Social Media Success Secrets – 5 Proven Ways to Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign
Putting up an e-commerce store and linking them to online marketplaces like Amazon is not where your efforts for your business should end. With so many stores sprouting by the minute, you need a strategy that will set your business apart from the rest.
If you’re dreaming of getting your Return of Investment (ROI) fast or scaling your business, you need to stand out from the competition and put your target audience into action.
To achieve this, you need to be visible. Although visibility figuratively translates to a forecast of future earnings in the business, the meaning of visibility referred to here is literally being seen by your audience and potential customers. And what better way to achieve this than creating your social media campaigns?
What is a Social Media Campaign
To better understand the value a social media campaign can add to your business, let’s first take a look at what it is.
A Social Media Campaign is a coordinated online marketing effort designed to disseminate or reinforce brand information or brand message.
It makes use of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and many more to achieve the brand’s marketing goals.
On the other hand, Social Media Marketing is the evolved form of digital marketing or e-marketing. It is the use of social media channels to promote a brand, engage its audience, and eventually boost its sales.
Posters, videos, images, and gifs are a few examples of how social media marketing works. Nowadays, the use of “influencers” or internet celebrities is another social media strategy you can use to promote your products or services.
Importance of Social Media Campaigns
If you’re wondering why you need social media campaign for your business, the short and most obvious answer is that modern life is progressing, rapidly and surely, to digital reality. Just like with trends, you have to keep up, or else people will forget you.
As of this moment, 55% of the total global population is using social media. In the US alone, 77% of the population is using any form of social media. Even at that, there is a continuous decline in the attention span of social media users due to the fast-paced way virtual reality evolves.
Without regard for this data, you’ll get stuck with the crumbs of those who make efforts before you.
Here are other reasons why you need to set up social media campaigns for your business.
- It raises awareness about your business.
- It increases your website or store conversion rate.
- It exposes your brand to a bigger audience.
- It boosts audience engagement for your brand.
- It builds your brand image and reinforces your brand story and message.
- It increases audience loyalty to the brand.
- It increases sales.
How to Make an Effective Social Media Campaign
- Define your marketing goals and objectives.
Setting specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals is the first step in strategizing your campaign.
You have to develop a clear understanding of what you want to achieve. It will guide you to arrive at accurate and goal-oriented executions.
- Know your target audience.
Every step in the creation of a social media campaign is important. But having a clear picture of your audience is one of the most vital ones.
Why? Because your audience is what drives your sales. You have to understand how they think, how they act, and what their preferences are. It is to ensure that the messaging of all your campaign materials, such as posters, videos, and other types of social media posts, are aligned with what your audience wants and needs.
Understanding the personality and preferences of your audience (psychographics) and knowing where they are (demographics) will help you create a buyer persona. It will help straighten the message and positioning of your campaign.
- Create a market analysis and determine what sets you apart from the competition.
Market research tells you a lot about the customers’ buying patterns and behaviours, the saturation of the market, and most of all, the status of your competitors. In a social media campaign, you need to employ social media listening.
Social media listening is when you keep track of audience engagement with your competitors in the same niche and how they react to their social media efforts. This technique is kind of reading the atmosphere to best position your brand in your social media campaign.
- Identify the social media channels where you’ll launch your campaign.
Deciding where to invest your social media efforts is crucial to boosting your sales. In other words, the platform you use to launch your campaign is directly proportional, not only to the engagement of the audience but also to the sales and conversions your e-commerce shop will make.
For instance, customers who visit your e-commerce store mostly come from Instagram. But you chose to launch Twitter just because you already have an account there. Sure, some can be potential customers from Twitter, yet you already have active engagement and a bigger customer base on Instagram.
Choosing Instagram over Twitter is a more reasonable choice because it will create a loyal customer base. It will help with reinforcing your brand’s message and customer retention.
- Create a posting plan.
A posting plan helps keep your brand top-of-mind of customers. Frequent and sustained posts and shared contents on your social media pages help the brand recall. A social media calendar assists in making clear and organized flow towards your campaign goals.
- Establish KPIs and metrics to help measure your social media campaign’s performance and success.
You need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics to evaluate the performance and success of your social media campaigns. There are various interfaces and tools you can use to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
5 Proven Ways to Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign
Metrics and performance indicators are your best friends and most realistic advisors when you want to know if the money and time you’re putting in your campaign is worth it.
