Is it worth it?Campaigns, conversions, analytics & ROI

Centre For Collaboration & Partnership, University Of Brighton December 20-21, 2011

Is it worth it?

★ Understanding the Funnel

★ SMART targets for Social Media

★ Social Media Campaigns

★ 3rd party tracking tools

Understanding the Funnel

★ Beyond ‘prospects’ and ‘customers’

★ And into a funnel

★ The aim is not to sell as quickly as possible but to progress relevant people to the bottom of the funnel where they’re ready to buy.

★ You can engage, inform and entertain people all the while enhancing your connection and building a community of friends who may buy and/or may promote you to others

★ Existing customers are valuable, get the treatment they deserve and help you think about how you best promote and build your web presence

* we’ve become more refined over time* Google has perfected the funnel* example: searching for ‘training’ in Google.co.uk puts the prospect at the top of your funnel. Changing to ‘toilet training’ would push them out of the funnel, you can ignore them. But, here comes someone else with ‘CPD training Brighton’ now that prospect is worth a lot more of your time and attention. This is how AdWords works, people pay more for better qualified leads.* You can write AdWords adverts (and social media updates) to encourage lots of clicks or fewer (but better) clicks. Trad. marketing thought attention was infinite and free. But Google charges more for the clicks from the people further down your funnel

SMART targets for Social Media

★ Specific. Any social media  marketing target should be specific

★ Measurable. The target should be measurable

★ Attainable – Keep it realistic

★ Relevant – The target needs to be relevant to what you’re trying to achieve in your business

★ Time-Based – Set a date by when your target should be achieved.

S - Make sure that this is a target with a purpose, not just a target in itself. So a specific target should not be something like ‘Publish 3 Twitter updates every day’, but instead something like ‘Build a twitter audience of 500 potential customers’.M - e.g the number 500 gives us something to measure against, which is better than simply saying ‘Build Twitter following’, numbers are very easy to find for most online activityA - Writing down a target doesn’t make it happen. Do you really have the time, skills and ability to make it happen? If it doesn’t sound realistic you’re unlikely to try hard to achieve it. Try stretching existing metrics, i.e. ‘increase homepage traffic by 10%’R - If you have little intention of ever writing newsletters or sending out material or offers to people on your mailing list then there’s not much point in creating one. Doing something just because it sounds good or because someone else is doing it is not a reason for it being relevant to your own goals.T - Be realistic, but don’t be open ended. If your target doesn’t sit within set time bounds then it’s liable to end up dragging on forever, ‘increase weekly homepage traffic by 10% before the end of Q1’

Homework time!

★ Make 3 SMART Social Media goals for your department/team to achieve by the end of 2012

★ For each goal devise 9 month, 6 month and 3 month goals

★ Get your homework to Barbara before start of tomorrow’s Strategy & Planning session

S - Make sure that this is a target with a purpose, not just a target in itself. So a specific target should not be something like ‘Publish 3 Twitter updates every day’, but instead something like ‘Build a twitter audience of 500 potential customers’.M - e.g the number 500 gives us something to measure against, which is better than simply saying ‘Build Twitter following’, numbers are very easy to find for most online activityA - Writing down a target doesn’t make it happen. Do you really have the time, skills and ability to make it happen? If it doesn’t sound realistic you’re unlikely to try hard to achieve it. Try stretching existing metrics, i.e. ‘increase homepage traffic by 10%’R - If you have little intention of ever writing newsletters or sending out material or offers to people on your mailing list then there’s not much point in creating one. Doing something just because it sounds good or because someone else is doing it is not a reason for it being relevant to your own goals.T - Be realistic, but don’t be open ended. If your target doesn’t sit within set time bounds then it’s liable to end up dragging on forever, ‘increase weekly homepage traffic by 10% before the end of Q1’

Social Media Campaigns

★ Devise campaign codes to track effectiveness

★ e.g your-site.com/booking-form.html?code=TW10-09 for Twitter links offering 10 percent off in September

★ These codes will show up in your analytics software and, if used consistantly, can provide a lot of info about what works and what doesn’t

3rd Party Tracking Tools

★Google Analytics will give you real-time, free, analytics and help you define and attach goals to your funnels.

★ The bit.ly URL shortening service will also give you stats on specific links

★ Use forms, post-course questionnaires, on your site to get more information about a prospect, marketing geared to known subset of your lists makes messaging more relevant and effective and email pushes can be co-ordinated with your Social Media campaign codes

Wrap up & Questions

Do you feel you can...

★ use a variety of tools to analyse your networks, message effectiveness, areas of opportunity?

★ track campaigns and calculate ROI?