Get Buy In For Social Media

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I recently returned from the Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS09) in Boston and had the chance to meet several social media junkies; many of them already had the support of their management teams. However, I know that we are in the minority and many of you are still trying to get positive support to use social media in your business.  It’s kind of like putting together the pieces to a puzzle that looks complicated at first, but afterwards it seems far simpler.

 Here are my thoughts on a couple of the objections I heard from you in regards to return on investment (ROI).

 You can’t show ROI in social media – While it is true that tracking ROI in social media is not as clear cut as other channels, you can absolutely track ROI. It does require an engaged IT team to connect your social media monitoring tool (I like Radian6) with your CRM, making it not only possible, but realistic.  And trust me, ROI is extremely important; you’ll never hear me say otherwise.  However, there are some misnomers that you need to be aware of if you are getting ready to fight this battle.

Prospecting – First, the sales cycle is likely to be longer if your first engagement with a prospect is through social media. Why? First, because you aren’t out their pimping your services to everyone who will listen. Instead you are building relationships hoping that if your products and services fit your new “friends” needs they will consider you. Also, you might be engaging them long before they’ve searched for a solution or even know they need one. This part of the research phase typically doesn’t include any involvement by your company and is handled solely in the minds of your consumers. At some point they will decide they need a solution and likely do some sort of search and you hope that they think of or remember you. Direct intervention in the pre-research stage of the sales cycle has always been out of reach for businesses. Because of this millions get spent for “branding” campaigns, all aimed at trying to increase recall of your brand. Now you have a chance to engage people and be on their minds while they are in the “thought” stage.  To me, not participating in the discussion at this stage is nuts. The ROI will be there if you do your job well in social media, but the close rate and time to buy may be different. So what do you say to that disbeliever?

Well, I liken this to a sales executive telling you not to make that phone call or sales call to a prospect unless you know for sure you are going to get the sale. Could you imagine having to prove out the ROI before you could make the call? That’s ridiculous, and so is not participating in discussions about your industry and your brand within social media channels.

Customer Service – Second, when looking at the benefits of using social media to provide better customer service it can get really dicey. Many times, the revenue is already in the door, but you are looking to build relationships for future purchases. If you were to put the customer service provided in conjunction with social media, up against your traditional customer service channels I believe you would see that it increases efficiency within your service team. I believe the ROI will be the same as with any customer service channel that provides superior service. I won’t go into what would happen if you were providing cruddy service before. If you were to measure the incremental lift in future business when comparing both channels of service, that would be your ROI for social media. If you also showed the value of a more efficient service model, you’d be golden. But you haven’t sold your executive yet. So what can you say to that skeptic?

If our phones in customer service were ringing off the hook, would you tell our agents not to answer them unless they could prove they would lead to future sales? Of course not. So why can’t we answer the phone? It’s ringing…it just happens to be in cyberspace.

The bottom line is that if you can put social media into the perspective of the current things you are doing within the organization, you may have an easier time selling social media through. And if you can talk of social media with stories related to the first time your company tried another new selling method such as a telesales force or even their first e-commerce site, hopefully they’ll remember that the beginning was slow but the ROI came. It might be a different volume of ROI and it might be a different conversion rate, but it’s there. And it will be for social media too. Good luck! Please share your story in the comments section.

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Creating A Social Media Value Index

The question of the day is how do you measure social media? It’s the question brimming on every marketers mind as we look at how social media will fit into our current marketing mix. Because let’s face it, if you aren’t looking at social media you might just be left in the dust. So for those of you who are trying to tackle this daunting task, I’ve put together a few tips and a social media value index model that you can use to guide you in the process.

In looking at the #smroi conversations on Twitter recently, one of the big discussions is the ongoing debate of whether or not social media will prove a positive ROI.  In addition, there are many who are using ROI to talk about value rather than an actual monetary return and it is causing confusion about the true value that social media can bring to an organization and how to explain it to stakeholders in a meaningful way.

To get started you need to develop a plan. I’m not a huge believer in the let’s try it and see what happens strategy. Not that you can’t try and see, but the trying it out should lead to a well-defined plan. There are four-steps to creating your plan.

