Great marketing isn’t great unless it changes consumer behavior, drives sales, or meets other goals. So how exactly do we measure the success of a campaign? Sometimes it’s relatively easy; we look at sales patterns during and after the duration of the campaign. There’s no way to definitively attribute a spike in sales solely to marketing efforts because there are other factors at play. When numbers increase after a marketing campaign, however, it’s generally a safe bet to assume it’s largely because of the advertising. But what if the goal is to increase brand awareness or create a larger social following? KPIs, or key performance indicators, are meaningful metrics used to track marketing acts. Some things cannot be measured in terms of hard numbers, so we use various KPIs to evaluate marketing successes, like social media engagement.
Facebook is the frontrunner of social media and it is incorporated in almost all social media campaigns. Facebook offers a tool called Facebook Insights that becomes available to any user after a minimum of 30 people have liked their page. Insights provides users with data about people who engage with the page, number of likes, fans, page views, demographics, media usage, impressions, mentions, and much more. It sounds like an overload of information, and it is, but Facebook packages all of this data in neat little charts and graphs that make it easy to digest. Twitter offers a similar metrics tool called Twitter Analytics. This is available to everyone, even personal accounts, regardless of the size of your following.
Both Insights and Analytics allow users to set specific time periods in which they want to view data, which is particularly helpful for marketers. Say a TV commercial for a new restaurant in town ran for four weeks during the summer. We can easily view data pertaining to social media engagement during those four weeks and then the following weeks or months at just the click of a button. The numbers may show that the restaurant received x amount of likes during and after the commercial aired, or that social media engagement increased by x percent. It’s in this way that we can say marketing efforts were successful or unsuccessful even though the campaign’s goals were qualitative.
Most marketing firms use programs that take metric tools a step further than Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. At Transformation, we’ve got all the tools and brain power to comprehensively analyze the work we do. This final step of the marketing process is arguably the most important because it tells us what works, what doesn’t, and how to adapt to be even more successful in the future.