The 2018 Social Metrics Map

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1 A Sprout Social Company GUIDE The 2018 Social Metrics Map How to Tie Owned, Earned, and Paid Social Media to Business Goals

Introduction earned, and paid social media strategy to the relevant KPIs and business value, depending on which stage of the funnel your program is focused.

2 Introduction earned, and paid social media strategy to the relevant KPIs and business value, depending on which stage of the funnel your program is focused. Kevin Shively Director of Marketing for Simply Measured, a Sprout Social Company Two years ago, we published the first edition of the Social Metrics Map. A simple guide to identifying the correct social media KPIs for each stage of the funnel. It s been one of the most valuable pieces of content we ve ever published. Customers constantly tell us they have it hanging above their desk as a reminder, and to help inspire new ideas. The social metrics map is something we use internally as well, and helps inform both our social, and content marketing programs. But as the face of social has changed, we ve realized the need for an update. Social Marketers Should Help Define Social s Impact on the Business. Use this guide to measure the effectiveness of your current strategy, or work backwards to develop a new social media strategy based on the impact you re looking to make. Success in marketing needs to be defined up front. If you leave that definition up to someone else, you ll likely be disappointed, and potentially set up for failure. By following this simple process, you ll find your definition of success easy to understand, easy to justify, and most importantly, a relevant measure of your program s effectiveness. Not only are social marketers responsible for posting Tweets and Facebook posts. They re responsible for influencer campaigns, inspiring user-generated content, publishing paid content and boosting their organic content to get a wider reach. The challenge with all of that is that social marketers aren t always evaluated by the same standards and metrics that the rest of the marketing team is, and in many cases, this is because marketing leadership doesn t know how to evaluate social media. In this guide, we ll walk through a simple, three-step process for mapping owned, We ll talk about: 01 Identify Objectives: The content you curate has to be relevant to your employees professional lives in some way 02 Organize Social Metrics: How to take all the metrics out there and organize them into simple groups that help prove success 03 Set Goals: Setting realistic goals with the appropriate objective and metrics The 2018 Social Metrics Map 2

3 AWARENESS CONSIDERATION 01. Identify Objectives: This is the marketing funnel. Many marketers use the buyer s journey as a framework, which is similar. The funnel is a linear representation of the buyer s journey, designed to align marketing and sales activities. DECISION ADOPTION These are the stages that a buyer goes through when trying to make a decision about a product or a service, and even after they purchase. Companies create functions, programs, and campaigns that allow their marketing team to move the buyer between those stages. So we align each stage with an objective. The objectives are very similar, but they include an action. For example, the action in the awareness stage is create awareness. ADVOCACY The 2018 Social Metrics Map 3

4 AWARENESS Create Awareness CONSIDERATION DECISION Generate Demand Drive Conversion Marketing Objectives: This is important because it leads to the next step, which is identifying which social strategy will allow you to achieve that objective. We ve outlined that here. ADOPTION Delight Customers What TrustRadius found in a survey is that while 50% of social marketers can easily identify these, they still find it challenging to connect the dots. ADVOCACY Inspire Evangelism The 2018 Social Metrics Map 4

5 AWARENESS 43% CONSIDERATION DECISION ADOPTION 25% 12% 6% What Marketing Objective Do You Support? When we asked which stage social media supports, 43% said they support brand awareness. Only 6% are focused on adoption. ADVOCACY 11% The 2018 Social Metrics Map 5

6 AWARENESS Expose target audience to brand content CONSIDERATION DECISION Generate engagement with brand content Drive target audience to brand offers Do You Have The Right Strategy? Identifying the marketing objective you need to support will allow you to come up with the right strategy for execution. ADOPTION Drive customer engagement with brand product/services ADVOCACY Activate customer influencers The 2018 Social Metrics Map 6

7 02. Organize Social Metrics While a lot of marketers are capable of identifying the correct objective and putting together the appropriate strategy, a lot of them fail in this stage. Less than 50% of marketers have identified the correct metric to evaluate their success. Marketers are using the metrics that are easy, instead of using the right ones. This creates a disconnect between paid, earned, and owned. So let s organize this mess. We identified three main types of metrics that will allow us to take this mess and put them in the right buckets. We asked why, and the answer is that there are so many metrics out there, and when you try to map a paid, owned, and earned plan back to that strategy, it can get complicated. There winds up being a lot of confusion about what is important, which metrics matter where, and what to focus on. On top of that, metrics with the same name have different definitions depending on the network you re analyzing. It s exhausting! Each year Forrester Research gives The Groundswell Award to social media programs that apply, and Forrester asks is that in that application, they share metrics that prove their success. Activity Posts & Promotion Success Impressions & Engagement Impact Traffic & Conversions In 2015, 84 companies applied, and among them, there were 57 different success metrics. There is no way that each of these 57 metrics are relevant. What we see from this is that the social media market has a metrics overload. The 2018 Social Metrics Map 7

