Visitor Insights

With all the buzz around social media marketing, more and more companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon. Social media offers a greater reach than some of the traditional online marketing channels, and enjoys fewer competition. Yet, there’s a lot of skepticism among some around social media marketing. The main roadblock that we’ve seen so far has been around measurement. Many companies still have the perception that social media is not measurable or that it can not be measured with the same standards as other online media. The following is a list of myths and facts about social media measurement.

Myth: I don’t pay for social media traffic. Since I don’t pay for it, I don’t need to measure it.

Fact: This is only a perception. The fact that you’re spending your resources – time and labor – means that you’re paying for social media traffic. True, there’s no cost-per-click model, but the mere fact that you’re spending time writing blogs, creating Facebook pages, responding to people’s requests or questions on Twitter means that you’re spending valuable resources on social media. Like any other activity, there’s an opportunity cost associated with your efforts – time you could be spending doing other things.

For example, if an employee costing the company $80,000 per year spends 10% of his/her time responding to blogs, Twitter posts, etc., then the cost of social media associated with that employee alone is $8,000 per year.

Myth: There’s no measurement standard when it comes to social media measurement.

Fact: There has been no shortage of measurements introduced when it comes to social media marketing – video views, sentiment metrics, advertising equivalency, etc. What’s important to note is that the same standards that have applied to PR measurement apply to social media as well. For years, PR professionals have classified the measurement of their activities in one of three buckets:

• Outputs (who’s talking about you): this is the basic level of measurement needed. Mapping this to social media measurement, the metrics associated with this pillar are video views, number of RSS subscriptions, number of blog or news mentions, etc.
• Outtake (what are they saying about you): this is the qualitative side of PR and social media measurement. Many brand managers use social media measurement for this aspect. The metrics associated with this pillar include qualitative measures such as “thumbs up”, “thumbs down”, measuring influence on Twitter or within the blogosphere, etc.
• Outcome (what does it mean to your business): this is the ROI portion of the measurement. How much site traffic and conversions can be attributed to social media. Do visitors who viewed a YouTube video end up visiting the site? This is clearly the most critical aspect of social media measurement for online marketing professionals.

The same standards that have applied to PR measurement also apply to social media measurement.

Myth: You can’t measure the ROI of social media.

Fact: This is not true. This is exactly what Tealium Social Media has been designed to do. Whether you measure your results based on the amount of traffic generated on your site, number of leads generated and the online sales volume, social media can be measured accordingly. In fact, so far most of the interest from customers has been around using measurement to audit their social media and PR agencies. Yes, you can measure the ROI of your social media marketing.

Myth: I can’t compare social media to other online marketing channels.

Fact: Again, not true. By integrating data from Tealium Social Media into your web analytics tool you can measure the ROI of social media side by side with your other online marketing channels such as search, email and banner advertising. This means that you can in fact compare your social media traffic – traffic attributed to video sharing sites, bloggers and news coverages – to your paid marketing channels.

Yes, social media is measurable and because it’s still a new practice, this means less competition and therefore better ROI than other online channels. We are working on a number of case studies in this area and are looking forward to sharing our findings once completed. Stay tuned.

PR Measurement, Social Media online marketing, PR Measurement, search engine marketing, social media measurement

In the traditional offline media (TV, radio, print), agencies typically charge 15% of the marketing spend as their fees. So for example, if your company is spending $100,000 on print advertising, the agency that you’ve hired gets $15,000 for their services, which could include ad design and creation, media engagement, etc.

I recently came across a great column by Kevin Lee mentioning that because of all the optimization work that has to be done around SEM, the 15% fee may not be enough and clients should be willing to spend more on agency fees. Kevin is right. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in the area of SEM optimization. Here’s a few must-dos for an effective campaign:

• Research the list of potential keywords to be targeted
• Select the keywords to be targeted through SEO, those through SEM, and those through both
• Create the right ads for keywords. You simply cannot use the same ad for all your keywords and the rule applies as you go from one outlet to next
• Determine the budget to be allocated to each
• Create specialized landing pages for each ad
• Well, you get the idea …

This becomes especially an issue with smaller clients since they won’t be able to leverage the economies of scale and scope enjoyed by larger clients who spend more money on more keywords.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice the disincentive between CPC and agency fees. I understand why agencies use a 15% fee on offline ads – there’s no viable measurement beyond the output. You can only reasonably measure the number of times and the money spent on ads. But in the online world, things are different. You can measure the entire visitor cycle – from impressions, to clicks to conversions.

Think about it: would you rather spend $10,000 and generate 10 leads or spend $1,000 and generate 50 leads? Of course you’d like the latter, but in the world where agencies are paid by CPC, their incentive is to spend more money. They’ll benefit from having you spend $10,000, whether the campaigns are optimized or not, whether the conversion funnels are streamlined or not.

Ideally, agency incentives should be the same as the clients: get the most you possibly can from your marketing budget. This means that their fees should be tied to your conversions – online purchase, leads, registrations or whatever they may be. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying agencies should not be paid for all the optimization work that they do. They absolutely should. But perhaps it’s time to introduce more complex pricing schemes that do every body justice: a one-time fee and maintenance fee to cover the work to be done to get the campaign going, and a conversion/engagement bonus that gives the agencies the incentive to outperform.

This way, the agencies will get compensated with all the leg work necessary to get started and will be incentivized to constantly outperform, to constantly work on ways to increase their campaign conversions.

I’d also like to hear about some of the payment schemes you’ve used that have worked for you.

SEM, Web Analytics, online marketing online marketing, search engine marketing, SEM, Web Analytics