Repeat after me: a client is totally justified, at any time, to ask you for the ROI of social media platform that is tied into your online or OEO (Online Editorial Outreach) efforts. Easily dismissing the fact that ROI can exist for Twitter doesn’t make you look intelligent or that you understand measurement. These types also tend to throw around “ROE – Return on Engagement.”
To quote my colleague Don Bartholomew: “Most of the folks who use these terms either don’t understand ROI or don’t know how to obtain the data necessary to calculate it.”
But how can you get to the point of knowing what quantitative measurable objectives to set, plus the strategy and tactics around them? The strategy portion has always made sense to me in thinking of it as a “Who, What, Where, When, Why” scenario, with the tactics being the “How.”
I’m not sure if quantitative objectives set at the start are the best approach, especially when working with a new brand/client. A listening period is effective, but let’s take it a step further into qualitative benchmarking to further lay them out. At the end of the day, you have to be able to meet what the client is looking for. If that’s impressions, it’s impressions.
Building brands is great – but you can’t tie it completely back to ROI. Engagement is a tactic, not a measurement standard. There isn’t a 100 percent, surefire way to tie back fans or Twitter followers to a quantitative objective. It’s perfectly applicable to tie it back to a qualitative one.
Say on Facebook that there is a coupon for 10 percent off at your clients store. The user has to “like” the brand to use the coupon. Granted, there are others that have already liked the brand and can use the coupon. You can track ROI based off the coupon usage, but it can’t be tied back into the qualitative numbers you have set. (Obviously, it would need to have a code entered at purchase to effectively track.)
The “listening/evaluation” period can be from 4-6 months, with 6 months being the period where measurable objectives can be defined. This approach should only be used for brands that aren’t already measuring. A brand that has been in the space for a long time will be able to provide their audience, target demographic and what approaches have been effective in the past.
I’ve found that it can be very overwhelming to jump the gun with those just getting started, when buy-in is critical for the first 4-6 months. If its too overwhelming and there is no action plan (or worse, it isn’t met because it wasn’t evaluated properly) you lose the business.
I approach it as “X number of quality followers per week”, add the numbers together and get an overall 6 month goal that the brand should be able to reach. This also allows time for the brand to evaluate and understand what type of audience they will be dealing with once quantitative action can be implemented and ROI can start to be measured.
Is it perfect? No. But it also enables the agency or brand to spend 4-6 months educating, understanding and really knowing the difference between a qualitative and quantitative objective. By learning and taking it step by step, the client will learn to trust you with all measurement along the way.
If the brand is starting at 0 followers, I might want to have 10 new followers a week on Twitter. At the start, define with the brand what qualifies as “quality” and be able to tie that back in. Tactics will come into play because of the “how” to reach the quality followers. If the overall goal is 40 new followers a month, for 6 months, you can expect to have 240 new followers in the month.
With the client, position this as “volume growth” in the qualitative objective/benchmarking category. Dependent on how far along they are in terms of fans/followers will determine what the number is per week, month and benchmark months.
From there, translate it into percentage increases for the client to easily understand.
In 3 months:
- XX percent increase in Facebook fans
- XX percent increase in Twitter followers
- XX percent increase in blog comments
- XX percent increase in website views
In 6 months:
- XX percent increase in Facebook fans
- XX percent increase in Twitter followers
- XX percent increase in blog comments
- XX percent increase in website views
At the end of each month, you should also be benchmarking as a “XX percent to goal” to see what tactics should be changed and what is working.
At 6 months, you should have a better picture of the type of demographics and what the audience responds best to. This will enable you to set more realistic quantitative objectives, while educating the client and building trust along the way. This is also the period where you can evaluate paid monitoring tools to fit the specific client. As our clients lean toward a more IMC approach, we don’t only need a listening/response platform, for example.
Am I promoting a band-aid approach to your metrics? Absolutely not. This is more of a pre-cursor to how you can start measuring. Education is key in this space, and it’s a step that’s missed a lot with brands.
What would you add? Do you agree, or do you jump in right away with quantitative metrics?
**The next post in this series will dive a bit more into setting quantitative objectives and how they differ overall.