1. Define Goals and Objectives
2. Align Strategies to Meet Goals and Objectives
3. Create Metrics to Measure Success
4. Develop Execution Plan

As I’ve said in my previous posts, I focus on three core goals. Will you use social media to retain existing customers, generate brand awareness and/or acquire new customers? For social media newcomers, I’d be very cautious about starting a social media plan geared towards acquiring new customers. This takes finesse that comes with experience and I’d wait until you’ve mastered the other two before broaching customer acquisition. Once you have determined what your goal for social media is, you can then start to align strategies with those goals, determine how you will measure if those strategies are successful, and put together a plan for execution. I’m not going to spend much time on those areas in this post, perhaps in a future post if readers are interested. Rather, I’m going to focus on how to create a model to measure success and then give you some ideas on different metrics you can use to build your model.

In order to be able to explain the value of social media to your stakeholders I prefer to use Key Performance Indicators as the term of choice.  Mainly because this is a standard term that people are familiar with and you don’t have to do a lot of explaining about what it means.

Social Media KPIs

So here I’ve defined 10 Key Performance Indicators for social media and I ranked them in importance from 1 to 10. Then I assigned a weight to each ranking.

Click here for the full list. Social Media KPIs

Social Media Monthly Worksheet

Then I took the 10 KPIs and put in metrics for how to measure them on a monthly basis. For each one I used a baseline measure of 0-1 either through doing a percent to goal or a ratio. I used a 1,000 point system to determine where I stand on each of the measure and apply the weight to determine how many points each measure received. The actual formula is (Score on 0-1 scale)*(Percent Weight*1000) to determine the number of points that indicator received for the month. To see the full worksheet click here. Social Media Value Index Worksheet 

Finally, I took the sum of each KPI score as the total for the Social Media Value Index. This gives you a baseline measure for how the all of your social media activities are performing over time. The closer you get to 1,000 the better closer you are to reaching your goals.

Social Media Value Index Score

You can chose any key performance indicator that you believe adds value to the organization. You can also choose more than 10 if you like. I chose to use ROI as one of my KPIs, but on its own I don’t think it tells the whole story, which is why I developed this model. Choosing your KPIs may be the hardest part. So I’ve included some ideas of what you can measure below.

Twitter

• Number of Followers
• Number of People You Follow
• Relevance of Followers (I only follow people that are relevant and use a ratio of followers to those I follow to measure this)
• Number of Retweets
• Number of @replies to you/from you (you can do a ratio here also)
• Number of Clicks on Links Posted
• Twinfluence metrics
• Twitter Grade

Social Networks i.e. LinkedIn, Ning, FaceBook, MySpace

• Number of Connections Made
• Number of Discussions
• Number of Comments
• Number of Groups Participated In
• Level of Involvement in Groups

Video Sharing/Live Webcasts

• Number of Monthly Views/Attendees
• Monthly Average of Views/Attendees
• Number of Linkbacks to Videos

There are many more I could list here. Joe LaTona did a really nice job of providing a list to start from in his “What Are Your Social Media Goals” post.

Now that you have your plan it’s time to execute, measure, and refine!

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on how you are measuring, suggestions you have for refining this model and what you would add to the list of possible KPIs.

If you would like a copy of the excel worksheets used to develop the model please email me at nikkikelly09@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy.

Return on Marketing Investment Measurement that Works

Measure the Marketing Mix

I’ve seen a lot of buzz about marketing operations, marketing measurement and marketing ROI on blogs and Twitter lately. There are certainly very good reasons for organizations to put resources behind taking a hard look at the contributions of all of their departments including marketing. The buzz swings all the way to the left with people
claiming you can’t measure marketing and back out to the right with here’s how you measure it. What I’ve noticed is even those who claim to be able to measure, haven’t really detailed how. As we are building marketing plans and marketing strategy we must start to include measures of success that we can deliver on.

In organizations, the pressure can bring “old school” and “new school” marketing to a clearly drawn battle line. Many times I’ve heard the claim: you can’t measure __________ (fill in the blank) marketing, brand awareness, social media or anything else requested. I often wonder, do people really believe this? Or are these people just scared to be measured? This type of clear-cut measurement certainly puts a new perspective on whether or not you are a “good” marketer. It could equally be a result of people truly not knowing “how” to measure results effectively. It doesn’t help when there are a lot of theories about measurement and few true industry standards beyond “yeah we measure ROI.” Really?!? Who does it, how do they do it, when do they do it, what do you do as a result of it, and the big question…how long does it take them to pull the report together?

Many marketers are pushing the envelope at organizations and looking for ways to measure everything. The problem we are all finding is that we can measure almost everything and it’s easy to get caught with paralysis by analysis. What should you measure? How often? And what metrics really matter?

I recently read an excellent blog post called “Mapping the Marcom Mix to the Lead Funnel”. I was impressed with the thought process behind this as I have been doing a lot of work on integrating funnel management and marketing strategies for marketing and sales. This spawned what I like to call, a moment of brilliance! I admit they are sometimes fleeting, but occasionally things just align themselves in a way that provide previously unseen clarity. When I started to consider how all the activities map to the funnel, I immediately wanted to measure their impact.

So, I worked on creating a model to measure the Return on Marketing Investment. There were three core considerations to building a model that I believe would actually work.

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

Like many marketers I’ve tried to measure the success of individual projects and campaigns with varying levels of results. The challenge was measuring long-term, mid-term and short-term strategies and relating them to ROI.  Because, ROI is return on investment which naturally requires you to track directly to revenue mid-term and long-term strategies end up with a result that looks like it was a failure. With  strategies like Brand Awareness it is much harder to tie them to current revenue as the impact of your activities today may not pay off for several years,  yet we struggle because we are being held accountable for these activities today. Trying to measure each item individually can lead to poor decisions based on short-term results. What really matters is how is the entire marketing mix contributing to overall lead generation.  I believe the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts in marketing.

Make sure your measures are actionable

I think it is mission critical that the data you surround yourself with represents items that you can clearly use to make better decisions. A bunch of foo foo numbers that aren’t clearly aligned with the input and the output just increase the confusion. Use measures that matter and can be used as a diagnostic tool and a success measurement tool and you’ve hit the sweet spot!

To be effective your marketing dashboard should:

1. Enable you to identify failures
2. Enable you to identify successes
3. Enable you to see where those failures and successes lie within your mix and/or tell you where to dig deeper to figure it out

Don’t stop at the marketing team

In my previous experience, every position I’ve held had one purpose. To use marketing to generate more revenue and more profit for the organization. All of the best marketing in the world will fall flat if your sales team is not equipped to close the deal. Therefore, it is critical that you measure all the way through the sales organization. This is certainly not so you can point fingers at the sales team, rather it is an opportunity for more open discussions about the impact marketing is having on the organization and how sales is delivering on that impact. Never forget, we’re all in this together.

So what does this look like? As a visual person, I use graphics to help tell the story and here is what it looks like to me. Now to tie it all together, how does this deliver on the three considerations?

Measure the Marketing Mix

Measure the impact of the entire marketing mix

As you can see at the top of the funnel you are keeping track of all of the leads delivered from each type of source. I chose to do this independently by source. However, ROI is not calculated on one item, it is calculated based on all of the inputs and the resulting outputs. I went one step further, and decided to measure based on the time frame (short, medium, fast) to an anticipated purchase and the expenses for the lead nurturing that is being done for each of those groups. Certainly for you the break-down may be different. I’m a big fan of the old KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) philosophy so I go with the core things that matter to both marketing and sales and that is their possibility of conversion or how “warm” are they.

Make sure your measures are actionable

The proof really is in the pudding here. By looking at this graph regularly I can identify several critical things in order to gauge success over time. First, are leads piling up in one of the tracks? If so, we aren’t moving them along effectively and need to take a look at our lead nurturing and/or sales activities in that group. Second, are there enough leads coming into the funnel to deliver the revenue we’ve forecasted for the period. Over time, you will get a better perspective of conversion rates and how many leads you need to generate a certain level of sales. This certainly helps when you need to ask for more budget $$$ to fill the pipeline. Third, from a budget perspective you can see where you spend your budget and whether or not it is delivering the leads you expected. Once you identify where the problems are you can do more investigation into that particular area simply by digging into the raw data behind the item with a simple click  instead of searching for the needle in the haystack.

Don’t stop at the marketing team

As you can see, leads are tracked all the way to revenue.  By measuring all the way through you can clearly see whether or not your marketing activities are having an impact on sales. If not, you have some work to do. If they do, how can you make it better? Or you may find that some of the activities you are spending a lot of money on are preventing you from being able to spend where you are generating the biggest results.

So go big, be bold. Measure it and see how your team stacks up. If you don’t like what you see, fix it. If you do, congratulations! Fuel an environment where old and new school thrive.