Effective social media marketing is key to elevating your brand within the digital space. Many entrepreneurs understand that social is a driving force in the current landscape – but they haven’t yet figured out how to navigate it. Perhaps this is the same for you-you may have already built your social media strategy and begun execution, but you do not yet know what key metrics will help you define success.
The importance of social media marketing today is to connect with your audience on a deeper level than ever before, with the capability of targeting the exact consumer you want to engage with. The impact of social media on marketing strategy is plentiful. Long gone are the days of print magazines and impressions, with the hope of increased brand recall and greater intent to purchase. Social media advertising allows you to fully track your consumer flow, from exposure to an advertisement to scrolling on your site, all the way to purchase completion. Though you may still run print, partnerships, and events, social media can act as a silo-ed effort, or a place to leverage a combination of marketing initiatives.
If you are new to social, how do you understand when you are effective in your social media marketing efforts? During the first phase of employing the strategy, we look mainly at awareness objectives to gauge success. Awareness objectives can be likes or follows, post reach, post engagements, and potentially even website traffic, dependent on your business objectives.
It’s important when beginning on social media that you are testing several different content types on some platforms, to see which variables perform better than others, and continue optimizing your strategy toward your top performers. You may even see that particular types of content perform best on one platform, whereas entirely different content performs well on another. This will help you in tweaking your strategy per platform based on initial results. After several months of testing, your team will understand where and how they are driving the most value.
Within the next phase of effective social media marketing, after optimizing based on initial performance, we recommend looking at some additional metrics. Perhaps your long-term business objective is conversions. If so, it’s important to begin dissecting the purchase behavior of your audience. You should be tracking actions such as website clicks, add-to-cart, searches, and conversions. These activities can be monitored on the backend of the ad management tools on social platforms, but can also be seen through Google Analytics. This will allow you to gain more insight into your consumer funnel, including how long they spend on your website, the content they are clicking on, and at what stage they make a purchase.
As discussed, you will see a clear impact of social media on your marketing strategy by understanding the key metrics you are looking for. To understand key metrics, we recommend always aligning with your brand team about short and long-term social media goals.
The importance of social media marketing for your brand in such a product-saturated market is incontestable. Not only can social media teach you about your customer, how they interact, and when they convert – you will learn about how to shape your strategy to achieve the results you are looking for.
Interested in learning more about how social media strategy can help your business? Contact us today!
