MarketingSherpa Blog

Measuring your marketing is the only way to know which efforts are working and which are wasting money. Even if you can’t measure every impact, you should track as much as possible.

After looking at some data from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, I wonder how many campaigns are only half-measured, with half their impact open to anyone’s guess.

When asked ‘What is your organization monitoring and measuring to quantify social media impact?’ 50% or more respondents said they were tracking:
o Visitors and traffic sources
o Followers, fans and members numbers
o Commentary about brand or product
o Sentiment around brand or product.

Fewer than 50% of respondents said they were tracking:
o Search engine rank
o Lead generation
o Progress toward social media objectives
o Engagement with influential bloggers, journalists, Twitterers, etc.
o Sales conversion and other ROI metrics
o Competitive share of social media coverage
o Criteria to identify and profile audiences

Astoundingly, only 35% of respondents said they were tracking sales conversion and other ROI metrics related to social media.

Getting more website traffic, Facebook fans and comments is very good. But if you’re not sure whether that’s having an effect on lead generation or sales, many executives will ask: what’s the point?

Marketers across the globe are finding use with social media. But if you want the rest of your organization to take it seriously and to invest more in the channel, you should learn as much about its impact as possible. The data talks.

If social media is helping you learn more about your audience, get data on how that knowledge is improving your marketing. If it’s helping your brand’s image, find a way to quantify it. Hypothetical evidence is as solid as a wet paper towel compared to hard data.

Is your team measuring its social media impact? If not, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments…

Return on investment is top of mind for marketers these days as most marketing efforts come under the scrutiny of ROI justification.

Here are a few insights gleaned from an interview with Jim Lenskold, President of the Lenskold Group, about how to improve and optimize the measurement of marketing ROI:

1. The biggest challenge in improving marketing ROI is removing cultural barriers and instilling a sense of discipline in planning and assessing the financial contribution of marketing.

2. Marketing strategies that do a better job targeting higher value, higher converting segments have the greatest impact on ROI.

3. Measurements that use market testing and modeling are most conclusive and often under-utilized when measuring marketing effectiveness.

4. Choosing measurements that provide insight about how to improve future initiatives is the most important step in generating greater performance and profitability.

5. Using revenue instead of profits as the return is a basic financial error that marketers make. It must be corrected for accurate ROI calculations and credibility with executives.