Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Return on Investment (ROI) of social media marketing can be difficult to pin down. Results can’t be guaranteed, and there is no way of knowing how your audience will react to the things you share online. While ROI proves that your marketing efforts are successful, it will only do so if you’re tracking and measuring the right things, and have ruled out other influencing factors.  Here are five ways to troubleshoot your social campaign’s ROI and measure your results more accurately:

in aIt’s a great way to keep in touch with friends, create new relationships, build communities and promote your blog/brand.

But when you’re using social specifically for marketing purposes; monitoring mentions, tracking your progress and gauging the impact that social is having on your blog or business are all important tasks that can be incredibly time consuming.

The truth is that these tasks don’t have to be no where near as time consuming or difficult.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools available to save you time and help you get far better results through effective social media monitoring.

In this post I’m going to show you some of the best tools. They range from free to paid and from basic to enterprise level tools so there’s something for everyone here....

I’m the type to always plug our Buffer blog URL into a tool to get feedback. If it’s free and simple, count me in.

I’ve bookmarked several of my favorites and dug up a handful of other useful graders and tools to come up with the 12 website graders, content scores, and social media ratings that you see below. Take them for a spin, and let me know which ones are most beneficial for you and your content!...

Analytics platforms are essential for merchants to glean insight into what drives their traffic. Google Analytics is the popular choice, but there are many other analytics tools available.

Here is a list of analytics tools to help you collect and measure your customer data. Some of these applications are general analytics programs, akin to Google Analytics, to quantify traffic. Other applications look at specific aspects of the customer and should be used in conjunction with a general analytics program....

Is your seat belt on? Here are 33 more (plus an extra 1) marketing facts. (Did you miss the previous two stat-laced articles?)

- 8% of Internet users account for 85% of online display ad clicks.

- In 2013, 62% of emails were opened on a mobile device. Mobile is important.

- Brands that create an average of 15 blog posts per month, receive 1,200 new leads per month.

- 69% of content marketers feel a lack of time is their greatest challenge....

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the information at our fingertips and get distracted by vanity metrics. Be honest, is page views really the most important thing for you to look at?)

So what should we be paying attention to? Which metrics matter more than others? And how do you measure the true business impact of your content?

Ultimately, it’s about the bottom line. All of the traffic in the world doesn’t mean much if you aren’t getting any new customers out of it.

Here’s a roundup of the core metrics that content marketers should keep an eye on if they want to know whether their content marketing is truly paying off....

Frivolous entertainment is taking over news, readers don't know what they want, and native ads really work—just as George Gallup predicted, nearly nine decades ago.

...George Gallup, the man synonymous with modern political polling, was a University of Iowa student who didn’t think that open broadsheets strewn across the floor of street trolleys made for particularly good data. In 1928, he wrote a thesis proposing a new scientific method for measuring audiences. Don’t stalk your readers, he said, and don't snoop through their train trash, either. Meet your readers.

Shared exclusively with The Atlantic, Gallup's 1928 thesis, "An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper," is an eerily prescient work, which reflects on today's discussions about viral media, news analytics, and even native advertising, all while showing that we've been having the same debates in this business for the last 80 years....

Nine out of ten in-house marketers say that content marketing will become more important, but just 38 percent has a content strategy.

There’s a gap to bridge. The infographic by Pardot.com shows interesting data points, among others the four content marketing metrics categories.

The four types of content marketing metrics can be divided in:

• consumption
• Sharing
• lead generation
• sales.

As shown in another point made in the infographic (most popular metrics), the research behind it shows that marketers are focusing on Consumption and Sharing metrics but by also taking into account Lead generation and Sales it keeps the content aligned with business objectives....

The internet has given marketers many things, one of which is more ways to reach potential customers directly. But with this comes further challenges, most notably, how do you work out whether all that online activity is having any real impact on sales?

Tweeting, posting, uploading videos; that’s the easy part. Working out whether your efforts are having a genuine impact is often the place where lots of marketers and businesses come unstuck.

Why? Because genuinely meaningful measurement can be tricky. It’s easy to measure how many followers you have or how many likes you’ve got on your last Facebook post but that doesn’t really tell you anything.

Since it is almost impossible to monitor every website manually, having a social media monitoring tool or tools is an absolute must in today’s digital world.

Besides the reputation management angle, social media monitoring tools have a tremendous amount of additional benefits and value for a business. Here are a few to be aware of...

Do you want to understand your social media return-on-investment (ROI)?

Are you tracking the customer journey in Google Analytics?

In this article you’ll discover how to collect and analyze the data you need to properly calculate how social media marketing impacts your business....

The truth is that, unless you set objectives and keep track of your blog’s analytics, you can’t really answer this question. Are you growing on a monthly basis? Are you producing interesting content? Are you leveraging SEO? All these questions can be answered by a simple look at your analytics dashboard.I want to share 11 of the analytics metrics I use to track my blog to guide my growth and measure success....

Do you review your website’s metrics on a regular basis?

Are you struggling to figure out how you can better use the data?

To know which of your marketing efforts are most successful, you need to look beyond the numbers. Explore what they mean and figure out what parts of your strategy need to be adjusted to increase your reach.

Here are five ways metrics can improve your social media marketing....