Measuring your Social Media Marketing: KPIs for Product & Brand Awareness

Marketers know that the ability to measure success online is far more accurate than measurements offline. Tracking, analyzing and responding to the data is your key to success. Begin by defining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your campaigns.

With your marketing goals in mind, what is measurable? As Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook notes, social media’s goals are about increasing online visibility. This means creating awareness about your products, services and brand. When determining metrics, think of actions that indicate people are aware of your brand and, from these actions, what is measurable.

The development process for KPIs can be visualized as a funnel:

Goal > Action > Measurement (KPI)

Web Stats To Measure

KPIs linked to product and brand awareness should focus on visits your website and how they found it. Are people aware of, and visiting, your site? If they are, how did they get there and were they aware of your brand before they visited? The following is a list of web stats that can help gage awareness about your product and brand.

• Unique Visitors. This shows how many people are visiting your website.
• Direct Traffic. This shows how many people are coming directly to your site by typing the URL in their address bar. These visitors are coming to the site having already heard about your product or brand.
• Referral Traffic. This shows where your visitors are coming from. This is important because referrals are like recommendations. You will want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to your site.
• Keyword traffic. This shows how people are finding your site. Are they using your brand’s keywords? This shows that they already knew about you before they visited your site. What other keywords are visitors using? If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it shows a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site’s content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.

With these KPIs, you can create a KPI scorecard. Fill in the scorecard monthly and go back over previous months to determine a baseline. Looking at the numbers month over month, are they the same? Where do they fluctuate? What does this mean in relation to your marketing activities? What should be repeated, modified, or discarded for something new?

Online Marketing Best Practices for Newspapers

I was at Northern Voice two weekends ago and I went to a great session with the CBC’s Lisa Johnson and the Vancouver Sun’s Kirk LaPointe, on how journalists use social media. At the session, LaPointe argued that there is no news problem or audience problem in the newspaper industry; the problem is, in fact, a business one.

This got me thinking about how newspapers are adapting their businesses to the online space in order to succeed in a digital world. What best practices can we find?

After gathering notes from the Northern Voice session as well as comments from The Globe and Mail and The Texas Tribune here’s a list of best practices for the industry:

Online Marketing Best Practices for Newspapers

Lead from Any Chair: The Lone Evangelist

Leadership doesn’t always come from the top. You can show leadership no matter what chair you sit in for the organization. Below are some tips.

If you’re the lone evangelist in your organization, the person who wants to experiment with social media, or wishes for a website redesign to increase usability, or needs tips for talking to the boss about why online marketing is important, you are not alone.

There are lots of lone evangelists out there who can clearly see what needs to be done and should be done to positively affect the organization. Your job is not the description you have for your performance review, your job is to work as if you have the title you want and the position you want. You can lead from anywhere.

Here are my tips.

Know what the top cares about.
Regardless of what’s painfully obvious to you, regardless of what you think the C-suite should care about, you need to show how your idea meets their business needs.

Don’t be defensive.
Take all criticism as passionate interest in what you have to offer. Use that criticism to refine your arguments. Try again.

Build momentum.
Make sure you’re talking to the right people, in the right order. You have an idea, have you talked to the people who would directly benefit? For example, if you have an idea that would make the website better for visitors, have you talked to those visitors? Do a survey. Call them on the phone. Talk to your customers, pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.

Once you’ve got user buy-in, build your requirements list. What technically needs to happen for this to succeed? Who in the organization would need to be involved? Pitch the idea to IT, finance, purchasing, whoever would be involved from a technical, or logistics, stand-point. Pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.

Now you have the business case (user buy-in), you have the technical requirements (tech/logistical buy-in), you’re ready to pitch the idea to management. These are the big picture folks in the organization, and the folks who hold the purse strings. 

Getting economic buy-in is always easier when you have buy in, contribution, and commitment from other links along the chain.

Tell stories.

Facts and figures are great, but don’t lead with those. The townsfolk followed the Pied Piper because he was playing music, not waving a laser pointer at a flip chart. (Don’t go any further with that metaphor! You’re not luring people off to meet their demise, but you do want their attention. You do want your story passed on through the organization.)

Stories help us understand the world. What’s the story behind your great idea? How did you come to this understanding?

Know what you need.

Once you have their attention, know what you need and how to ask for it in the most simple, direct manner.

I believe that (business case)
should be able to (objectives that have a positive impact for customers/for the organization)
by (measurement, key performance indicators)
through the ability to (actions required)
as a result of (differentiations that will be created)
for ($).

