Have you ever planted a seed in expectation of growing a wonderful flower or tomato? Yeah, I’m betting you have. Since the dawn of time, educational facilities have required children with no knowledge or desire of agriculture to plant and grow things.
Well, since we’ve established that you understand how planting a seed and watching for growth works, I’m going to assume that you know the general truth of not planting a seed and then never attending or checking on it ever again. You could plant a seed and then just leave and assume everything grows according to plan, but that would be stupid.
You’re not stupid are you? Then you wouldn’t even dream of setting up a Social CRM or social media strategy within your firm without setting up the proper measurement tools, I’m sure. You also wouldn’t be confused about what to measure, since that would be like planting a seed and then checking the dryer lint levels once a week to make sure the seed’s growth is progressing.
Almost everything in social media can be measured, but here’s a list a thing you should make sure you’re keeping an eye on if you want sales numbers to increase.
1) Leads/Sales
True CRMs are built around the base of leads seeing as how leads by their very nature “lead” to sales. Whether you’re in B2B, B2C or some weird variant of the two, leads are key aspects to growing business. It’s the job of your marketing or creative department to create content that drives people to landing pages and into sales funnels, but it’s the job of your CRM to track how those leads accumulate.
It’s good to understand how many leads are coming in, but it’s even better to know which channels which leads prefer and how each group converts once they get into your digital funnels. Which offers work best on which platforms to which demographics? Which groups tend to convert earlier in the funnel than others? Make sure you have a deep understanding of the leads that come in and how they affect your bottom line. It’s important.
(It should go without saying that if you’re tracking leads and sales via social channels, you should also be tracking conversations, so I won’t even mention it.)
2) Following Growth
Numbers are important to any sales cycle. One important truth to any sales process is that “numbers are important.” Let me clarify, I’m not talking about using that phrase to justify cold calling everyone in the phone book in hopes of tripping over a sale. I’m talking about systematically gathering a collection of qualified, interested potentials that can enter your sales cycle via social media channels.
This isn’t a number to lose sleep over. It comes second in the list because it needs to be taken in account with those followers that become leads and eventually sales, but to do that, you must measure it. This can be accomplished with almost and set of analytics tools available or simply creating an Excel sheet and visiting each social network per week.
Always tie the metric of followers to conversions in order to gain a better understanding of their importance.
3) ROI (Return on Investment)
This one should also be self-explanatory. You have to understand what you’re getting in return for your efforts in the social space. This will come from subtracting your investment of money and time from what you gain in return for those efforts. In order to do this best, refer to the formula we’ve outlined on here before.
Put time into this task by running a few campaigns lasting at least a month or two and use those numbers to pull into the equation. Use your findings to be able to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of your efforts against other marketing and lead gen functions within your organization.
Analytics are important for many reasons but one of the best is pure knowledge and understanding and as Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones says, “knowledge is power.” Start granting yourself power in your own business and watch those seeds you plant grow into the fruit that will sustain your brand for years to come.
Thoughts?
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[...] How To Know What To Measure In Social CRM [...]
Good article, Joey. All 3 points make a lot of sense. If you’re not going to how measure how certain efforts affect your business, then why bother at all?
But the harder question is whose job is it to find and keep track of all the information? Is it sales or marketing?
If the answer is marketing, I wouldn’t expect many problems as we’re already familiar with tracking SEO, conversions, and the like.
But if the answer is sales, that’s are harder task. Sales reps are best at what they do, building relationships. The added overhead of finding, tracking, and entering data is not something that most sales professionals are accustomed to or like doing. That’s not to say that they should be exempt from the job. But, companies that are developing software for sales professionals should keep that in mind.
In the meantime, there are plenty of great ways to hack together our own solutions. I recently wrote an article just on this topic: how to create a funnel to segment and track your leads from social media.
@ecquire I’ll agree with you and I think you bring up two very good questions and points. I’ll give you the answer I feel is best suited to the situation of Social Business as I see it, but this will vary by industry and company.
I believe it is BOTH marketing and sales’ (and customer service’s) responsibilities to justify the tools they are using for the betterment of the organization. Wen silo-ed, I can see how it would seem like a daunting task for any department, but the truth is that a truly Social CRM will overlap many departments and each department should be responsible for the metrics of analytics detailing their existence.
Every sales department has to track how many sales they are generating because it’s the lifeblood of the business. Any CRM worth it’s salt can be tracked back by lead to determine the source from that lead (there’s your answer to #1). Marketing, then should be able to use that information to focus content on areas that are bringing in the most leads while making sure the followers are still growing due to content distribution strategies in place (answer to #2).
The third point, the ROI one, will be a combination of the metrics already being analyzed by any thorough marketing department and sales director and they should get together at least once a month and figure up the ROI for the CRM and communications channels.
Where Customer Service fits in is keeping track of how people are communicating with your brand for complaints, compliments, and any other form of communication. That way you’ll have a full picture from beginning and continuing communication for each lead and customer.
That’s how I see it all playing nicely together in the same sandbox and bringing forward the analytics necessary to effectively run a CRM strategy.
Cheers!
Thanks – great article. Other things you might want to measure:
1) Amplification in results via sharing.
2) Unique social analytics such as how many times post was shared within the brand context.
3) Understand the impact of your top influencers.
4) Determine what marketing channel performs the best in terms of visitors, opt-ins and product purchase #SocialCRM should include data from a) Social Profiles (Facebook, Twitter), Demographics, location information and Intent to Purchase.
5) Apply learning in an active engagement on Social, or Mobile platforms.
@Maven_Social I would say those are all good additions, although a few of them fit nicely into the categories already listed, but in complex social media strategies and plan, I would say everything in you list is important to keep an eye on seperately.
Thanks!
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