Measuring and evaluating the success of a brand goes beyond justifying a marketing budget. Tracking specific insights enables a business to ensure its social media strategy is connecting to the right audience and ultimately driving key business goals. Evaluating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is key.
So, what are KPIs?
KPIs are a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of your organisation or a specific campaign, allowing you to reflect on your performance, analyse where changes are needed, and measure the return on investment (ROI).
Ultimately, your KPIs are crucial to tracking your company’s presence across all social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There are many social media metrics that you can measure, and all can be relevant to your business in different ways.
We’ve put together 4 KPIs your business should be tracking to evaluate how effective your social media strategy is.
Reach
Reach KPIs provide an understanding to what your audience finds valuable and interesting. It not only shows how many people have seen your posts, but also takes into consideration your impressions, follower count, website traffic and share of voice. Through tracking reach KPIs you can find out if your brands has influence within the industry, see insight into your existing and potential audience, analyse your growth over time, and evaluate whether your current approach is increasing brand awareness.
Engagement
KPIs based on social engagement includes likes, comments, shares, reviews, and clicks. It measures the quality of your content and helps you recognise whether your audience is connecting with your business enough to interact with what you have to say or offer. If your content is engaging, relevant and targeted to your audience, it will not only increase conversations but generate loyalty, authority, and trust among your followers.
Conversion
Once you’ve established if your content is hitting your reach and engagement goals, you need to take a deeper look into whether these metrics are creating the conversions that you are looking to achieve. Examples could be the number of subscribers to a newsletter or company page, or the number of downloads on some gated content on your website. Ultimately, are the goals you have set been achieved? Are these leading to increased revenue or furthering the business goal that you set up? Not every person who engages with your content will turn into a lead, so it’s important to find out what type of content is impacting your bottom line. Determining how many conversions come from your social media to your website provides a better understanding for your company on the value of each customer and where they are taking action.
Retention and Loyalty
All businesses should be consistently providing social media content that is worth your audience coming back for. Building your presence on social media is a key element when you want to increase brand loyalty, but only if you know how to communicate your brand messaging effectively. When you start to understand retention and loyalty KPIs and the affect it has on your social media strategy, you can minimise cost per lead, improve customer satisfaction and turn your audience into long-term customers. This can all be measured through reviews your customers leave, issues you resolve, and how you tackle customer satisfaction and sentiment.
Social media is so much more than just a way of connecting with your audience. If you want to truly understand the impact that a social media strategy can have on your business, then you need to be tracking your data. In a digital environment that is rapidly evolving, you need to know how to communicate with your customers in an effective and efficient way. Once you start measuring your KPIs, you can begin to create a social media strategy that will enhance future campaigns and the long-term success of your business.
At Ilex, we can help you structure a social media strategy that evolves around your business goals and KPIs. We can create content tailored to your target market, amplify your brand messaging, build a strong, loyal community across all social media channels, and provide social media reports that track your growth and progress. Get in touch today.