Managing your online marketing is a balance of Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and traditional media marketing.
Project management of online marketing campaigns requires an understanding of the metrics, analytics and terminology associated with each of the types of marketing. With the speed at which the online world is changing this can be an overwhelming task, but this book breaks down each of the types of marketing campaign, how to measure its success or failure, and how to find the right people to make sure it is a success rather than a failure.
This book addresses Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing, Reputation Management, Metrics,and Analytics for Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alexa, Twitter, FaceBook and more.
Book Excerpt:
Follows is a sample section on Social Media Metrics.
Social Media consultants are often very friendly, eager to please, people. You have to be to be popular with everyone. This type of individual tends to not be enthusiastic about hard metrics, instead they will often prefer to report soft metrics. Unlike all other statistics and metrics many social media consultants are calling these cold metrics and warm metrics. Cold metrics being the “unfeeling” raw numbers and warm metrics being the “tough to quantify” measure of good will.
As the manager of a campaign you will often have to translate between the qualitative and quantitative metrics provided by your consultants. It is also your responsibility to make sure that your marketing spend is in the demographics that make sense. Not all demographics are represented in all social mediums. Very few body building enthusiasts are on Twitter, and Oprah fans aren’t on MySpace.
Social media metrics should always include the following hard metrics:
· Fan/Follower Count
· Active Fan Percentage
· Friend of a Fan Growth
· Traffic from Social Media
· Product/Services Conversion from Social Media
· Percent of Network(s) Engaged
· Cost Per Fan
Social media metrics should always include the following soft metrics:
· Positive to Negative Feedback Ratio
· Support to Marketing Interaction Ratio
· Press/Blogger/Media Response
Be prepared to be told that your Social Media Consultant can’t, won’t, or doesn’t need to provide these metrics. There are a lot of Social Media “Experts” who feel that Social Media is about “building good karma” and that has “incalculable value”. These consultants will often talk in terms or ROI as Return on Influence rather than Return on Investment. Much like the section on avoiding SEO/SEM scams, if you hear anything that indicates that you can’t calculate hard statistics RUN!
Fan/Follower Count is an easy metric to gather. This is simply the number of Fans, Followers, or Friends you have on each social network you have engaged in. Typically you want to break this down by network, but having an aggregate is also useful, and is easy to calculate.
Active Fan Percentage is sometimes difficult to gather, but it is the percentage of your fans/followers who logon to the service at least once a week. Where this metric is most useful is in preventing consultants from using nefarious practices to gain followers/fans.
Friend of a Fan growth is the number of users acquired through word of mouth rather than direct engagement. This is an important indicator, as the purpose of Social Media is to have word of mouth advertising spread your brand “virally”.
Traffic from Social Media is easy to gather from your web analytics. Checking how many people are landing at your website from FaceBook, Twitter, and via your URL shortening service allows you to track how many of the people you are engaging are actually following through to your site.
