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DEFINE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA OBJECTIVES

The old adage “You cannot manage what you do not measure” is especially true in the age of digital

and social media. With tens of thousands of available tools online, virtually every single step of your

social media marketing activity can be monitored, tracked and quantified.

However, first things first. Before you go ahead to plunge into the world of digital analytics and

metrics, you need to know where your “true North” is.

What do you seek to achieve from your social media marketing (SMM)? How do you know when

you’ve arrived?

Let us start by identifying the problem that you seek to solve.

IDENTIFY MARKETING PROBLEM

To be razor sharp in your focus, you need to know what problem SMM sets out to solve. In the world

of marketing, there are a few areas that are consistently true:

Lack of Brand Awareness & Publicity

Your business or brand is still relatively new to the market. Thus, there is very little awareness of

what your product or brand is, what it does, or how awesome it can be in transforming the world

(Ok, I jest).

Falling Sales in Traditional Channels

By now, everybody would have read or heard about the plight of Orchard Road retailers, and how

purchases are moving away from physical stores to online ones (see chart below). As a digital

marketing strategy, social media marketing could perhaps help to address this.

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1 Courtesy of Vulcan Post (https://vulcanpost.com/14559/online-shopping/)

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Lack of New Leads Generated Increasingly, B2B companies are finding it difficult to generate new leads and prospects from traditional sources like trade shows, telemarketing efforts, street surveys, and cold calls. This is worsened by the imposition of more stringent guidelines protecting personal privacy. Please see below for an extract of some of the new rules governing this area2.

Falling Levels of Profitability With the rise in costs of rental, manpower, and media, your company may find it less profitable to embark on traditional marketing. Social media marketing could thus be a more attractive option. Decline in Customer Service As consumers growing increasingly demanding and discerning in an “always on” digital world, social media can help to address customer service issues and challenges. Customer experience has been cited as the single most exciting opportunity by marketers around the world in a recent study by eConsultancy.com (see chart below)3.

2 Source: PDPC.gov.sg 3 Source: https://econsultancy.com/blog/64324-customer-experience-is-the-most-exciting-opportunity-for-marketers-infographic/

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SETTING SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES Now that you’ve nailed the pesky marketing problem on your screen, you need to establish what your precise social media marketing goals and objectives are. The best forms of goals and objectives are SMART, ie Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound. Conceived to address those issues, your objectives should support your broader goals and be quantified in the form of metrics. Typically your social media marketing goals would come in the following broad categories:

• Awareness: Increase brand awareness; improve brand recall; positive brand associations; etc

• Engagement: Improve the length of duration for web visitors; Increase overall engagement; Increased in comments and likes etc

• Conversion: Generate more leads; Increase sign-ups; Grow sales volume; Improve sales value;

• Loyalty/ Advocacy: Growth in number of followers, increase in number of social shares/retweets; increase in hashtags; growth in customer Life Time Value (LTV).

Objectives are more specific and are usually derived on a campaign by campaign basis. They are also focused on selected channels and are shorter-term than goals.

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We can establish the relationship between Goals, Objectives and Metrics (or Key Performance Indicators aka KPIs) using the infographic below:

The Four Categories of KPIs Let us dive more deeply into the specific KPIs concerned with SMM. As I’ve explained earlier, Awareness, Engagement and Conversion are three of the most important KPIs in social media marketing. 1) Awareness KPIs Typically, these are concerned with the overall reach of your social media campaign, as well as the views or what we call “impressions” that it has garnered. Rankings on digital measurement tools like Klout (measures influence on social media) or Alexa (tracks web visitorship) also count as awareness KPIs. Beyond this, other indicators for awareness could include the reach of your social media posts, your total fanbase, as well as the impressions of your social ads.

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2) Engagement KPIs Engagement or interaction tracks how good your content is in eliciting a response from your fans or followers. Typically, engagement is measured in terms of the growth of fans or followers, duration in which a web visitor stays on your website, number of likes per post, as well as number of comments per post. The more engaged they are, the higher your average number of likes, comments and views per post relative to competitors.

3) Conversion KPIs Conversion is where the rubber meets the road (or the cash meets the cash register). If you don’t convert, you don’t generate a sale, and if you don’t generate a sale, you don’t eat. Examples of conversion include number of subscribers, downloads, app installations, sales made and value of revenue generated.