8 Stage: Brand awareness Here s an Example: The corresponding strategy would be to expose the target audience to our content and message. In order to do that, we need to go out there and post and promote on social, and enable our audience to do the same. This means that the activity metrics would be posts and promotions. Once we do that, there s a result of that activity. We capture that with the success metrics, which are impressions and reach. Finally, the impact on the business is Share of Voice (SOV) and Top of Mind Awareness (ToMA). Marketing Objective: Create awareness Social Media Strategy: Expose audience to brand s content Owned Activity Metrics: Posts Paid Activity Metrics: Boosted Posts and Promotions Earned Activity Metrics: Influencers interacted with Success Metrics: Impressions and reach Impact on Business: SOV and ToMA The 2018 Social Metrics Map 8

9 We created this process for each stage of the marketing funnel, and mapped each stage of the buyer s journey with the objective, strategy, and different paid, earned, This will allow you to tie the way you prove your value with the buyer s journey and your overall business objective. and owned metrics you need. Social Metrics Map BUYER S JOURNEY AWARENESS OBJECTIVE Create awareness SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY Expose target audience to brand content SOCIAL ACTIVITY Owned: Posts Earned: Influencers engaged Paid: Promotions, Boosts SOCIAL KPIs Impressions, reach, cost-per-impression BUSINESS IMPACT SOV, ToMA CONSIDERATION Generate demand Drive engagement of target audience with brand content Owned: Posts Earned: Interactions Paid: Boosted Posts, targeted ads # of engagements, types of engagements Visitors/traffic (online or offline) DECISION Drive conversion Move target audience to brand offers Owned: Posts with CTAs Earned: Shared links Paid: Targeted ads with CTAs Link clicks, cost-per-click Conversions (purchases, leads, app downloads, etc) ADOPTION Delight customers Drive engagement with brand product/services Owned: Customer interactions Earned: Responses Paid: Promoted customer content (Positive) Earned mentions, customer care (responses, times, qty) Sentiment and satisfaction ADVOCACY Inspire evangelism Activate customer influencers Owned: Posts Earned: Outreach to influencers Paid: Boosted influencer posts Earned impressions, reach, social UGC Referrals, influencer activity, positive word of mouth, NPS The 2018 Social Metrics Map 9

10 03. Set Realistic Goals Setting goals with no information is a gamble. We don t have to gamble as social marketers, because we have an abundance of information. Setting realistic goals is about a reference point. A goal is taking one of the metrics we ve discussed, and attaching a value. So if impressions is the metric I m focused on, the goal would be a certain number (a value) of impressions, during a specific time frame, with a specific audience, etc. The first step is to set a reference point. To the right you ll find five ways to do this, ranked from most effective to least. Establish a Point of Reference 01 Your own baseline: If you did it before, use your own baseline to set realistic goals 02 Peers: What kind of success have like-minded companies seen? 03 Competitors: What type of results have your competitors seen? 04 Industry Benchmarks: These can be difficult to navigate because they re generic, and not always relevant 05 Common sense (guesstimation): If you have a good idea of what your goal should be, this is better than nothing The 2018 Social Metrics Map 10

11 Conclusion If you don t define what success means for your social team, who will? This process of mapping metrics to the buyer s journey is the key to taking control of social media goals. Start by using the funnel to identify your objective, take all the metrics you have access to and narrow them down to the key metrics across paid, earned, and owned activities, and plan your strategy accordingly. The 2018 Social Metrics Map 11

12 About Us Simply Measured, a Sprout Social Company, provides the world s leading full-funnel social analytics. As part of Sprout Social s end-to-end social media management system, Simply Measured exposes social media s total impact, from conversations to conversions. We re here to help social marketers generate actionable insights from social data. A Sprout Social Company REQUEST A DEMO Copyright Simply Measured, a Sprout Social Company. All Rights Reserved.

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