8 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to Track Your Social Media Marketing Program

KPIs for craft businessesYou’re spending time, money, and resources on your social media and marketing program, and you want to know, “What am I getting out of this?” Unless a customer tells you that one of your marketing efforts got them to buy your product outright, making a correlation between social media posting and your bottom line can be difficult. A strategic social media marketing plan can ensure that your business is still around 5 years from now, though most companies have more specific goals than simply keeping the doors open longer than their competitors.

By zeroing in on these goals, we can then work backwards to determine how to measure success along the way using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – metrics that can be easily measured and tracked to help you connect the dots between your marketing strategy and growing your company. Over time, you can use this data to decide what is and isn’t working for you so that you can fine tune your efforts to maximize your ROI (Return on Investment).

For today’s post, we’ll be talking about how B2B (business to business) companies can track their success by creating and tracking KPIs. We’ll be discussing this same topic for B2C (business to consumer) companies in our next post.

Getting Started

Particularly in the craft industry, in can be hard for B2B companies to track specific sales to singular social media posts. Your retailers are placing orders based on the demand of their customers (we assume), but unless they’re asking each customer why they bought your product, you’ll rarely know if that post on Instagram spurred that customer to buy in a store.

Where does social media fit into this? Social media helps you build brand awareness. This means that people will see your products, logo, projects, patterns, etc. on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest and they’ll have your brand in the back of their mind. When they walk into their local store, they’ll see your products on the shelf remember what they saw online. Consumers are much more likely to buy from a company that they recognize and trust than a company that they know little to nothing about.

How To Determine and Track Your KPIs

Specific KPIs may be different for each company, but it’s essential to figure out what is important to you and your business. Are you focused on brand awareness? Do you want people to be more engaged with your brand? Is it audience growth that you want? Are you looking to support retailers by creating bottom-up demand at the consumer level? Once you have figured these out, it is good to track these using a software or in a simple spreadsheet. Once you have a baseline of data, you can create goals of growth that you can work towards.

Tools that can help you track this information are all around, but one of the cheapest and easiest tools to use is Google Analytics. This is a free tool from Google that helps track traffic to your site. Using this combined with UTM codes, small bits of code that are attached to links in your newsletter or social media posts, can prove to be a powerful source of information.

Platforms like Facebook have the option of adding a Facebook Pixel to your ads, and can then track the paths that people are taking from that ad to your website.

Here are a few KPIs for you to think about.

For Brand Awareness

  • Post Reach: This measures how many ”unique” individuals are seeing your posts. Most business accounts have tools that help you measure this. Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram all measure this metric, so all you (or your marketing team) needs to do is pull that number periodically and track it. A higher number of individuals seeing a post will help more people see the post in their feed.
  • Number of Impressions: on Pinterest, you can see how many impressions a certain pin has. This equates to the number of times a post has been seen total. What this means is, the same people may be seeing your posts over and over again, as opposed to post reach, where it counts the number of unique individuals seeing your posts. Read this blog post to see how you can optimize Pinterest for driving traffic to your website.

Brand Engagement

  • Brand engagement is an important metric to track because the more engaged users are by your content, the more likely they will share it, and the more that the Facebook and Instagram algorithms will boost your content. This boosts your brand awareness, which as we stated above, is good for business.
    Post Engagement: This is also measured by many social media platforms. This is essentially how many people are commenting, liking, and sharing your posts. This is important for Facebook in particular because their algorithm uses this to determine how many more people will see your post in their newsfeed. Post engagement is the total number of likes, comments, and shares. It’s is important to periodically keep track of this KPI, because this tells you whether or not that type of content “plays” well with your audience.

With Facebook’s algorithm some forms of engagement are weighted higher than others. At the time this post was written, Facebook is giving more weight to “Reactions” than to likes.

  • Engagement Rate: To calculate engagement rate, take your 5 most recent posts on one of your social media platforms, and add up all of the shares, comments, and likes that each post has gotten. Take each of those numbers, and divide them by your total followers at the time. Add those 5 numbers together, and divide by 5 to get the average engagement rate for those posts. Engagement rate is a great way to compare how your brand is doing compared to others. Although some brands will have varying followings, engagement rate is a way to compare your brand to those much larger or smaller.
  • On Instagram another KPI to consider is use of your brand hashtag. Simply tally the number of times your branded hashtag(s) have been used, the growth of your branded hashtag is another way to gauge how your brand is growing on this trending platform.

Audience Growth

  • Number of Likes/Followers: This is one of our main goals for our clients at Stitchcraft Marketing. This metric is more powerful when combined with other KPIs, especially engagement. A high number of followers plus a large engagement is great news. This helps tell the Facebook and Instagram algorithms that your content is worth seeing, and will organically push your content in front of more people.

Newsletter KPIs

  • Newsletters are a great way to reach consumers, and if they have the desire to subscribe to your newsletter, that shows that they want more of your content. Newsletters are a good place to put longer pieces of content, calendar information, and current promotions.
    Newsletter Open Rate and Click Through Rate (CTR): Though you may not be selling through your consumer newsletter, keeping track of the open rate and CTR is essential to see how engaged the end consumer is with your brand. If you see a sharp change in open rate or CTR you can determine what is, or isn’t, working.
  • Number of Newsletter Subscribers: Another number to look at to see how many people are interested in your brand is your newsletter subscriber count. Lists tend to decay, so it’s important to continually add people to the top of the funnel, as an old list with no new names will see continually declining open rates and CTR.
    Measuring the results of your online marketing is critical to helping you analyze what is and isn’t working for your brand. Afterall, the aim of gaining followers and engagement is to grow your business and share your brand with more people.

If you would like to learn more about creating and tracking KPIs and measuring ROI, we can help! Contact Leanne to learn more about how we can help you make magic for your brand, leanne@stitchcraftmarketing.com.

No Comments

Post A Comment