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4) Customer Loyalty and Advocacy KPIs This is where the “social” element of social media marketing comes in. If you’re effective in building a loyal online community, or in creating content that adds value, you’ll have a higher chance of growing your community, triggering social sharing and virality, and improving your customer retention. Over time, this will improve your customer Life Time Value (LTV), which we will learn to measure later in Section 5) of the course.

MAPPING OBJECTIVES TO DIGITAL MARKETING FUNNEL

A digital marketing funnel (or digital funnel) captures the different points of entry of your target audience to a web page or social media post.

Mapping our earlier social media marketing objectives to the digital marketing funnel, we would see that there is a gradual intensification of customer relationships from mere visitors to customers and advocates as shown below.

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The digital marketing funnel is normally associated with different stages of your customer journey, and is normally divided into three sections:

1. Top of the funnel (TOFU) 2. Middle of the funnel (MOFU) 3. Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

Your goal is to “graduate” your online visitors to move progressively downwards towards a profitable action like an online purchase or signing up for a programme. This process is called inbound marketing (bringing visitors in to your funnel via content) and lead nurturing (improving the likelihood of conversion).

Top Of Funnel (TOFU)

Also known as TOFU (Asians will have no problems remembering this!), the top of your digital marketing funnel is where the bulk of your visitors first encounter your online brand.

As shown in the diagram above, most of these visitors arrive at your website (or landing page) through the following actions:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – They searched for specific terms or keywords which your website ranked for, and clicked on the link provided by a search engine.

• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – They were attracted by a social media post (eg Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc), and clicked on the link shared.

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising – They clicked on an online advertisement on Google’s network (AdWords or Display Ads), a Facebook Ad (eg sponsored post), or other social media/online ads.

The key here is to attract the most relevant and interested parties to visit your website or landing page. To do so, generate and share short but helpful content such as blog articles, Facebook posts, infographics, and slides which address specific customer pain points or needs.

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(PS – You may want to advertise some of your best content by boosting them on social media.)

Note that we normally do not ask for the sale at this stage. This is because your TOFU web visitors are likely to be fairly “cold” to your products or services. However, you can introduce specific Calls To Actions (CTAs) to convert TOFU visitors to MOFU leads. This may include encouraging them to opt-in with their contact information for more valuable and helpful content like an eBook, slide, or template.

Middle Of Funnel (MOFU)

Unlike TOFU visitors, folks who hover around the MOFU layer are normally more invested in their relationship with you. Often, they are the more valuable leads who have decided to opt-in by providing their contact details (normally name, email address, organisations and occasionally mobile numbers) on what we call a lead page.

In return, they will receive a valuable piece of longer-form content or a tool. Examples of such lead-nurturing content include the following:

• eBooks – These are the gold standard for MOFU content for professional services like management consultancy, IT, or financial services.

• Tools and Templates – Everybody loves a downloadable “plug-and-play” template which they can use for their business. Tools like calculators or auto-updated spreadsheets are also valuable.

• Webinars or Seminars – Learning opportunities like these not only provide immense value to your leads – they also allow you to promote and sell your products or services.

• White Papers – These are more theoretical and academic than eBooks, and normally include some research findings.

• Videos – Normally instructional in nature, opt-in videos could be offered as a “free sample” of a full course which you offer, or provide a valuable “DIY” tip to your users.

At this stage, you are looking at building a strong community who opt to subscribe to your email newsletter and receive updates from you. After they have been “warmed up” sufficiently as a beneficiary of your content marketing efforts, you may want to convert them to become actual customers.

Which brings us to the next stage of lead nurturing – BOFU.

Bottom Of Funnel (BOFU)

The Bottom Of Funnel (BOFU) is where the rubber meets the road.

After you have attracted a strong following of leads and prospects who follow you religiously, you need to find the opportunity to convert them to become customers. This is where email marketing or perhaps remarketing or retargeting of your prospects comes in.

Often, an attractive offer which is highly targeted and relevant hits the sweet spot – the “Buy Now” button on your email, lead page or website.

What strategies can you apply to convert your leads to customers?

