2023 is certainly the year of digital marketing, and social media marketing should already be playing a major role in your overall strategy to grow your business.
But there’s little or no point to having marketing campaigns or dedicating budget to these strategies if you don’t measure their impact and ensure you can attribute any successes to the bottom line directly to the campaigns you’ve run.
Measuring the success of your social media marketing campaigns is essential to understand whether your efforts are generating the desired results. To help you make the most of the money you’re spending and the time you’re dedicating, let’s discuss the key metrics you should be tracking, as well as the tools you can use to measure them.
Setting goals for your social media marketing campaigns
Before you start measuring the success of your social media marketing campaigns, you need to set clear goals. These goals should be aligned with your overall business objectives and should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).
Some common social media marketing goals include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads or sales, improving customer engagement or building customer loyalty.
Key Metrics to Measure
Once you have set your goals, it’s time to measure the key metrics that will help you understand the performance of your social media marketing campaigns. The four key metrics to measure are reach, engagement, consideration and awareness.
Reach (How Many): The number of people who have seen your social media content. This metric is important because it tells you how many people you are reaching with your content. Some common ways to measure reach include impressions, clicks, and followers.
Engagement (How did they react?): The level of interaction people have with your content, including likes, comments, shares, and other actions people take on your social media posts. Engagement is important because it indicates how well your content resonates with your audience.
Consideration (What did they do?): The level of interest people have in your brand after seeing your social media content. This metric includes website traffic, sign-ups, and other actions people take after seeing your social media posts. Consideration is important because it indicates how well your social media content is driving conversions.
Awareness (How well do they know you now?) The level of recognition people have of your brand. This metric includes brand mentions, media coverage, and other indicators of brand visibility. Awareness is important because it helps you understand how well your social media marketing campaigns are increasing brand awareness.
Tools to Measure Success
Fortunately, these days are many tools available to help you measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns. To get you started, the following are the best options to consider:
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows you to schedule and publish content, monitor social media activity, and track key metrics such as reach, engagement, consideration and awareness. Hootsuite also provides detailed analytics reports that help you understand the performance of your social media campaigns.
Sprout is another good option, and like Hootsuite, it has some great tools including scheduling and publishing content, monitoring social media activity and tracking key metrics. Sprout also provides detailed analytics reports and allows you to create custom reports to track specific metrics.
Buffer is a social media management platform that focuses on scheduling and publishing content. It allows you to schedule posts across multiple social media channels and provides analytics data to help you track your social media performance.
GA4 is Google’s latest version of its analytics platform, which allows you to track website and app activity. GA4 also includes social media reporting, allowing you to track key metrics such as reach, engagement, consideration and awareness across multiple social media channels. It also allows you to track which channels are most effective at delivering results, so that you’re more able to focus on those that really work, and discard those that don’t.
GA4 also provides AI-powered insights that help you understand the performance of your social media campaigns, with recommendations on how to tweak and update campaigns to achieve the best results.
Benchmarking for comparative understanding, and ongoing improvement
Benchmarking is an important part of measuring the success of your social media marketing campaigns. It involves comparing your performance against industry standards or competitors to understand how well you are doing.
By benchmarking, you can identify areas where you are performing well and areas where you need to improve. This information can help you set realistic goals and develop strategies to improve your social media performance.
Some common benchmarks to consider include the average engagement rate, the average reach per post, and the average click-through rate. By regularly benchmarking your performance against these metrics, you can stay ahead of the competition and continuously improve your social media marketing campaigns.
You should also do internal benchmarking to see how your campaigns perform over lengthier periods of time so that you get a better overview of spend vs performance vs goal achievement.
If you’re thinking about setting up social media marketing campaigns and would like some help and guidance on the best way to go about it call us on 01223 550800 or email info@realnet.co.uk. Or message us on our social media channels.