Business Marketing Success Strategy ? Integrate Marketing ...

As I wrap up my ?Business Marketing Success Strategy? series, one core element to keep in mind, is ?don?t take your eyes off the target.? After all, high levels of traffic, increased conversion rates and better revenues are the whole point of the content game in your online marketing strategies. Finding a way to track and analyze audience metrics at each stage of the users? journey is important.

Designated landing pages, prominent and actionable calls-to-action, tracking URLs and functional forms will help you collect user data and tailor your next message on the basis of each specific user?s engagement with your content. As social networking becomes more sophisticated, so too are the metrics by which we measure social business ROI.

In the early years of the social networking age, organizations relied almost solely on simple, standard metrics, such as the number of Facebook fans and likes or the number of Twitter followers and tweets/retweets, to determine their success. Those metrics are still important, but organizations today are developing more sophisticated metrics to measure their progress in meeting increasingly granular social objectives.

What matters most will differ depending on your organization?s size, industry, products, current goals for social, and so on,but some increasingly important social media metrics can be applied widely. Here are three that you may want to consider now:

1. Quality of Followers/Fans

You may have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter. These numbers still matter, but it?s critical to look beyond the numbers to the quality of those fans and followers. There are companies that will allow you to purchase followers, but I don?t allow my team to do so because it will not be an effective return on investment. Sure, it may look impressive to see thousands of followers on a company profile, but other than the wow factor for visitors, what purpose does that large number serve? Especially if they don?t interact with your site or represent your niche market. Maintaining a smaller core audience of interested, engaged followers will ultimately lead to more meaningful conversations and stronger sales.

2. Most Popular Pages, Posts and Tweets

By now, most organizations realize that to succeed at social media marketing they need to maintain a consistent presence and dedicate resources to updating content and engaging with the audience. It?s easy to measure in pure numbers which pages, posts and tweets are most popular, but organizations need to go beyond the numbers to determine why they were popular. Was it a question that prompted a barrage of comments? Was it a link to a how-to video on Twitter that resulted in a high number of retweets? Was it a how-to whitepaper that accompanied the announcement of a new product launch? Using this information will increase the likelihood of more success.

3. Conversion

Conversion is a long-vaunted goal, but as companies become more savvy about their use of social media, it?s increasingly critical to measure what the social audience is doing as a result of the time they spend on your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social sites. Did they buy something, sign up for something or consume something as a result of a Facebook update, Twitter post or Pinterest pin? If so?and this is the harder question to answer?why?

Once you have a solid flow of leads coming in, you should nurture them by offering them new value pieces. But whether you do that via campaign emails or monthly company newsletters, make sure your message resonates with users ? you surely don?t want it to end up in the spam box after all the effort.

Here?s a list of several metrics tools several of my clients and I like to use that will aide in gathering the information you desire to support the above three considerations:

Facebook Insights: Provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.

Twitaholic: is a site which shows the growth of a Twitter account over time in relation to the number of new followers and follows. It also compares Twitter account follows based on region by ranking them.

Google Analytics: lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back.

BudURL: designed to give businesses and marketers insight into previously invisible click traffic. BudURL is the only service to provide integrated short URL services, QR codes, and mobile landing page management into a single platform.

Do you have a question about social media metrics or maybe a favorite tool for gathering statistics? We?d love to hear from you; please leave a comment below?

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