Quantifying Marketing Success with Metrics

Three Methodologies to Quantify Marketing Success with Metrics

Marketing is best described as a science between creativity and strategy. You need the creativity to develop innovative and engaging marketing content and campaigns, yet you also need strategy to bring all this alive. This is where metrics matter. Metrics can help marketers make informed business decisions while also enable them to measure their brand's social performance.

In the third week of my course in Social Media Marketing & Networking (good read before moving forward) at UC Berkeley, I highlight the relevance of metrics and how they are used to quantify social media marketing success, and the importance of mainstream platforms (Part I: Social Media Platforms). The deck for this lecture has been uploaded on SlideShare and shared below.

Social Media Marketing Metrics Slide Deck

Metrics Relevance

Metrics without a strategy are simply raw data and numbers. Within the social context, metrics could either be external or internal. External metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and page likes are publicly accessible, which is key when developing competitive analysis. Internal metrics are private data that will give you in-depth information such as reach, tweet engagement, and post clicks. Internal metrics will help gauge the performance of a brand's content and campaign strategy.

#1. Identifying the Competitive Landscape

The social sphere has a wide spectrum of brands from many industries. To compare success, a marketer must first identify who are their potential competitors. In the social context, competitors are not brands that you are trying to directly compete against. Rather, the focus should be on how your competitor's social infrastructure is performing relatively to yours.

Within the competitive landscape, you must take these four factors into consideration: industry (the category and space your brand is competing in), business context (your audience: businesses, consumers, or employees), followers base (brands with a lower, similar, and higher followers count), and organizational size (the number of employees supporting a brand's social infrastructure).

The chart below breaks down each competitive landscape factor (*Followers Base is using UC Berkeley Facebook Page with 300K Likes):

#2. Measuring Relatively

Once you have identified your competitive landscape, the next step is to measure social success RELATIVELY and to SCALE. You cannot compare apples to oranges. Similarly, you cannot compare a Facebook page such as UC Berkeley (300K likes) to Harvard (4M likes) just with raw metrics.

At first glance, you may assume that UC Berkeley is growing slower at 1.6K new likes/week versus Harvard's 22K new likes/week. However, when you measure these "New Page Likes" metrics relatively to the page's size, a different story unfolds:

• Growth rate: New Page Likes / Total Page Likes *
• UC Berkeley: 1600/300,000 = 0.53%
• Harvard: 22,000/4,000,000 = 0.55%

*you can also get a more specific and week-to-week growth rate with this equation:
(Page Likes Week1 - Page Likes Week0) / (Page Likes Week0)

What do both UC Berkeley's 0.53% and Harvard's 0.55% growth rates tell us? These two growth rates tell us that despite the two pages' huge difference in size, they are growing at the same rate. A few more calculations to include the growth rate of UCLA (0.24%) and Stanford (0.33%) further tell us that UC Berkeley's and Harvard's Facebook pages are growing at a healthy rate compared to their fellow higher education competitors.

By measuring relatively, social markers are able to conduct competitive analysis to quantify the health and success of their social media strategy. Most importantly, it enables the comparison between brands with different and drastic followers count. An additional measuring relatively calculation sample is provided in the slide deck above (engagement ratio).

#3. Getting Executive Buy-In—CPM and ROI

Despite being around for nearly a decade now, there is still a lot of skepticism behind the value that social media brings to marketing. Getting executive buy-in is a pain point that many social marketers still face in their daily work. In this context, executive buy-in comes in the form of increase monetary support for non-traditional marketing advertising.

Getting executive buy-in can be supported by, once again (you guess it): metrics. Cost-per-thousand (CPM) is the metrics for how much money a company must spend to capture every 1,000 views/impressions/reach/homes (or aka eye balls). Recent studies show that the CPM for prime time TV and the Super Bowl are at $24 and $35, respectively. This means that it will cost a brand approximately $24 for prime time TV or $35 for the Super Bowl to receive 1,000 views.

The exhibit below shows the total budget for a Facebook's Boost Post promotion:

Now, compare the CPMs of prime time TV and the Super Bowl with Facebook 'Boost Post' promotion. For roughly $5, a brand can broadcast its message to roughly 90,000 people (this number will vary depending on your page's total likes).

• CPM: (Marketing Budget x 1000) / Total number of impressions
• Facebook CPM: ($5 x 1000) / 90,000 = $0.05
• $0.05 (Facebook) < $24 (Prime time TV) < $35 (Super Bowl)

This CPM demonstrates that Facebook is a viable and cheaper option for promoting your brand. However, it should not imply that your brand should be using "Boosting Post" for every update. Why? Social media networks are already cluttered with a myriad of content: friends' updates, pages' updates, and now sponsored posts. Boosting Post should be reserved for special occasions (i.e. upcoming keynote, local events, company's milestones).

There are both pro's and con's for marketing promotion through traditional channels (TV commercials) and non-traditional channels (social media). Being aware of the advantages and limitations of each channel will be key to success. Before social media, the live span of a Super Bowl commercial was short lived. However, with the integration of social media, the digital live span of a Super Bowl commercial will live on forever through networks such as YouTube and Facebook.

This brings us to the topic of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) strategy that optimizes traditional marketing with social media. Although IMC is not part of the lecture for the course, please feel free to let me know below whether this is a topic you would like to learn more about.

Part 1 of this lecture, Social Media Marketing Platforms, has been published.

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Tai is currently a business undergraduate at UC Berkeley. He is ready to disrupt the tech industry with his infectious passion and energy for marketing! Learn more about his marketing and networking course at the Haas School of Business.

Reach out via email: taitran@berkeley.edu.
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Like what you read? Share, like, and comment. Follow me for more pieces on undergraduate education and social media marketing. You may also enjoy:

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