Social marketers say that the top 3 challenges they face include identifying and reaching their target audience, measuring ROI and supporting overall business goals.

Sprout Social

Social media marketing KPIs are different for each business and industry.

The social media marketing KPIs that you track might be completely different to your competitors but that wouldn’t mean you are doing anything wrong.

KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, play an important role in analyzing and optimizing your marketing efforts.

If you want to nail your marketing campaigns, dominate the digital marketing networks and build a successful online brand, you’re going to need social media KPIs.

1. Social Media Marketing Objectives

In order to understand what ‘key areas’ you need to focus on, you’re going to need some social media marketing objectives under each stage of your customer journey – Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Retention.

For example, an Awareness campaign will have the objective as Reach while a sales campaign will focus on Conversion objectives like Add To Cart or Catalog Sales.

2. Why Use Marketing KPIs?

Marketing KPIs are important for three reasons:

  1. Social media marketing KPIs enable to identify specific objectives and analyze the progress to achieve them. This gives us an image of what’s going well, where we need to improve, and how much of the strategy is giving returns in terms of meeting marketing goals. 
  2. Secondly, KPIs help provide deep insights if campaign changes are leading to desirable results or not. If a modification doesn’t result into something as expected then it’s time to try something else and review the results along the way so you know why things didn’t work out this time around. 
  3. Last but not the least, KPIs can help you identify areas that need improvement. Analyzing and notifying your low points will create paths for you to work on in the future.

3. The Advantages of Measuring KPIs

Tracking KPIs might sound like a lot of work but it has endless benefits. Below are some major ones:

  1. Understanding the audience: In order to effectively talk to your customer, you need to understand who they are and what they want. You you actually need to know about your customer beyond age, gender, country, languages spoken, etc. to actually know who they actually are and how to speak to those people on a level that builds connection and trust! Their personality, likes/dislikes, beliefs, goals, values, problems.
  2. Top performers: KPIs give clear assessment of what’s working and what’s not in terms of everything strategies, assets, target audience, platforms. Make sure to test one thing at a time to be able to make some conclusions and not get lost in the large amount of data collected.
  3. Growth opportunities: KPIs will help you understand how you can grow your brand and business in the digital world from one platform to another. Start to master one platform at a time, note your learnings and use similar strategies for the next platform on your list. Execute > Analyze > Optimize and repeat the process till you achieve desired results.

4. Examples

There are a lot of metrics to measure but what matter the most vary for each business. To effectively track your brand/business’ performance, it’s key to use the right objectives, meeting your business goals. Here are some categories to start with:

  1. Reach: This is more of a quantity measurement – shows how many users come across your social media channel/campaign.
  2. Impressions: The number of times your post was shown to the users. If you have seen a post twice, the impressions would be 2.
  3. Growth rate: Since social media is a game of gaining and losing followers on daily basis, it is important to know the pace at which you are growing. 
  4. Engagement rate: It includes are the engagement a post receives: likes, comments, saves, shares as compared to your total followers.
  5. Click through rate: The percentage of people who clicked the Call-To-Action (CTA) on your post/ad versus how many people saw it. 
  6. Cost per click: The money you pay to social media platforms to get each click. This is an important metric to make sure the amount is worth investing for a single click.
  7. Conversion rate: The number of users performing the specified action compared to the number of clicks for your ad. 

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