How Social Media Helps Marketing Metrics
2012
Marketing has long been marred by metrics. Great marketing can’t always be directly measured. It is the bane of a marketing director’s position, especially during a recession when every penny of the budget requires justification. The flip side, however, is during high times, “fun” marketing that is clearly not effective is indulged or encouraged beyond the parameters of good business sense. A recession forces marketing creativity in finding new ways to do things cheaper, faster, more effectively.
Here’s where social media has helped immensely. In prior recessions, the technological tools were limited both in reach, capabilities and cost. Web development that previously cost in the thousands, could now, if needed, be done on the fly by amateurs. Indeed, the result is not as professional as a web pro might do, along with poor landing page optimization, stock graphics, and perhaps even poor content development. But, if push comes to shove, at least through GoDaddy and other templates services, an entrepreneur or one-man marketing shop could get the word out.
Then there’s email. Even the worst of us technologically can seem to draft an email message today. It’s a way to stay in touch with clients and prospective clients at relatively low to no cost. And here’s the best part — Google Analytics, email analytics, and social media analytics make it all measurable!
Of course, there’s the question if any of the available metrics mean anything, but that was always true even in the traditional market days of DECs (Daily Effective Circulation) and out-of-home media. Out-of-home sales people still quote DECs as it’s all they’ve got, but is the count of the number of cars that pass a billboard in a set time period really any measurement of marketing effectiveness? In the same vein, the measurement of web hits or followers may not tell you much either. All of these metrics only let you know the potential exposure of your message to an audience, not whether the message resonated or not.
In the end, there’s really only one marketing metric that every matters – how many times the cash register rang. If business is growing, you may not be able to attribute the exact level of the growth due to marketing, but you can tell what’s working and what falls on deaf ears. As with any marketing,you need to continually ask how the lead was generated, talk to customers about what resonated with them, and track when surges occur. Even without a coupon code on an ad, if an ad runs and the phone rings to a much higher degree than previously, there is a correlation.
In marketing, never ignore coincidences, because there are none. If a customer walks into your store, they reacted to something. Find out what it was. It might be your sign, an article about you in the newspaper, an ad you ran, or plain old word-of-mouth. But something created the lead. Find out what it was so you can learn and repeat it. Because, repeat business is true marketing success.
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