{"id":2854,"date":"2017-12-30T21:00:27","date_gmt":"2017-12-30T15:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/?p=2854"},"modified":"2018-11-24T20:43:07","modified_gmt":"2018-11-24T15:13:07","slug":"is-your-social-media-presence-working-for-your-brand-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/is-your-social-media-presence-working-for-your-brand-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Is your social media presence working for your brand? (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post was written for Escape Velocity Blog and first appeared there.<\/p>\n

\n

Sen. Lindsey Graham: \u201cHow much influence did these ads have? \u2026are there tools you can use to evaluate what impact these ads might or might not have had on each of your platforms with respect to the opinions\u2026 that Americans were forming\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n

Colin Stretch (Facebook\u2019s General Counsel): \u201c\u2026we do have tools to help advertisers measure their return on investment\u2026 to help them understand different campaigns\u2026 For campaigns like we saw\u2026 they were intended to drive followership of the pages \u2013 getting people to like the page. There the return on investment is clear in how many people liked the page.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Lindsey Graham: \u201cSo would you consider the return on roubles invested, on the money they invested, did it make sense? Were they under or over expectations?\u201d<\/p>\n

Colin Stretch: \u201cI can\u2019t say what the expectations were; I do think it\u2019s clear they were able to drive a significant following\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This conversation happened right at the beginning of the Facebook, Google and Twitter testimony to the congressional committee<\/a> hearing Russia\u2019s election interference in last year\u2019s U.S. presidential election. It demonstrates some of the confusion prevalent in measuring digital and social media activities\u2026 What should the campaign intention be? Are we measuring campaigns to manage them, or are we measuring in order to understand a campaigns\u2019 actual impact? How do we define impact, and what tools do we use to measure this impact? What should the expectation of the ROI be from this medium? \u00a0Judging from the answers given at the hearing, not many people, even within Facebook, understand how to quantify the \u2018impact\u2019 of activities conducted online in an offline environment.<\/p>\n

What is the impact?<\/h3>\n

When Social Media took off in India, the first thing that brands asked was, \u201cWhat should we do on this medium?\u201d Advice came aplenty.\u00a0 Now that some of them have been on it for a few years and poured in more than a little money, they\u2019ve started asking, \u201cWhat is the impact of all my efforts on it?\u201d \u00a0The conversations that happen then are not different from the one quoted at the beginning of this post.<\/p>\n

There are fundamentally three questions that need to be answered when assessing the impact of any marketing activity:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Has the person of my choice \u2013 Target Group (TG) \u2013 viewed the message?<\/li>\n
  • Having viewed the message, does the TG think of my brand differently?<\/li>\n
  • Did the TG change behaviour \/ take an action that benefited (purchase of) my brand?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The muddling up of the objectives<\/h3>\n

    Prior to any mass media activity, businesses and \/ or marketers are extremely diligent in defining TG, brand attributes, key message take-out, desired action (marketing objective) etc. Once these are clearly defined, the answers to the three questions above are obtained through measurement of the relevant parameters, and the success of the activity is determined.<\/p>\n

    But, when it comes to digital and social media, critical points such as objective, key message take-out etc. are not clearly defined, which makes measurement of impact difficult and accountability of the digital agency even tougher to enforce. At best, some effort goes into defining and answering the first question \u2013 reaching the right TG. Beyond this, thanks to strategies that social media evangelists and agencies propagate, \u2018engagement\u2019 becomes an end in itself. After all, isn\u2019t social media all about, \u201clistening in to conversations that customers are having and then participating and connecting with them by initiating and having more meaningful conversations?\u201d<\/p>\n

    Then there are some more \u2018activities\u2019 thrown in as \u2018objectives\u2019 and \u2018goals\u2019 by the networks themselves \u2013 building presence, creating awareness, driving discovery, acquiring customers, customer service\/experience etc. With a plethora of such \u2018objectives\u2019 floating around, it\u2019s not surprising that businesses and marketers are confused and \u00a0sometimes forget that these are the means to the end and not the end itself.<\/p>\n