Example: We believe that we can improve the user experience on our site by adding clearer calls to action, which should increase our sales and optimize the user experience, which we can measure by monitoring cart abandonment, time on site (and common paths) and sales. The ability to design and add these buttons requires some design and development time from Marketing, IT and our outside vendors that’s beyond the scope of what they do today. Based on industry standards and our internal testing, we anticipate a 50% drop in cart abandonment, time on site to decrease since users are no longer lost in the process, and sales to increase by 20%. The cost is $3,000, which we anticipate recovering in the first month after implementation. What questions can I help answer?

Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.

State your general position. Identify the specific segment or target market that will be affected. Propose the value proposition. Provide proof. Start a dialogue.

Don’t have specifics?

If your business case lacks the logical justification that comes from facts and figures, then you need to appeal to emotion.

Go for forfeiture vs. aspiration (what are they missing out on, giving up or losing vs. what could be gained):

• saving time
• immediacy, convenience
• making easy money
• comfort
• scarcity
• belonging
• reputation
• fun

Be ready to fail.
Set many small goals early. Break big tasks into smaller pieces. Start with small experiments, filter out failure, expand upon success. Report often. Keep people in the loop.

Have a sense of humour.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates

Seeing the humour in any situation allows you to also see the lesson.

Namaste Publishing Launches New Website

Boxcar Marketing has been busy in the trenches lately as we worked to re-launch the Namaste Publishing website.

Namaste Publishing is a small, financially successful Canadian publishing house with a worldwide presence. Known as the publisher for leading authors like Eckhart Tolle, Namaste has a solid reputation for publishing transformative, leading-edge books on self-help, spirituality, alternative health and personal transformation.

Namaste’s original website was built using flat HTML files and grew over the years as a disconnected collection of sites and blogs under Namastepublishing.com and various subdomains. Without standard navigation between interior pages, the site was difficult to navigate, and the key ecommerce functions required unnecessary steps to purchase products in the store.

Screenshot of the Original Design

Namaste’s online presence needed a radical reinvention and expansion. The team wanted a deeper long-term engagement with their community of fans, authors, spiritual leaders and staff. The project required a full re-branding and entire re-experience and re-interpretation of what publishing meant for the company.

Screenshot of the New Site Launched March 11, 2010

A re-design is more than just design.

Boxcar Marketing started with a month-long strategy session to convert Namaste Publishing’s business from a traditional publishing company to the leader of a global spiritual community. Jordan Behan of Tell Ten Friends Marketing Co. and Boris Mann of BMann Consulting and Bootup Labs contributed their expertise during the strategy sessions and subsequent social-media training sessions. Once the team established the goals of the project, we sent out an RFP to various vendors.

Namaste Publishing’s goals were:

1. To support and engage readers in an ongoing experience that deepens and adds richness to their understanding of the written materials.
2. To dispel the distance and ‘one to many’ dynamic between author and reader.
3. To distribute spiritual and inspirational information through new methods that are engaging, easy to understand, inspirational, fun and engage a wide audience.
4. To expand the commercial viability of the already-profitable online store without compromising the intentions and integrity of the informational and community aspects of the website.

As for technical requirements, Namaste wanted an easier system for publishing their content (events, blogs, store products), a more user-friendly online shopping experience, and support for online and offline groups that form around Namaste’s publications (book studies and interactive courses).

In order to reach these goals the project was divided into 3 distinct but interdependent phases:

Phase I: Re-Experience
Namaste Publishing and Boxcar Marketing worked with Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting on the information architecture, user experience, and interface design. Key to this phase, and taking the design lead, was Lift Studios, who provided the brand redesign (logos, business cards and other identity) and worked closely with us on the website redesign and desired user experience. 

Phase II: Store Renovation
Boxcar Marketing’s experience with publishers and online marketing primed us for taking the lead on the product page requirements that would remake the online store and improve usability for customers. (A separate case study on this phase is coming.)

Phase III: Community Expansion
Namaste Publishing’s connections to the global spiritual community are extensive and they wanted to build social web tools within the Namaste site, as well as actively participate in other online communities where their fans and customers gather.

Throughout the project Boxcar Marketing and Namaste Publishing established practices for building and managing online communities, handling digital and print online sales, establishing online courses, such as The Journey to Higher Consciousness, promoting events, such as Namaste Radio, and incorporating the publisher and author blogs.

Boxcar Marketing, along with our expert partners, did extensive workflow planning, which translated to detailed wireframes that drove design and development decisions. But, of course, we would be nowhere without the guidance and amazing work of our Drupal development team from Raincity Studios. Raincity Studios turned our designs and user experience requests into the dynamic, fully functioning website we launched this month.