• Free trials – These are popular with providers of online software (aka Software As A Service or SAAS). The usual duration is a 30-day free trial, where you “hook” your user in populating his or

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her content on your platform. Once the trial period is up, a credit card account would be needed to pay for continued use of the service.

• Online assessments – Free diagnostic tools like website audits or psychological tests help to draw your customers in by offering them real value for free. However, the next steps (ie engaging your services to rectify the faults detected in the assessment) are usually paid.

• Discount coupons – Everybody loves a good deal. Timed to create a sense of scarcity, these deals normally offer a significant discount to make it attractive for users to buy.

• One-to-one consultations – For higher priced services or products (eg legal services or purchasing a car), a face-to-face consultation or actual physical test-driving helps to move a prospect to buy.

Note that getting your leads and prospects to become your customers alone isn’t enough.

Expert marketers know that managing customer experience is critical to long-term digital marketing success. Adopting a holistic view of your customer helps you to improve customer loyalty and lifetime value, giving you permission to upsell products and services to them.

Beyond this, you may also want to encourage your best customers to become your Word Of Mouth (WOM) advocates, especially on social media. You can start by giving them a small incentive (eg discounts off purchases) to involving them in designing your product.

Marketing Funnel Metrics & Analytics

Learned to attract your target audiences, turn them into leads, and convert them to customers and advocates? Good! Now you need to track, measure and optimize your digital marketing performance throughout your marketing funnel. This is where digital marketing analytics using tools like Google Analytics comes in.

Let’s revisit our digital marketing funnel and add a layer of metrics and analytics.

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For the example above, you can see that different measurements are needed for audiences at different stages of engagement with your brand.

Top Of Funnel Metrics At the TOFU level, there are two key metrics for you to consider:

1. Awareness and reach: social media reach, ad impressions (usually measured in thousands of views), and keyword searches.

2. Engagement: no of comments and shares, retweets and duration of stay. 3. Visitorship and views (either on your website, landing page, or social media page).

Normally, the numbers who “bounce” off your website (ie leave after viewing only one page) is an indication of how “sticky” your content is. The lower the bounce rate, the higher your chances to converting your visitors to become readers.

Middle Of Funnel Metrics This brings you to the MOFU level of the funnel. Here, the key metrics used could be defined as:

1. Content readers: web visitors who spend a longer time on your website (eg 2 minutes or longer). This can be easily tracked with Google Analytics or other analytics software.

2. Leads: those who choose to opt-in via a form.

Bottom Of Funnel Metrics Finally, at the BOFU level of the funnel, you need to track the following:

1. Prospects: the folks who not only subscribed to your email newsletters, but clicked through on an offer.

2. Customers: leads or prospects who actually responded to your offer by completing the purchase process.

3. Repeat Customers: customers who make two or more purchases of your product or service. 4. Advocates: customers – and sometimes non-customers but fans – who helped to spread your

content on their own social networks.

I would like you to bear in mind the digital marketing funnel as we establish the type of metrics that should be covered for your business.

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Mapping Social Media Objectives to Metrics

Simply Measured4 has found a way to tie back objectives to the different stages of the marketing funnel, and I have reproduced their chart below for your reference. The main idea here is to link each of the objectives to specific KPIs that can be measurable on social.

4 Source: http://get.simplymeasured.com/rs/801-IXO-022/images/TheSocialMediaMetricsMap.pdf

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ANALYSE YOUR PAGE USING FACEBOOK INSIGHTS5

What is Facebook Insights? It is a free, analytics tool provided by Facebook to help you understand more about your Facebook Page’s posts and fans.

The type of information you will see is:

• Which posts are working / not working, which ones are liked, shared and have comments.

• Is your Fan page count growing? And how quickly?

• How much of your audience sees your content?

Overview

Generally, Facebook Insights allows you to gain an overview of the following performance indicators for your Facebook page. • Page Likes – Here, you can look at how many Facebook Page likes you have this week,

compared to last week. This is a useful way to keep an eye on any spikes or trends. If your performance is worse than last week, why is that?

• Post Reach – This is the number of unique people who have seen your posts over the last week. These could be fans or friends of fans. If someone sees your post multiple times, this is only counted as once for the purpose of reach. When you see your reach going up or down, have a look at your content to see why you got more engagement with one post over another. When you see Facebook talking about ‘impressions’, they count one person seeing a piece of content five times as five impressions. It’s good to look at both stats.

