Social media is a powerful channel for B2B marketing, but how do you measure the impact of your campaigns? Tracking the right metrics can help you optimize your strategy, improve your content, and demonstrate your ROI. In this article, we will cover some effective ways to track B2B campaign metrics on social media, including:
Before you start tracking any metrics, you need to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media campaigns. What are you trying to achieve? How will you measure success? Your goals and KPIs should align with your overall B2B marketing strategy and be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, if your goal is to generate more leads, your KPIs could be the number of form submissions, downloads, or sign-ups from your social media posts.
To track B2B campaign metrics on social media, start by defining clear goals. Utilize platform-specific analytics tools like Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, and Twitter Analytics. Monitor engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Track click-through rates to gauge website traffic. Measure lead generation by monitoring form submissions and downloads resulting from the campaign. Utilize UTM parameters to trace website visits from social posts. Employ CRM systems to link social interactions with sales outcomes. Regularly analyze data, adjust strategies, and optimize for better results.
I would urge all marketing operations teams to take full advantage of your CRM and CEM platforms. Investing in your SaaS is by and far going to give you a huge ROI on the backend of a campaign.
The next step is to choose the right tools and platforms to track your social media metrics. Depending on your budget, needs, and preferences, there are many options available. Native analytics offered by the social media platforms can give you an overview of your performance on each platform and compare different types of posts. Third-party tools, such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, and HubSpot, offer more advanced features like sentiment analysis, competitor analysis, hashtag analysis, and influencer identification. Additionally, Google Analytics can track traffic and conversions from your social media campaigns to your website. It can also be used to set up goals and measure the value of your social media campaigns.
When tracking B2B campaign metrics on social media, it is essential to identify which metrics are most relevant and important for each stage of the buyer's journey. Depending on your goals and KPIs, different metrics should be tracked for each stage of the funnel. For instance, in the Awareness stage, impressions, reach, followers, mentions, and share of voice should be monitored to gauge how many people see your posts, follow your account, talk about your brand, and compare visibility with competitors. During the Consideration stage, clicks, likes, comments, shares, and video views should be tracked to measure how many people interact with your content and view your videos. Finally, in the Conversion stage, form submissions, downloads, sign-ups, leads, and customers should be observed to determine how many people take action from your posts and purchase products or services.
The final step is to benchmark and optimize your performance based on your metrics. Benchmarking involves comparing your results with past performance, goals, KPIs, and industry standards. This allows you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and determine where you need to improve. Optimizing means testing and tweaking campaigns based on insights and feedback. This can help enhance content, targeting, timing, and budget to increase ROI. Examples of optimization tactics include A/B testing, content repurposing, and content curation. A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of a post to determine which one generates more engagement, clicks, or conversions. Content repurposing involves reusing existing content for different platforms, formats, or audiences. Content curation involves sharing valuable content from other sources with your audience. All of these tactics can help you reach more people, extend the lifespan of your content, and build relationships with other influencers and brands.
LinkedIn Insight Tags can provide lots of value for B2B marketers. Install the tag on your website and when users visit your website from any channel, you'll be able to gain reports on user data such as job function, title, company and much more.