“Measurement” can be a daunting word for business owners. However, in the business world, these measurements are critical to benchmarking success. Measurements are critical to forecasting and company spending strategies overall.
Whether you are investing in print, TV, a call center, the web, social media, sales force, or brick & mortar, measurement is critical to determine what has the highest ROI for your company. While several different media channels may influence a customer before buying your product, the channel they end up in at the end of the sales funnel should be the channel that is measured most critically.
To put the importance of measurements into perspective, look at the Barnes and Noble dilemma of 1998. The company created a website to sell books and compete with Amazon, but it wasn’t performing as expected. The low numbers caused a mindset alteration. By measuring the website’s impact on the customers, rather than just the number of hits, they changed routes and used the website to generate increased traffic to their brick & mortar stores.
The Lesson? Companies should categorize all of their media channels. Pay close attention to the last channel utilized by the customer. The last channel should be the channel of record.
How does this play into social media measurement? Measurements should be based on discussion among customers; not the number of people who simply visited your company’s post or page. If they pass along your content to their friends and followers – sharing the page, commenting the post, etc. – it should be measured and weighed appropriately. Place a high emphasis on the customers that actively comment on your posts and re share them. Calculate which customers participate in conversation about the company via social media. These are the customers you need to measure carefully, pay attention to, and cater to.
Many companies use the “seven touch points before they buy” strategy. This is fine, but only when accompanied by measurements! The measurements should be used to justify future company spending.
Using a social media measurement tool like Radian6 or HubSpot can help sort out the distribution of impressions per each channel. These sites will determine where the most positive feedback is taking place in the social web. Your customers are not only talking about you, but they are generating positive feelings about your company. We cannot stress it enough: specific, positive, and consistent feedback is what your company should be looking for when conducting these measurements.
Lastly, capture the buy lead in the final channel. Do whatever you can – create surveys and incentives – in order to find out how and why the customer got there. But, don’t forget to focus on what the customers do when they reach their media destination!