3. Measure and manage

4 Key Metrics to Measure the Success

For marketing creatives the the process of inventing a campaign can be tough. However, once you have the perfect idea the fun begins and you can put all your thoughts and ideas into action. After the campaign has been launched and conversations start to fade away, time has come for evaluation. For marketers that are not so fond of analytics, this might sound as pure horror. Not to worry though, here are 4 social metrics that matter and that are easy to measure!

1. Compare 'campaign buzz' to 'normal brand buzz'

Compare the week or month in which your marketing campaign generated most buzz with the preceding week or month. If you only do marketing campaigns on a sporadic base, this will give you a clear idea of the online conversations they trigger. If the spike in social media mentions is negligible, you should reevaluate your campaign. Campaigns that touch people, generate reactions: likes, comments, +1′s, whatever. The absence of reactions is often a good indication the campaign was not a success.

If your brand does marketing campaigns on a regular basis, you might not really have a 'normal brand buzz'. In this case it is wise to compare the campaigns to one another. There are two possibilities here:

• • After each campaign you export all metrics of interest to you. You combine them in a report which you can afterwards use to compare campaigns to one another. This of course always takes some time and your reports are then in a different location than where you follow up on your marketing metrics: in your social media management tool.

• Second option (the one I prefer) is to create a custom dashboard for each campaign. This requires a one-time effort: choosing all the metrics you want to track and combine them in a custom dashboard. Afterwards you can always copy-paste this template to track a new campaign and all you have to do is change the date filter. This way you always have the data you need in the place you need it.

2. Top posts on your social profiles

Marketing campaigns go hand in hand with publishing content on your social networks. Find out which of the posts you published had most success, both with regard to applause (like retweets and likes) and engagement (like comments and replies). For Twitter you can also measure which post reached the highest number of people, taking into consideration the follower count of the twitterers retweeting your content.

3. Successful campaign content

The top posts already give you a good indication of which content worked and which didn't. Another way of working is checking each type of content individually: most popular photos, videos or web pages. Small guess: it will probably be the first two categories that are shared most often.

4. Sentiment evolution

The ultimate goal of marketing is generating sales leads. Of course there are several other intermediate goals that serve the same cause. One of them is brand reputation. A good measure for reputation is how people talk about your brand. After a campaign it's interesting to check whether it had a positive impact on the sentiment of the messages about your brand.

Needless to say there are several other metrics that are interesting to follow up on in the aftermath of a marketing campaign. However, these four already give you a good idea of a campaign's impact.

Follow me on ...

Blogger:     
Diigo:    
Disqus:    
FourSquare: 
GitHub:     
Instagram:
Medium:      
Pinterest:  
Reddit:    
Telegram:  
Tumbler:     
Twitch:      
Twitter:     
Vimeo:       
Youtube: