. According to the same studies mentioned above, only 38% of B2B and 37% of B2C content marketers believe their campaigns are effective.
A more stunning figure is that only 23% of B2C and and 21% of B2B marketers say that they are successful at tracking their content efforts. Yes, we can wave with reach numbers of our paid ad impressions and with Facebook engagement rates. And show increased numbers of page views on our website. But are these soft metrics persuading our CFO?...
Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.
In fact, if you’re whipping up blog posts and infographics without business objectives, you’re basically partaking in a very expensive version of arts and crafts.
Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay.
Let’s talk about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts....
Analyzing the impact of your content doesn’t need to be a costly endeavor. These nine analytic tools are free (or almost free). Identifying which ones help inform your content marketing goals, using them regularly, and adjusting your content so your results are aligned even better with your objectives will boost the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.
In spite of many improvements in technology and our ability to collect data in 2015, some marketers may still struggle with measuring promotions or strategies — like content marketing — effectively.
While there is no magic content-marketing-measurement panacea, there are good ways to monitor content marketing’s impact on business goals, and some relatively clear steps you can take toward proper measurement....
You’re rocking social media.
You’re finding great content to share, you’re writing the best headlines, you’re engaging and automating and seeing your brand soar.
How will you let your boss or client know all the great stuff you’re up to?Is there an easy way to see for yourself how things are going?...
But in many areas of marketing, more doesn't always mean better. Take your marketing data, for example. Though having data about your marketing programs is crucial to analyzing your success and making changes to future programs, some individual metrics aren't actually that helpful. And with only so much time in your day, you can't afford to spend your time analyzing data that won't help you make better marketing decisions.
If you want to get a full run-down on the metrics you should (and shouldn't be tracking, tune into our webinar on March 11 called Smart Reporting: How to Stop Wasting Time and Make Better Marketing Decisions. To register for that webinar, click here.
In the meantime, let's take a look at some of the metrics you might not want to track -- and give you suggestions for different metrics to look at instead....
So, we need to introduce another dimension that would make content tracking more practical — that of the marketing goal.
Align your content metrics efforts with the exact marketing goals.
Of course, sometimes you'd be able to achieve multiple goals with one piece of content, but usually there is one goal that dominates...
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Creating a social media report can be key to explaining your progress on social media. You can choose the stats that matter and deliver it in an easy-to-understand way; there’re tons of personal insights to gain as well as valuable info for your boss or client.
We’re grateful for the example of so many Buffer users who are already creating social media reports of their own to share with a boss or client. I’d love to share a bit about how these reports come together—and how you can make one for yourself....
When it comes to free analytics software, nothing comes close to Google Analytics.
Over 28,365,107 sites use it, which makes it the most popular analytics solution on the market.
Although it has some limitations, it’s fantastic as a free product.
However, most webmasters see the basic graphs and stats that Google Analytics (GA) gives you and never dig any deeper.
This is a shame because there are some really useful advanced features just waiting for you to be used. And I’m about to show you what they are.
And although they’re advanced, they aren’t that complicated to implement or use. I’m going to break them down step by step in this post, and I encourage you to start using as many of them as you find useful.
I remember sometimes being a bit fuzzy with my answer to that question. I’ll have been really enjoying sharing and engaging with people, forgetting completely about the awesome stats and analysis at my fingertips. And knowing these social media stats can be incredibly valuable—for connecting deeper with my audience, for curating finely-tuned content, and for growing a following and a brand.
So where do you go for these important social media stats?
And what do you do with them once you’ve found them?
I’ve been fortunate to spend some time hunting, gathering, exporting, and exploring the social media stats for myself and for Buffer. I’d love to share what I’ve learned along the way about finding the best social media stats and creating some cool reports....
Still obsessed with YouTube views as the key metric for knowing whether a video really connected with your audience? Not so fast, says ad agency Solve, which embarked on an experiment recently to see whether it could make literally the most uncreative video go viral.
The Minneapolis agency created a four-minute video that was completely blank—no images, no sound, no title, no description. (A title, "The Blank Video Project," was added after the project ended.) The only thing it had was a click-through URL to the agency's website, solve-ideas.com. Solve promoted the video as pre-roll to U.S. viewers using YouTube TrueView In-Stream advertising. Viewers could skip it after five seconds. Solve was charged if a viewer watched at least 30 seconds.
