Any modern marketer will tell you that the foundation of digital marketing - and the area in which it has the greatest advantage over traditional advertising - is data.
The ability to track almost every interaction between your audience and your brand's online presence gives marketers the ability to continually optimize their efforts, and presents a more 'scientific' approach compared to traditional marketing methods.
However, social media does present a challenge in this regard, since interactions with your brand's social media profiles happens outside of your own web assets. As such, your tracking capabilities are limited to what Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram are willing to show you.
Depending on your goals, this might be only a very partial picture and provide only minor possibilities for further optimization. However, by combining the data extracted from social platforms with your other marketing data sources - such as website analytics, marketing automation and CRM - you can gain a better picture of the role social media is playing in your marketing funnel, and find new opportunities to promote your business goals socially.
Defining Your Goals and Finding The Relevant Data
A prerequisite for any intelligent measurement and analysis of data is to first establish what your goals are.
If you don't have a well-defined strategy for social media yet, it might be too early to start thinking about the data (this neat guide by Hootsuite could be a good place to start coming up with one). Needless to say, data is always meant to serve the business goals, not the other way around.
Develop a clear understanding of what you hope to achieve from your social media marketing efforts, and from there you can define your KPIs and data source.
For example:
- Increasing brand awareness - If your goal is merely to get your name out there, you might want to look at your overall reach statistics. This data can normally be found within the native social media reporting tools (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc.)
- Sales - If you're aiming to sell more of your products via paid social media advertising or by driving additional traffic to your website organically, you will generally need to look in your web and ecommerce analytics tools in order to understand the way users behaved on your website or landing pages after coming in through social media.
- Lead Generation - Many companies, particularly in the B2B space, are not necessarily looking to generate a sale right here and now, but merely to push additional prospects into the funnel. Often the lead lifecycle will be managed via marketing automation tools such as Marketo and Hubspot, or CRM software such as Salesforce.
- Recruitment - Many companies use social media, particularly LinkedIn, as a way to lure candidates for open positions. Modern recruitment platforms can enable you to track job seekers coming in via social media, as well as social referrals by current employees.
Combining Data from Multiple Sources for a Holistic View
Once you've identified your KPIs and the data you'll need in order to track them, you need to start thinking about ways to join these data sources together.
Let's say you're a B2B marketer looking to drive lead generation and sales by posting content updates on Facebook. It's important to understand that the data you need essentially resides in three different places:
- Facebook Insights will tell you how many people saw and engaged with your Facebook posts
- Google Analytics (or similar web analytics tools) will tell you the conversion rates of social traffic on your website
- While data regarding prospects' behavior further down the funnel (i.e. which leads became paying customers) might be stored in your CRM.
Creating an integrated view of the data requires extracting it from the various sources, finding or creating a unique key which will allow you to identify visitor's throughout the funnel, and then aggregating data based on this key. This can be done by manually exporting the data to Excel and applying the relevant formulas, but if you're working with larger datasets or want to automate the process (e.g. by connecting directly to the various systems via API), you might want to look into marketing dashboard tools.
Once you have all the relevant data in one place and can link it all together, you'll gain a much deeper understanding of the actual impact social media has on your business. You'll also learn to steer clear of vanity metrics, such as "likes", which may be ultimately meaningless if engagement isn't the core metric you're after, and instead focus on the things that actually matter according to your predefined goals.
Driving New Insights Through Data Discovery
Narrowing down your focus to truly meaningful KPIs is the first step in data-driven social media marketing - but it doesn't have to be the last.
Easy access to all your data will enable you to look at new types of connections and correlations - for example, it could be that your activity on social media isn't driving a lot of traffic directly, but the exposure your brand is receiving on social is increasing organic and direct traffic to your website on subsequent days. Or perhaps your social media updates aren't leading to conversions on the very next click, but your analysis shows that engaged followers are more likely to make a purchase on a monthly basis.
These are mere examples - each business is different and can find its own insights based on its audience behavior and the effectiveness in which they gather and analyze data. However, if your data is still spread across a plethora of different systems, this type of data exploration is close to impossible.
Centralizing the data and creating a single, holistic view out of social media data, web analytics, CRM and other relevant sources will enable you to dive deeper, understand the effectiveness of your social efforts. And of course - optimize, improve, and optimize again.