6.0 : The Importance of Ongoing Monitoring

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

In this chapter, we’re going to consider the importance of monitoring and learning from, your engagements. It’s not surprising, and it still does happen, that businesses will go out to social media networks, spend a lot of money, and at the end of the process have no idea whether they’ve been successful, whether they’ve seen any benefit, or actually any return on investment.

Campaigns don’t work in isolation Campaigns have to be a part of a plan, and that plan should necessitate that you learn from, and reflect upon, what information you can tell from your buyer persona in relation to your content.

All of your social media networks of significance provide feedback, provide data that can be used to improve, to modify, and to change direction if necessary for a campaign. They can also be used to compare with others and they are used to understand what the buyer persona is responding to. All of this means that it’s worth time and effort to analyze the data that is available to you possibly right now. There is a lot of data out there and ultimately it’s understanding of what that social network provides you and being able to understand from that social network what you need to do next.

Monitoring and measurement are key ingredients of a successful campaign –

Remember SMART objectives?

Asta Cepulyte, Chief Executive Officer, Sharecruit, Lithuania

The biggest focus is on online marketing. We promote our solution online, and we reach our audience online. And that’s why the strategy is very important for us because we can analyze social marketing campaigns which we can order, which we can assign to our team members to work, and then we can analyze the effectiveness, the return on investment even with the smallest budget to reach the targeted group of people we want, and it’s very important to use those channels which work best actually.

Basics of Return on Investment (ROI)

Investment = €500
Profit margin per sale = €600
If we get 2 sales = €300 x 2 = €600
ROI = (Profit – Investment) / Investment * 100
ROI = (€600 – €500) / 500 * 100 = 20%

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We have a weekly meeting in the office to make sure that we are reviewing activity quite regularly.

The Candidate Ltd reviews their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in relation to the website and social media metrics on a weekly basis

As I said, it’s important to review things quite a lot. In a new campaign that goes live we tend to log in to statistics every day, but you can see a more fuller effect, especially on overall traffic levels and organic search levels, on a more longer-term basis so we have key statistics that we pull from our online tools across the business on a weekly basis and have that catch up in our marketing meeting which allows us to make decisions on whether we continue to invest in certain areas or indeed we need to test something new and trial something else because something’s dropping off. So I would say weekly is a good standpoint to have from a monitoring and evaluating point of view.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

It’s an ongoing process. We are having monthly reports for this process. First of all, we are asking from different departments reporting from social media, reporting from the website, reporting from the campaign, so from the planners part, so we have one someone like project manager analyzing the data and trying to find results from different platforms.

Monthly reviews to calculate ROI are used in the Monks case study

Most digital marketing platforms are independent of each other and this presents a challenge when it comes to attributing ROI to an individual platform

One negative of the digital advertising platforms that there are not a lot of synergies between them. You know, they are huge competitors, like Facebook and Google, so they are not allowing third parties to connect figures. So what you have to do is take results of different platforms and try to translate them in one report coming from you. So there is no golden rule or great platform taking all in one. This is the worst thing online.

When it’s PPC campaign, every day. For SEO, on weekly basis, I think. And for content, I think it’s every hour because you have to see how competitors are responding, how fans are responding. And especially if you are using social media for customer service, you have to be there.

Exercise

Monitoring automation

There are a number of social media monitoring tools that allow you to get an email to let you know that content that might be of interest to you has been mentioned online. None of these tools are perfect, but there are some free market leaders:

Google Alerts
Mentions
Talkwalker Alerts

Read this review of the alerts software https://moz.com/ugc/google-alerts-vs-mention-vs-talkwalker and experiment with these tools with search results either for your name or your brand, product etc