What To Expect When Expecting Success in Digital Marketing
Before I started my coursework in the Digital Strategy graduate program at the University of Florida, I could only imagine what my future job as a marketing professional would be like. After nine weeks of courses, I’m starting to frame a more detailed picture. Although the number of likes, comments, and shares are positive interactions that I would love to see in response to the creative content I’ve contributed, I realize there is much more that will be expected.
For any businesses, the whole point of establishing a presence online is to form a strong connection with their audience that fuels their business goals, whether financial or brand-building. I am merely one of the conduits for ensuring that their goals become a reality by interpreting and using insights gathered from social media to achieve organizational benefits. The ability to measure the success of my social media campaigns, how they impact the overall business, and the effectiveness of my social strategy can only be obtained by consistently sifting through and interpreting social media analytics.
Social media analytics is concerned with collecting, monitoring, analyzing, summarizing, and visualizing social media data. This data can then facilitate conversations and interactions to extract useful social patterns and intelligence. Therefore, the development of effective and efficient analytics techniques for social media analysis becomes essential in supporting decision making and enhancing a company’s competitive advantage.
Each day, I would be reviewing social analytics for each of my company’s active social accounts and using the metrics provided to determine if our marketing performance is successful based on the company’s business goal at the time. For example, if I worked for a small chain of retail pharmacies and the current goal is brand awareness, my daily metric reviews would include examining impressions, reach, and engagement from the content published the previous day. While impressions would tell me the number of times my content was displayed for viewers, reach would tell me the number of people who have actually seen my content. The engagement metric, on the other hand, includes things such as likes, comments, reshares or retweets. So, in order to figure out how successful my social strategy has been for the previous day, I could use these metrics to determine my engagement rate (the number of people who have seen my content divided by the total number of audience engagements). With this rating, I can better understand what type of content my audience finds more interesting and determine which content ideas could be reused for future posts and which should be discontinued. Whether it is to measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, gather insights about customer needs and preferences, discern brand perceptions, obtain feedback on product performance, or to capture data on market trends, social media analytics have the potential to provide useful information to various lines of business such as marketing and sales, customer relations, public relations and product development.
If the pharmacy’s marketing goal were to increase sales revenue, my metrics of focus would then be the click-through rate and the number of conversions prompted by my social media content. The click-through rate informs me of the number of people who have clicked on the link to my company website provided in my post, in comparison to the number of people the social content was displayed to. The number of conversions is the number of people who have completed my desired action, which in this case would be consumers switching their medication services to our pharmacy. Recording these consumer actions following my content posts will be important to keeping me on track for reaching long-term goals. Let’s say my 90-day goal is to increase sales revenue by 25 percent. By monitoring the daily outcomes, I will be able to track my progress toward the goal and always know just where I stand. In addition, during weekly check-ins with my direct manager, I will already be prepared to show my progress and the steps or adjustments I made to get there.
Weekly assessment meetings with my immediate boss would also involve reviewing some of the metrics we’ve previously discussed (impressions, reach, engagement rate) based on the set goal at the time. We might even discuss how much the pharmacy’s follower count has increased and the number of leads generated from certain content posts. Both of these metrics show the potential for future sales growth with the continued production of quality content and remarketing strategies. Besides interpreting these metrics, their focus here will also be on elements that hold a higher importance when trying to meet financial goals.
After a week of publishing social content, departmental funds might have been spent to create quality video content or pay for Facebook and Instagram advertisements due to flu shot season or a new service offered. So, my manager would be most interested in discussing our weekly return on investment, which details how much money we’ve earned for the company via social activities compared to the total amount invested. Future discussions and decisions to pursue paid advertisements over organic will most likely be based on previous ROI (return on investment) data. Weekly reviews with management allow for quick adjustments to be made, possibly in preparation for a monthly meeting with the pharmacy’s owner or executives where our impact on the business objectives must be thoroughly proven.
Regardless of the type of healthcare business I choose to jump into, there will likely be a board of executives or a business owner that will require monthly updates to show how social media marketing is positively impacting the business overall, what setbacks were experienced and what opportunities we can use to further benefit the company. Here, my manager or I would remind them of our set goal, the strategies we used for reaching them and our audience’s reactions to them. From there we would discuss the sales revenue and leads (website visits and click-through rates) generated within the last month. Comparisons could be made regarding the positive or negative outcomes experienced in previous months and used to discuss our next opportunities for improvement. For example, if the sales revenue were not increasing, but we had plenty of website visits, I would discuss using Google Analytics to send remarketing emails to those who visit our website but fail to transfer their services to our pharmacy. Also, if I could present polling results that prove that the majority of the pharmacy’s social media followers would recommend our services, I could perhaps propose initiating referral contest campaign.
As the weeks progress, I am learning more and more about the social media marketing industry and what it takes to be successful. The fundamental essentials are knowing how to interpret social media analytics and having the ability to use the metrics provided to determine the creative direction of my social campaigns and prove the financial success behind it.