(by Influencers) How to Measure. the Impact of. Social Content. Tips for Social Marketers TMV MEASURE GOALS

Transcription

1 How to Measure the Impact of MEASURE Social Content (by Influencers) GOALS TMV DISTRIBUTION Tips for Social Marketers

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS About TapInfluence... 2 About the Authors... 3 Introduction... 4 Tip # Tip # Expert Tips Breakout Tip # Tip # Tip # Tip # The Impact Recap share

3 ABOUT TAPINFLUENCE one thing making it easy for marketers to connect with their consumers in a meaningful, authentic way. Contact Identity Activate who are trusted by your target audience. peer-trusted content that attracts and engages your target consumers Distribute Amplify social content at scale across the web on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. Measure Track the performance, engagement, and ROI of a program. share 2

4 THE AUTHORS Christopher Nixon VP of Marketing Debbie Pelzmann Content Strategist Having ramped and ignited powerful marketing strategies for several successful tech and SaaS startups, Chris knows a thing or two about reaching and engaging with customers in the software world. He believes that the simplest solution is most likely the right solution. He now conducts the symphony of demand and lead generation at TapInfluence as Vice President of Demand Marketing. Authentic, socially-driven content marketing began for Debbie when she wrote and distributed newsletters for her first business The Greenthumb Greenhouse at age nine. As a journalist and editor-gone-technical, she's brought keep it real writing to technical documentation, training, and web projects for global software companies and tech startups. share 3

5 THE INTRO SETTING THE STAGE. The way we measure the impact of social content, and that created by social influencers across all verticals, has changed rapidly and dramatically in the span of just a couple of years. It's both exciting and daunting to be a marketer right now. More and more, it seems the modern marketer needs to be able to pull technical know-how and a degree in data science out of his or her back pocket. While there's some truth to that, by-and-large there are countless others that have done a lot of the hard work for us, offering tools and opportunities to scale, track, and measure outcomes in ways that simply weren't possible before. Even that, though, is a nightmare to wade through. The same applies when it comes to partnering with influencers to co-create and distribute social content to your audiences. We wrote this specifically to address the social content industry as it begins to approach the tipping point to becoming an expected, and yes, totally necessary, part of every marketer's strategy. You can measure a return on influence. Here's how... share 4

6 TIP #1 SET YOUR BUSINESS GOALS. As with any other business analytics tools out there today, when you go to Google Analytics or Omniture, one of the first things you need to do is set your business goals. Setting up business goals makes it so much easier to move into the metrics piece and to know what to look at. Nail that down, and be on your way with a smooth approach to the metrics piece. For example, if your aim is to raise brand awareness, the first thing you should be looking at in influencer marketing is reach, or audience. Upon on how many people can you have an impact? Focus business goals on the why. It may be your goal to create authentic content, but without establishing why that s going to be good for business, your efforts can be led astray. Authentic content" in this case is the how. It s fine to include that in your business goal, but always keep the why top of mind. Here's an example: Our business goal is to create authentic content featuring videos of real employees having fun with our product. The Why: We want to let customers see our human side, because we've found they think we're robots over here. share 5

7 TIP #2 MEASURE UP. This one can be solved with technology. Influencer marketing is often measured manually using Excel spreadsheets, where you spend a whole lot of time going out to total up clicks, tweets, or Facebook engagements. This problem is avoidable. Given that: - Platforms exist that can automate the measurement of just about anything, and - All digital content can be distributed using trackers here we will talk about bringing it all of that together in non-mind numbing fashion. WHAT TO TRACK: Posts Shares Tweets Comments Impressions Engagements share 6

8 TIP #2 CALCULATE YOUR TOTAL MEDIA VALUE & ROI. STEP ONE: ROLL UP THE NUMBERS YOU TRACKED Each of these numbers is part of the formula that can determine your estimated return on influence (and social content in general). Place them into a spreadsheet by type (click, Like, retweet, comment, pin, etc), or use a tool like the TapInfluence platform, which automates the crawling, collection, and calculations for you. share STEP TWO: TURN THOSE NUMBERS INTO DOLLAR VALUES When you purchase Facebook promoted posts, depending on the pricing model you choose, you might pay a certain amount for each Like and another for each comment. You can use this as a baseline for your own measures. Take the numbers of views, engagements, and determine what it would have cost you to reach those numbers in a traditional paid advertising model. That is your Total Media Value, or TMV. STEP THREE: SHOW ME THE MONEY! To calculate the approximate Return On Influence (ROI see what we did there?), the formula is this: (Total Media Value - Investment) Investment = ROI Subtracting the dollar amount you spent on your influencer campaign from that would-be investment in traditional paid media (aka your Total Media Value) gives you a close idea of what your return on investment is. 7

9 EXPERT TIPS (BREAKOUT) ALL IN A CLICK. WHAT AM I TRACKING? Reach for the stars? What about the clouds? Here s what we see when we get into the discussion around reach: When marketers do influencer outreach with just a few selected celebrity bloggers the stars they can easily get to millions of people. But more and more, marketers are learning that working with a scaled number of influencers who fall into the power middle or what I m calling the clouds here can net equivalent reach. More importantly, it usually results in significantly higher engagement. Sooo, you're tellin' me there's a chance. Dumb and Dumber references aside, views boost brand awareness, which can translate into consideration and preferences. A view is worth more than Lloyd Christmas's one-in-a-million shot at a girl ("YEAH!"). By looking at content, your audience is telling you there's a chance. These cloud influencers have, on average, smaller audiences. As a result, they know them more intimately, and vice versa, the audience feels a stronger direct connection with the influencer. share 8