• Engagement – This shows you if people actually like your content. Are they liking, commenting, sharing or clicking to see more? Underneath these graphs, you see some additional information:

• Recent Post Engagement – Analyze your five most recent posts to see which worked best/worst. If you see a post performing well, you can click on ‘Boost’ to pay for ads.

• Pages to Watch – You can add your competitors’ Pages to this list to track their performance. If any competitor performs really well, it’s useful to see why they performed well so you can get ideas for your Page.

• Suggested Pages to Watch – Facebook Insights will pick out Pages that have a similar audience to you and you can choose whether to add these Pages to the ‘Pages to watch’ section.

5 Source of information: https://www.facebook-studio.com/fbassets/resource/37/PageInsightsProductGuide.pdf

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Likes

In the Likes tab, you’ll see three core metrics:

• Total Page Likes

• Net Likes (Likes – Unlikes)

• Where Your Page Likes Came From

To find out why one of the Likes charts went up or down, you can click on it to see more information from that day. You can also drag on the chart to select more than one day.

For all the charts in the Likes tab, the popup will list your Page’s Like and Unlike Sources for the selected period of time. You can also click on a metric in the benchmark box on the right to compare data over time.

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Reach

The Reach tab shows you:

• Post Reach, which is broken down by paid and organic

• Positive Engagement: Likes, comments, and shares

• Negative Engagement: A fan hiding a post, hiding all posts, reporting spam, or unliking your Page

• Total Reach, which shows you the total number of unique people who were shown any activity from your Page

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If you click or drag on the Post Reach, Positive Engagement, and Negative Engagement charts, the popup will tell you what posts people were seeing during the selected time period. This helps you quickly tie content to performance trends in your graph.

Visits/Views Tab

In the Visits tab, you’ll see:

• Page and Tab Visits: A breakdown of where your visits are coming from

• Other Page Activity, such as mentions of your Page in a post, posts by other people on your Page, check-ins to your location, or offers redeemed

• External referrers: Sources outside Facebook that are driving traffic to your Page

Posts

This tab allows you to check on when your fans are recently online. The best strategy for posting is to align your post timings with the timings when most of your fans are online.

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Videos Tab

Recently, Facebook has included a Videos tab to focus on your analytics for videos uploaded and shared on Facebook. You can see the times your page’s videos are viewed for 3 seconds or more here.

You can also gauge the number of views for videos which exceed 10 seconds. This would be important if you are seeking to improve engagement on video.

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ANALYSING A FACEBOOK POST OR ADVERTISEMENT

Here is an example of a Facebook Insights report for a successful video ad6. There are a few points to note here:

• Overall numbers of people reach is pretty high at 733,866

• High engagement both the number of likes and shares

• From the breakdown of reach numbers, we can tell that the majority of the people reached are organic (ie light orange). In other words, there is high virality of the content

• Clicks through the posts are also high

Generally, it would be useful to consider the following when we look at a Facebook ad:

• Type (video, photo, links)?

• Organic versus Paid Reach?

• Clicks, likes, comments and shares?

6 Source: Equal Head Start Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/equalheadstart/)

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TRACKING CAMPAIGNS IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

(Source: https://www.shopify.com.sg/blog/14759449-how-to-track-your-marketing-campaigns-in-google-analytics)

Let's say you have several bloggers lined up to post sponsored reviews for your product launch. How could you track each of the campaigns to see which one was most effective, as well as which one was least effective?

This is important information that can help you decide if you should pay for further sponsored posts in the future. This is where link tracking, also known as UTM Parameters comes into play.

What Are UTM Parameters?

So what exactly are UTM Parameters? UTM is an acronym for Urchin Tracking Module and is the format Google uses to track URL's. The name Urchin itself comes from Google's early days (2004) when they acquired the company Urchin, which was later turned into Google Analytics.

UTM Parameters are simply small pieces of information that can be added to the end of any URL that gives Google more information about that particular link.

You've likely seen them before. A link with a simple UTM Parameter might look something like this:

http://www.website.com/?utm_source=emailcampaign

The part after the question mark is a UTM Parameter. When someone clicks on that link, Google Analytics for that particular website will read and record that parameter information.