They will tell you if your campaign had gone south and you’re heading at a loss.
So how do you know if your social media campaign is winning?
Here are five proven ways of measuring the success of your social media campaign:
- Engagement
In the “social” definition, engagement is the measure of how many interactions and reactions a post or campaign receives from the audience. It consists of likes, shares, retweets, comments, and replies from the audience.
Engagement is important because it shows what kinds of content move the audience and motivates them to act. Engagement also reveals the personal preferences of your target audience. Because of this, it is easier to personalize their experience with your brand and optimize your content.
Engagement doesn’t directly translate to sales if it is one of your social media objectives. However, it helps with other vital brand elements like brand identity and image. It also strengthens customer trust, making referrals to potential customers possible.
Engagement also increases the chance of people visiting your e-commerce website or making a purchase. To calculate engagement rate, divide the total number of interactions your content received by your total number of followers. Then, divide it by 100.
- Brand Reach
One of the best benefits of social media is that it allows you to reach people far and wide. Traditional campaigns commonly only allow for a specific target location.
But with social media, there are no geophysical barriers because your connection can reach anywhere.
It’s the perfect tool to raise awareness for your brand, especially if it is a new one. Reach measures how far your content and campaign message reach social media.
To get brand reach, you have to divide impressions by frequency. Impressions measure the number of times your content was shown to people on social media.
- Social Traffic
Social traffic, or traffic, pertains to the number of visitors coming from social media channels to your website, mobile site, or app. For instance, you posted a carousel ad on your brand’s Facebook page. Then, people clicked on it, which automatically directed them to your store’s website.
The people who are directed from your Facebook post to your website are your visitors. This strategy increases your conversion rate. Social media is a proven platform for increasing web traffic. In all social media networks, Facebook was found to be the most effective social platform to bring visitors to your site.
Social traffic is measured using tools like Google Analytics. This tool is also used for Social Media Analytics (SMA), which is the process of tracking, analyzing, and evaluating social media data. It helps businesses like yours learn what people say about your products and services.
Other tools you can use for tracking and monitoring are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Hootsuite, Hub spot CRM, Salesforce CRM, and many more.
- Conversions
As explained earlier, conversion happens when people directed to your website, store, or app complete certain actions that ultimately lead to a sale. Some conversion examples are people subscribing to a newsletter on your website, buying a product on your e-commerce store, and filling out their information on the pop-up information box. This is related to social traffic and can be considered as its result.
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who completed any “desired action” on your website, store, or app.
To compute the conversion rate, simply divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors on your e-commerce website or store in the same time period.
For example, 2000 people are directed to your website by clicking your social media campaign. 1000 of them completed a “desired action,” and by doing that, they are your conversion.
To compute the conversion rate, divide the 1000 converted visitors by 2000 web visitors. It means you have a 50% conversion rate (1000 ÷ 2000 = 50%).
- Social Media Return on Investment (ROI)
Of course, what better way to gauge the success of your social media campaign than calculate and predict the return on investment that you will gain from the campaign? From the word itself, Social Media Return on Investment (ROI) is the return you will gain from the investment you made, with investment being your time, effort, skills, and money spent on your social media campaign.
Social Media ROI exposes what is working for your brand and what is not. Therefore, it guides you through planning competitive and target-oriented marketing strategies the next time you make another social media campaign.
Simple computation of the Social Media ROI is dividing the profit with your total investment and multiplying it by 100. The format looks like this: Profit ÷ total investment x 100. Another way to calculate this is by subtracting what you spent from what you earned and dividing it with what you spent. In format, it is Profit – Expenditure ÷ Expenditure.
For more social media marketing tips, check out this blog: 5 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media Marketing For Ecommerce Store.
FAQS
What Are the Elements of an Effective Social Media Campaign?
One key for an effective social media campaign is its ability to stand out. That’s why you have to consider important elements like creativity, interactive components, virality, clear messaging, and purpose.
How Much Does Social Media Campaigns Cost?
The average cost for running a social media campaign, according to Upwork, falls between $4,000- $7,000 a month. However, how much you spend on a campaign depends on how large the campaign is and how long it will take to run the campaign.
What is the Right Social Media Channel for my campaigns?
Choosing the right social media channel is crucial to the success of your social media campaign. Launching a campaign on a platform that your target audience is using definitely works. However, it is important to “listen” and be aware of rising trends and platforms which exhibit the ability to go big.