Truly a group effort, thank you again to Todd of Corvus Consulting, the design team at Lift Studios (Haig, Cam, Frederick), the development team at Raincity Studios (Erik, Francis, and many other behind-the-scenes folks), and the inspiring team at Namaste Publishing (Constance, Howard, Mary, David, Lucinda, Nora and Kathy).

The accomplishments of this small Canadian publisher knows no bounds. The Namaste Publishing team are my inspiration. Thank you for a wonderful project!

(And like in any Oscar speech, any oversights in the shout-outs are mine alone. If I’ve missed you, please announce yourself!)

What’s the Difference Between Organic and Campaign Landing Pages?

Ion Interactive held a landing page optimization webinar in August, where they highlighted the differences between organic landing pages and campaign landing pages. These differences are important to keep in mind when creating and optimization your own landing pages.

Organic Landing Pages:

• Are pages on your site.
• Need to appeal and work for everyone.
• Should be focused on the lowest-common denominator.
• Should be optimized for global, organic traffic.
• You have little control over the message.
• Work with closed-ended experimentation.

Campaign Landing Pages

• Are pages that are created for a specific purpose.
• Have a specific message and receive specific traffic.
 
• You have total control over the message, placement and the link behind the message.
• Should be optimized for your highly targeted, campaign-specific traffic.
• Need open-ended experimentation to get better conversion rate and quality. You need to test, learn, and adapt.

Campaign landing pages need to be hyper-local. You should be developing different, context-specific landing pages for different campaigns, different groups, different search engines, and different traffic sources.

For example, if you were advertising for a French language-learning series you would need to have a different message for your three different audience groups:

Students who are learning French because they’re required to: “Ace your French exams”
Travelers who want to learn French for a fuller travel experience: “Experience France as only a French speaker can”
Business People who are short on time: “Business French in 10 minutes a day”

Because your different audience groups would all buy the product for different reasons, the landing page that you direct them to should reflect their different needs.

For more on landing page optimization watch the webinar.

Get Search Optimization Help at SES San Jose 2009

Do you have a strategy in place to increase your website’s search ranking? Need help? SES San Jose is a search engine strategies training and conference series that will teach you how to optimize and market your site within search engines.

Who Should Go?
Marketing Managers
Creative Directors
E-Commerce Managers
Brand Managers
Business Analytics Directors
Media Buyers
Media Planners
SEO Specialists/Consultants
PPC Analysts
Webmasters
Web Developers and Designers
IT Project Managers

What Will You Learn?
How search engines rank web pages.
How to optimize your site to out-rank competitors.
New methods of link building to keep your brand in front of your customers.
How to increase traffic via organic listings and avoid “spam” penalties.
How to optimize and rank better with pay-per-click campaigns.
How to improve user experience and increase conversions by testing and tuning landing pages.
How to track your performance and maximize ROI using analytics software.

Details
SES San Jose runs August 10 to 14, 2009 at the McEnery Convention Center. The conference runs August 11 to 13. August 10 and 14 are training days. A three-day pass for August 11 - 13 costs $1995 - save $200 when you register before July 24. For more information visit the SES San Jose site.

Register here.

7 Sentence Online Marketing Plan

Based on Guerrilla Consulting’s 7 Sentence Marketing Plan, I have been thinking about how the 7 Sentences can be modified for online marketing plans.

Free download Sample Marketing Plan & Roadmap from includes the 7-Sentence Marketing Plan.

At the BookNet Canada session “Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing”, I was asked about how I start creating an online marketing plan and if I think about the tools first.

I always have the tools in mind (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious), but I start with the 7 Sentence Plan, which really is about the business goals.

1. The purpose of the marketing plan is [specific, measurable goal here].

2. The target audience is [Who does this campaign need to reach? Where are they online?].

3. The niche in the marketplace is [What’s special about this book, how is it different, what are its benefits, competitive advantages?].

4. My identity is [Who and how are we representing ourselves online? Is the author blogging and commenting and the publicist doing the research? Is the publicist representing the author and the house? Are we using our Facebook profile, website, blog?].

5. Our tactics and strategies are [list here the tools, based on what’s going to work best for the target audience].

6. We will devote [percentage or amount of time, people, money] to this project.

7. We are measuring [specific, measurable goals here] and we understand the value of our goal conversions to be [enter values here].

Couple of competitive tools I mentioned:
* MarketLeap.com
* Compete.com
* Google Insights Search