Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to the recently released "Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends" report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 28 percent of B2B marketers don't measure the ROI of their content marketing.

Failing to do so is a mistake, because tracking metrics — the right ones — enables you to concentrate on the content marketing activities that most benefit your bottom line.

To prove your content marketing effectiveness and see which content initiatives are worth your time and money, focus on these metrics....

A survey by Gartner has shown that the most successful digital marketers spend six times more on resources to help understand their data (such as tools and people) than those who don’t. Reacting to this trend, CMOs are set to increase spending on social media analytics by 440% between 2014 and 2019. But what can you do with the data that you extract?

We recently released a visual guide looking at how to use Twitter insights for your content marketing strategy, but Twitter data can also be utilised to deliver more long term benefits to your brand’s wider marketing strategy. We spoke to Johary Radifison, Global Insights Director at Grayling to discover more....

Whether marketers like it or not, consumers are now generating over 25% of content that appears in web searches for specific brand names, and consumers often trust those social media messages more than advertising or news articles about the brand. Research has shown that this “electronic word-of-mouth” is seen as reliable by consumers and significantly affects a firm’s perceived value.

But with such a panoply of channels out there, how can social media marketers keep track of what people are saying? And what strategies can be implemented to engage those consumers to influence the conversation? That’s where a careful social media audit can help. It’s a systematic examination of social data to help marketers discover, categorize, and evaluate all the social talk about a brand. This approach captures what consumers are saying about a brand, what competitors are doing on social media, and what the brand itself is doing.

I developed a social media audit template for the book Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution from the principle of the Five Ws that is taught to journalists: who, where, what, when, and why...

There are so many metrics that can be measured in social media, that sometimes it can be overwhelming to narrow it down to something bite-sized, and find a good measure of success. Since social media also touches everything from attracting prospects to delighting customers in the buyer’s journey, figuring out what metrics to report on can be a challenge.

In this post, I will break down the metrics we observe at HubSpot, how we define success, and how we make that decision each month. And the best part: we'll wrap up with how to actually measure those metrics at HubSpot....

Analyzing the impact of your content doesn’t need to be a costly endeavor. These nine analytic tools are free (or almost free). Identifying which ones help inform your content marketing goals, using them regularly, and adjusting your content so your results are aligned even better with your objectives will boost the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

But how you know when the number of interactions you’re getting is good? And what does “good” mean, anyway?

The answer: It’s all relative. A “good” amount for engagement for a marketer in the software industry could be a totally different number than for a marketer in the financial services industry. That’s why we put together the 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report -- it's 49 pages of of social media data and analysis from over 7,000 business in nine industries.In this post, I’ll analyze our findings on audience participation on social media for each of the industries represented.

Find your industry below (or use our jump-to links to head directly to your industry) to see how much interaction is happening relative to how much a company posts a week on social media, and also get some key takeaways for how to apply this to your own social strategy....

The internet has given marketers many things, one of which is more ways to reach potential customers directly. But with this comes further challenges, most notably, how do you work out whether all that online activity is having any real impact on sales?

Tweeting, posting, uploading videos; that’s the easy part. Working out whether your efforts are having a genuine impact is often the place where lots of marketers and businesses come unstuck.

Why? Because genuinely meaningful measurement can be tricky. It’s easy to measure how many followers you have or how many likes you’ve got on your last Facebook post but that doesn’t really tell you anything.

Social media ROI is what you get back from all the time, effort, and resources you commit to social. And it’s best calculated with dollar amounts.

Of course, there are no dollar signs dangling from retweets or likes. Twitter, Facebook, and others are no-cost marketing channels to join, potentially a zero-dollar investment (which makes any return exponentially fantastic, right!).

So in order to track ROI, the key elements would be:
-  Identifying your monetary investment in social media
-  Attaching a dollar amount to your social media goals...

What these oft-quoted stats on social media usage don't do, however, is show us how to act. They fail to provide us with any actionable insights into how we can actually improve our social media marketing. 

That's why we created the 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report, which uses data from 7,000+ businesses. The report sheds light on metrics associated with social posting frequency, social following, and social engagement. Use it to benchmark your own social metrics against businesses in your industry and/or against businesses with a comparable company size.

To give you a quick overview of the types of data you'll find in the report, I put together a few interactive charts using the infographic creation service, infogr.am....

Do you want to understand your social media return-on-investment (ROI)?

Are you tracking the customer journey in Google Analytics?

In this article you’ll discover how to collect and analyze the data you need to properly calculate how social media marketing impacts your business....