In the end, the video generated more than 100,000 views for an investment of just $1,400—or a remarkably affordable 1.4 cents per view. The ad was served 227,819 times, meaning about 46 percent of viewers watched for at least 30 seconds. Solve says viewers on average watched 61 percent (or 2:26) of the video, and 22 percent made it all the way to the end—seemingly solid engagement metrics. Nearly 1 percent even clicked through to the website. The video did not earn any likes, shares or new channel subscribers, however....
Whichever way you spin it, far too many marketers get caught up chasing relatively unimportant metrics. I don’t care if you’ve grown your website from one million to four million visitors, how has it impacted your bottom line?
Profit is, and will always be, the most important metric for any business – online or offline. Profit gives you sanity.
Despite profit’s underlying importance, it isn’t the only business metric worth tracking. After all, you can interpret a lot about the state of your business from a wide range of metrics.
Today, I want to cut through the unimportant metrics and straight to the good stuff: six on-site metrics that all online businesses should be tracking. I’ll also be providing some quick tips on how to improve your performance for each one....
There are so many metrics that can be measured in social media, that sometimes it can be overwhelming to narrow it down to something bite-sized, and find a good measure of success. Since social media also touches everything from attracting prospects to delighting customers in the buyer’s journey, figuring out what metrics to report on can be a challenge.
In this post, I will break down the metrics we observe at HubSpot, how we define success, and how we make that decision each month. And the best part: we'll wrap up with how to actually measure those metrics at HubSpot....
In other words, legacy brands do have a leg up on smaller retailers when it comes to ecommerce and it’s in the amount of intelligence they are using to drive conversions and increase revenue.
That said, data and analytics should be democratized throughout the ecommerce space, and no, Google Analytics isn’t enough. Your big box competitors aren’t simply monitoring new and repeat visitors, or from where their web traffic comes. No, they are using enhanced ecommerce analytics to push visitors down a purchase funnel from the moment they land on the site.
Below, the top metrics these retailers are using and how you should be using them, too....
Traditional social media listening platforms don’t collect this location-tagged social data. Think you’re not missing much of the conversation? Think again. It’s time to complete your social media strategy with location-tagged posts, and there are infinite ways to leverage this data for your social listening and engagement campaigns.
So, what are the top five ways you can activate your location-based social media data to ensure you hear the complete conversation?
But how you know when the number of interactions you’re getting is good? And what does “good” mean, anyway?
The answer: It’s all relative. A “good” amount for engagement for a marketer in the software industry could be a totally different number than for a marketer in the financial services industry. That’s why we put together the 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report -- it's 49 pages of of social media data and analysis from over 7,000 business in nine industries.In this post, I’ll analyze our findings on audience participation on social media for each of the industries represented.
Find your industry below (or use our jump-to links to head directly to your industry) to see how much interaction is happening relative to how much a company posts a week on social media, and also get some key takeaways for how to apply this to your own social strategy....
If you’re like most marketers, you’re waiting for some sign that says your content is “working.” Unfortunately, though, most marketers suffer from two major roadblocks when it comes to understanding whether or not their content efforts are paying off.
1. They don’t have the infrastructure in place to measure the right data.
2. They don’t know what the “right data” might be.
Like any aspect of marketing, your content must have defined objectives that align with the goals of the organization....
Social media has provided people the ability to voice their opinion on companies, brands, people—in short, anything and anyone. What people say can be good or bad, but that alone doesn’t determine your social media success. The way your company listens and engages with these social media posts is what dictates how those opinions influence your online presence and brand sentiment.
Social media monitoring (also known as social listening) allows you to gain powerful insight into your customers, competitors, and industry influencers. To take full advantage of social media listening, you need to spread your monitoring across several social media channels, and keep a constant watch for new opportunities.
However, acquiring these insights takes time, and the use of the right tools. To provide you a hand in choosing which social media monitoring tools to use, we’ve compiled a list of 9 tools to get you started. To make it even easier, they’re all available in the Hootsuite App Directory....
Content marketing can be one of the most effective ways to generate and convert leads, but it’s only effective if you make well-informed improvements to your strategy over time.
And, of course, you can only make these types of improvements if you have the data needed to inform your decisions.
Effective content marketing is a synergy of two skillsets and you need to combine the science and data discipline of a scientist with the creative genes of an artist....
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Does social media work for ecommerce? New research from Monetate says no, but Jay Baer says there may be a catch.