Now more than ever, businesses and brands have access to an unprecedented number of potential customers, readers, subscribers and fans.
While the internet and search engines have made connecting with audiences on a global scale much easier, it is social media that is currently revolutionizing the marketing game.
Social media marketing – in comparison to traditional marketing techniques – is cheap, easy and all-encompassing. Nevertheless, it is not automatically guaranteed to deliver pragmatic, beneficial results.
So, how can you verify whether or not your social media marketing campaigns are delivering the kinds of results you need?
Keep reading to find out how best to measure the success of your social media marketing.
Table of Contents
Define Campaign Goals First
Before the first ad campaign is launched on social media, a brand or business must first ask itself, ‘what are the social media marketing goals of this endeavor?’
Obviously, the short and sweet answer would be “to perform well and convert”, but what does that look like for your brand?
Whether you are wanting to generate more subscriptions, sell more products, earn more likes, shares or follows on social media, or something entirely different, defining these goals at the onset allows you to create campaigns best-suited for these goals. It also allows you to select the right metrics for measuring your campaign’s success.
Select the Right Metrics for Your Campaign
In knowing your overall goals, selecting the right campaign metrics makes measuring success a lot easier.
For example, brands wanting to boost name recognition may focus on measuring reach and volume. Those wanting to boost social engagement would instead focus on metrics such as comments, shares and overall engagement rate.
Many brands are obsessed with driving traffic from social media to their websites. In this case, tracking URLs and conversion rates are the best metrics to measure. Solutions such as UTM Star are designed to make analyzing traffic and measuring marketing success easier.
By helping brands track their UTM links and visualize performance, services like these make tracking social media success a breeze.
Monitor Results Consistently
Brands seeking to extract maximum value from social media marketing won’t necessarily just run the occasional ad, but will instead focus on maintaining a marketing presence for weeks or months on end.
As such, it is imperative that constant monitoring of results occurs. This allows you to utilize the goals and metrics selected to evaluate performance: are your campaigns delivering the results you expected, exceeding them, or failing to live up to expectations?
You’ll only know these answers if consistent monitoring occurs. This is where – especially as time progresses – the use of benchmarks and precedents can help you determine whether a specific campaign needs reworking or not.
Perform A/B Testing
Last but not least, when campaigns don’t perform as expected – or when they do even better than you had hoped – you want to understand what led to these performances.
A/B testing is an excellent way to leverage social media marketing experimentation into tangible long-term improvements. By running multiple variations of ads, you can figure out if there are key elements leading to over-performance and under-performance. For future attempts, you can build ads that feature all of the pros and none of the cons. To learn more about A/B testing, click here.
Social media marketing requires plenty of experimentation and tweaking, but you can create the right path forward by following a few key pieces of advice.
By establishing goals first, choosing ideal metrics to monitor those goals, persistently keeping track of performance and using A/B testing to figure out the best variations possible, your social media performance will exponentially improve.
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