The UTM Parameters

There are five UTM parameters that can be used for tracking various pieces of information in Google Analytics, three are required and two that are optional. Let's look at each one to understand more:

Required Parameters

• Campaign Source (utm_source) – This is generally used to describe the website or main source in which the link will be placed. For example, for example the name of the website displaying your ads or if you're using the link in an email newsletter, you may use "newsletter".

• Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Medium is used to describe the marketing activity. For example, you may want to call this "ppc" if you're using this for a pay-per-click campaign or "review" if you're using the link to track traffic from a product review on a blogger's site.

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• Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Campaign refers to the overall campaign you're running. For example, it could refer to a product launch, a summer campaign or a particular sale.

Optional Parameters

• Campaign Term (utm_term) – Campaign Term is used for tracking particular keywords if you're running an Adwords campaign.

• Campaign Content (utm_content) – This parameter is helpful if you're split testing ads. In this case you could track each ad to see which was most effective for driving traffic.

Building Your Own Trackable URLs

All you have to do to track campaigns automatically is use Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool to create a trackable URL. This tool makes it really easy to build your URL's with all the relevant information. All you have to do is enter the URL you want to track, along with the parameters to track.

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Once you click submit, Google will give you your trackable URL. It will look something like this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2014%20summer%20sale

Once you have the URL, you can copy it and use it for your marketing campaigns to begin tracking.

Best Practices for Creating Trackable URL's

Since the reports for the links are your own, there's really no wrong way to create your tracked URL's, however, there are a few suggestions here that will help:

• Consider a standard naming convention upfront. Because each URL's will have multiple parameters, things can get messy and difficult to read later unless you adopt a similar style upfront for naming everything.

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• Keep in mind that anyone clicking on the link will be able to see the parameters names so don't write anything you wouldn't want your customers to see.

• Parameters should all be written in lowercase letters. • Because the URL's tend to be long, you can always consider using a link shortener

service like bit.ly to make them shorter. • Only create parameters that are necessary.

Viewing Your Campaign Reports

The URL's you create will automatically be tracked by Google Analytics as they're clicked on throughout the web. Google (and other analytics software) will record all the parameters from each link and present it to you in a handy report.

Keep in mind that sometimes it can take up to 24 hours for Google to receive and record data, so if you don't see clicks showing up right away, just be patient.

To view the information on how your campaigns are preforming, login to your Google Analytics account and on the left hand menu, click on Acquisition reports:

Then click on Campaigns:

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In this report, you'll have a list of all of the campaigns you've tracked. You can click on each campaign to view more information on traffic as well as information on any sales resulting from each campaign, provided you have ecommerce tracking turned on in Google Analytics.

As with any traffic source, you can view the metrics most important to you including sales, goals, bounce rate, page views etc., to determine which elements are the most effective for your campaigns.

Note: Campaigns will only show up in your Google Analytics Campaign reports if the links are clicked on.

When Should You Use UTM Parameters?

UTM Parameters are an easy way to track performance of a wide variety of online marketing initiatives. Some marketing activities you may want to track include:

• Guest Blog Posts - You keep hearing that content is king and that you should be guest blogging on other websites within your niche. But how effective are your guest blog posts? Try using a trackable URL in your next guest blog post to find out exactly how much traffic and sales your posts are driving.

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• Social - You spend countless hours building your Facebook fan page and Twitter account, but how many people are clicking on the link in your profile to check out your store? Furthermore, are those people buying from you? A trackable link in your social profiles can help you uncover the true return-on-investment of all your hard work.

• Email - It takes time to come up with great campaigns and crafting the perfect email to send out to your customers. Advanced email marketing programs can help you track sales from your emails but using a trackable URL in your emails is a quick and easy way to know which emails are working and which aren't.

• Features - One of the best ways to get lots of traffic and sales is by getting featured by bloggers, Instagrammers, media publications and YouTubers with a large following. Make sure to give them a trackable URL to discover exactly who drives the most qualified traffic to your store.

• Banner Ads - Using a trackable URL for banner ads will not only help you understand the effectiveness of your campaign but also will allow you to easily track the success of each variation of banner to see which one performs the best.

Besides the above examples, you can really use link tracking anywhere you can share a link and want to know more about who's clicking on it.