If you are on the agency side then you have had the opportunity to work with a whole bunch of different clients and with those different clients will come a variety of opinions when it comes to measurement.
So why does this happen? Because your clients are all in different parts of their marketing journey. While one might think they need revamp their social media content another could think they are doing perfectly fine for the same exact reason- how and what they measure.
Although you may never get every client on the same page when it comes to marketing measurement (and maybe that’s not a bad thing) you can build a structure around client’s social media and digital marketing measurement practices by using the strategies listed below.
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Look At The Past
You can’t understand what needs to happen unless you dive into what has happened. Best case scenario, even if they may not measure the way you would, your client has been collecting data and measuring something. There is some type of historical information for you to export and dive into to gain perspective from. When taking a look at this information don’t use it to find what they were doing right or wrong, use it to help understand how and what they were doing. Using that data to better understand what they measure, how they set goals and the content they produced tells you a lot about what they value, what they are good at and what they need your help with. This information is going to help set benchmarks and goals going forward- even if that means it is the exact opposite of what they were doing before. Collecting historical data is a really important step because this will serve as the starting point for what happens next.
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Look At The Competition
After you have taken the time to gather and analyze their previous content and data you then should go after their competitor’s data. When taking a look at competitor’s data and content you are gaining an understanding of what and how brands market in their industry. You can also start to understand what your client has to compete with.
- Is their industry plugged into social?
- Do they have an audience?
- When and what do they seem to be responding to?
- And what does an engaging posted look like?
Not only is every brand so different but so are industries and you need to understand that before you can move on to creating a content and measurement strategy now.
Look To The Future
Now that you have used data to understand your client’s history and their industry you are ready to put that together to create a structure and strategy for their measurement and marketing practices going forward.
Wait but why did you need to do all that other work?
Because if you had just taken the measurement practices of what the internal marketing team or the previous agency’s team had done you would not have understood the how and why they used that data and set the goals they did.
Now that you have done all the work yourself you know what goals are important to set going forward and why you need to use certain metrics to measure success as you get there.
So what should be included in this structure?
- Goals that affect the entire business: You don’t want social just to make social better you want it to positively impact the entire business. Whether it’s generating new leads or increasing sales. How can marketing’s goals tie into the business’s goals?
- Reporting that shows this impact to the business: Leave out lingo that only marketers would understand and plugin words that the entire business can rally behind. If your goals are tied to business goals then your reporting should represent that too. This isn’t only important for your client’s reputation within the company but also yours. It is often times the C-Level Executives (who dig into these reports) who decide if you stay or if you go.
- Make sure you are constantly testing: You can’t know what you can be doing better if you are always doing the same thing every day. Make sure you are running A/B tests with everything you do and measuring results of course. Whether you are comparing different social platforms, content types or even hashtags. If you are testing what works and finding out what does not work along the way that helps too! You can quickly stop doing those things and re-focus efforts to help achieve the goals you set for you client.
Wrap It Up
There are a lot of different ways to navigate new client’s measurement and reporting habits they come to you with. Some might be worth keeping and some need to go. The best way to figure that out is to build a formula around goal setting, measurement and reporting practices. This will help you, your team, and the client understands where you are going and how you will get there.
Was this content helpful to your agency? Find more of it here in this FREE e-book, How To Escape Your Agency’s Reporting Nightmare, here.