Are you or aren’t you making a change happen? Can you or can’t you point to something different from before you started? Measurement. It’s where a lot of the social media conversations break down, where eyebrows furrow, where people stutter and change up their confidence for a slow deflation.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m working as diligently as anyone on the needles to follow. Here are some ideas that I’ve been working on with some clients, all with clear and obvious gauges. This is a sample of some of where we think numbers can matter.
- Reduction in time from alert to response. – a listening project.
- Increase in inbound links and off-site commentary. – a marketing awareness project.
- Deliver directly-measurable sales related to activities in a specific product vertical. – a content marketing and outreach project.
- Build velocity to an affiliate marketing program and measure % of sales increase. – a sales/content marketing project.
- Promote through outposts (twitter, facebook) and count number of hits from those presence points. – an awareness campaign.
Some of the projects are easy to measure: speaking and education projects. By the end of the project, the people will be more educated and have some recommended actionable steps.
Others aren’t as easy. It’s difficult to show a numeric effect on Twitter that ties directly to sales unless we do something like Dell has done with some of their efforts. Does Facebook sell anything or is it just another PR-flavored “price of doing business” type of sell?
Needles on gauges. It’s a tricky business, but that’s where the forward motion is for marketers hoping to engage the big guys in 2009 and beyond. We’re doing all kinds of other things to show measurement. What about you?
What kinds of numbers are you moving? Where do you show your results? How is that being received? What are marketers saying are the big challenges on their plates right now?
(By the way, this is exactly the stuff we’ll talk about at the Inbound Marketing Summit, my event in April in San Francisco. If you’re coming, use code “insider” to get $200 off.)
Photo credit NathanFromDeVryEET