10 EXPERT TIPS (BREAKOUT) ALL IN A CLICK. WHAT AM I TRACKING? I Volunteer My Attention! (Engagement Is Big) Engagement is the audience spending time with influencer content: Reading it, watching it (in the case of video), clicking on it, commenting, "Like"ing, and more. We see the most sophisticated marketers putting more weight on engagement than they put on reach and views, as was previously commonplace. This is for the simple reason that an engagement is a voluntary action taken by a segmented audience member on your content, about your brand. Raise Your (share of) Voice Share of Voice is a metric that says how big a player a brand is in all online conversations around an industry or topic. Jay Baer listed continuous brand awareness first on a list of key ways to increase your share of voice, and influencers are proven to be allstars of awareness campaigns. Several tools exist to help you measure your share of voice, so get one up and running to measure where you stand before, during, and after an influencer campaign. How Is Everyone Feeling? Sentiment Analysis Where share of voice looks at a brand s presence online, sentiment analysis examines that presence to determine whether it s a good one. When you work with influencers to create content that positively utilizes your brand (but isn t necessarily about your brand), consumers are more likely to think positively of you and reflect that in one or more forms of content engagement. share 9

11 TIP #3 BRING IT HOME WITH DISTRIBUTION. Distribution plays a huge role in the success of content. The more effectively you can distribute, the more your content will be seen. Influencers who fall in the power middle are power distributors, and they will do the brunt of the work for you. But there are easy and creative steps you can take to make their efforts go even further, and really bring it home. Drive traffic to influencer content right on the brand website and social channels. Here s the scenario: An influencer creates content and pushes it through their usual channels. They build the conversation with their readers as they engage with that content, but before long, they go on to their next post. After all, if they didn t keep their content fresh and relevant consistently over time, you wouldn t have wanted them to create content for you, right? So an influencer will bring you most of the way there, but it s your opportunity to make it last in the ways that will best serve your brand. How do you do that? share 10

12 TIP #4 TURN THE TABLES, BECOME THE INFLUENCER. Now, in a sense, you need to promote your influencer. You re taking their content (which is also your content!) and repurposing that. Drive it through your social channels, feature it on your website. When you ve scaled, you have a huge content bin to pull from to consistently post fresh, unique content for your users to explore. Black Box Wines had business goals around driving more consumers to their website and keeping them there longer (increasing time-on-site). In an influencer program of 50 bloggers over 60 days, Black Box Wines gained hundreds of pieces of content spanning across various media formats: blogs, videos, imagery, and more. To keep the content alive and active, they created a social hub on their website that aggregated the content itself, but also drove discussions around it. The result? Overall time-on-site increased by 56%, and positive mentions of Black Box Wines increased by 223%. share 11

13 TIP #5 A/B TEST YOUR INFLUENCERS AND YOUR AUDIENCE. The more influencers you work with, the more you ll be able to explore varying levels of impact and study how that affects your ROI. Some influencers will have widespread amplification with slightly lower engagement, while others will garner dedicated attention from a smaller audience. The scaled approach allows you to A/B test your markets AND your influencers, since your entire campaign doesn t rely on just a handful of content pieces from a few people. Aim for different markets using the voice of highly specialized influencers, and you will understand your customers in deeper, more satisfying ways. share 12

14 TIP #6 ADJUST ACCORDINGLY. You can fine tune Total Media Value by looking at exactly who is engaging with your content and assigning a media value to engagements by age, location, or any other measurable demographic. Example: You re a B2C brand creating content that targets men between 45 and 60. You distribute something on your FB page and see that of the 900 engagements it received, 30% were by women 4560, 15% were by men 2534, and 10% of engagements came from your target of men between years old. You might assign 50% more value to comments or likes coming from your target demographic because you know that 40% of touchpoints with that specific demographic result in leads or product preference conversions. It s specific to your business what type of engagement holds more value, and static, default settings are rarely the most accurate form of ROI measurement. share 13

15 THE IMPACT RECAP HERE S WHAT YOU JUST DID. We began by looking at the problem: Quantifying the results of social content programs. To do that we examined the barriers that present challenges and result in less-than-maximum marketing impact with audience reach that doesn t translate the way you want it to. Once you determine what your business needs out of social content, in walks a myriad of elements you can track that will tell you whether you re getting there (our bet is on YES). Remember to track not just: Posts - Shares - Tweets - Comments - Impressions but also: Views - Engagement - Share of Voice - Sentiment Why track all of that? It s what leads you down the yellow brick road to your Total Media Value, which is that would-be investment in traditional paid media. With your Total Media Value in hand, you are a subtract and divide away from your estimated ROI, or Return On Influence. But you know as well as we do that a campaign doesn t end there. Influencer content, especially, lives on, and the number of ways you can help it do so, and reap the rewards, keep increasing the deeper you go. share 14

16 share