Page 382 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Correlating Data with Business Objectives

Capturing metrics about your social media marketing efforts is always crucial,
whether they’re broader social media metrics or specific ones around a particular
platform. However, marrying these metrics with other marketing measures to see
how they correlate to business objectives is the key to business growth.

The most crucial challenge in social media marketing is not measuring individual
platforms but rather correlating that data to meet key performance indicators (KPIs).

Here are a few general KPIs to consider. Obviously, you need to pick the ones that
match your goals.

» Rate of customer conversion
» Performance of marketing campaigns
» Customer turnover rate

» Marketing return on investment (ROI)
» Number of customers acquired in the current year over the previous year
» Customer churn

» Customer lifetime value

When you put your social media marketing metrics in place, think about how you
can use them to determine whether you have met your marketing objectives. Also,
look at how you want to interpret them in relation to the rest of your marketing
and business objectives. Otherwise, you’ll just be capturing meaningless data.

Revenue growth, sales effectiveness, brand awareness, and leads are still the
metrics that matter most to management, so don’t lose sight of them.

CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

One measure that you should consider calculating is customer lifetime value (CLV). This
is not a new measure, but as data collection becomes more sophisticated than before,
marketers now can capture and gain insights from data along the entire customer
journey. CLV is a prediction about the value a customer will have to your business
based on their whole relationship with you. This measure helps you determine which
customers are the most important to pursue. It includes measures such as average
order value and frequency of orders.

366 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM