Consulting | Coaching | Communicating

I’m thankful when my clients ask this question. So often businesses and non-profits jump onto Facebook and Twitter without clear goals let alone a strategy to measure them. “Everyone’s doing social so we should do it too” isn’t a good enough answer. Hubspot’s research reinforces the idea that B2B marketers are increasing their inbound marketing budgets with a shift toward social media. This trend is not surprising, but without a clear idea of where they’re headed and why they’re going there, these folks could be wasting money.

If you are one of these organizations you need to know why you’re entering the social spaces and what you hope to attain. There isn’t a one size fits all answer to this question, but here are some options:

• Lead generation
• Sales
• Increased web traffic
• Additional exposure (reach) of your brand

What else? Why are you engaging with customers or clients in social spaces and how can you tell if you’re accomplishing your goals?

Before you can monitor the success of anything you have to measure it.  So measure where you are now against where you want to be. If you want additional web traffic and click-throughs to your site, measure your traffic now and design your strategy around driving people to your site. Remember those calls to action on your content! Again, Hubspot’s research shows that social media has tremendous power to increase website traffic.  After some time, measure again. Did you accomplish your goal? Yes = success.

If you want to generate leads, measure how many leads you have coming into your organization now with your current marketing methods. Design your strategy around generating leads through social methods. Perhaps use an email campaign to gather email addresses, or work on publishing compelling content on your blog and ask people to enter an email to download the content. The folks at Hubspot are geniuses at this – how do you think I got these charts? Anyway, how many leads does your content generate? Does it meet your goals? Yes = success.

If your goal is increased exposure of your brand, measure your reach now through web traffic and the reach of any additional marketing campaigns. How many people are you reaching? Publish content that builds followers. Measure retweets, followers, Facebook fans and comments. Study your Facebook insights and your site analytics carefully. How many more people are you reaching? Increased reach = success.

So how do you measure your success? I’d love your feedback and I promise I’ll respond. Right now though, I need to read the email Hubspot just send me. 🙂