    While setting campaign goals, it\u2019s critical to focus on the ultimate objective \u2013 to induce a behaviour change in the consumer that leads to cash registers ringing \u2013 and tie-in all activities and metrics to it. Without establishing the link, any money you spend online is akin to gambling on little more than faith.<\/p>\n

    Drowning in data and measurements<\/h3>\n

    Everything that the brand does during a campaign and how the consumer interacts with it is tracked and logged.\u00a0 Multiply the number of channels in play with the number of ad formats with the number of user actions possible and you get a sense of the amount of data to parse. For example, a brand could use a combination of websites and social networks, to show a mix of rich media, text and video ads using one or more ad servers that require a user to click and reach a brand page and eventually buy something.<\/p>\n

    Then there is the bigger problem of attribution and trying to measuring online-to-offline activity, which is increasingly complicated by the usage and movement of the users between devices, measurement in platform silos, non-linearity of user actions and use of tracking protection etc. For example a user might have viewed a brand video on a mobile app, remembered it and then searched for the brand on his desktop browser wherein the text ad was shown, clicked on it, landed on the website, read about the product and finally made an offline purchase a few weeks later.<\/p>\n

    With the amount of data captured in the example above, it\u2019s easy to get tangled in answering activity level questions \u2013 trying to piece together what happened, where, why \/ why not etc., and lose sight of the more fundamental questions that we mentioned \u00a0towards the beginning of this post. Marketers today have access to more data than ever before, yet there is still a lot of confusion about which data to track and focus on for assessing the impact on the brand.<\/p>\n

    An approach<\/h3>\n

    While there isn\u2019t a one-size-fits-all solution to measuring impact, here\u2019s one approach \u2013 always think about these three fundamental questions. Start with understanding your online audience<\/u> first. Then your marketing goals<\/u>, the outcomes that you want to achieve. Identify data sources<\/u> you need to help answer those outcome questions \u2013 both online and offline. Find ways to integrate these sources to get a more holistic understanding of offline actions basis online views<\/u>. If real time decisions are needed, use estimates and proxies to tie media metrics to business outcomes. And of course, set up the right tests to validate or reject the hypotheses later.<\/p>\n

    For example, you might want to answer the question, \u2018has the message been viewed by the right TG?\u2019 Then, it would be critical to segment and zero in on the right audience prior to the activity, understand if the media buy reflected that audience, if the ad was served to this right audience and if this audience actually viewed the ad. The extended demographics of the audience, viewability and attention metrics of the ads are a few measures that help you answer this question.<\/p>\n

    If you are trying to answer, \u2018has the TG changed his\/her behaviour and purchased a brand in-store,\u2019 determine what the best proxy to measure this is. For example, if the purchase funnel shows that awareness is the biggest driver, then evaluate \u2018lift\u2019 in ad recall and brand awareness scores in research studies apart from actual buying itself. If decisions need to be made real time, then use proxies of media metrics (such as mobile ad views, website visits, video completion rate etc.) that tie-in with the business outcome of purchase.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/div>\n
    \n

    I\u2019ve often heard digital agencies say that more measuring means limiting creative thinking, that the power of the medium is the agility that it offers, and that one can operate on an iterative and \u2018learn as you go mechanism\u2019. With the incredible growth of online advertising, it is high time businesses and marketers had access to a robust methodology to measure how brand perception shifts and sales are driven by activities conducted online.<\/p>\n

    In the next post, we\u2019ll look at some ways that large firms measure impact and how we can improve them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This post was written for Escape Velocity Blog and first appeared there. Sen. Lindsey Graham: \u201cHow much influence did these ads have? \u2026are there tools you can use to evaluate what impact these ads might or might not have had on each of your platforms with respect to the opinions\u2026 that Americans were forming\u2026?\u201d Colin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"book_review_cover_url":"","book_review_title":"","book_review_series":"","book_review_author":"","book_review_genre":"","book_review_isbn":"","book_review_publisher":"","book_review_release_date":"","book_review_format":"","book_review_pages":"","book_review_source":"","book_review_rating":"","book_review_summary":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-escape-velocity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/photo-1547139559-c89c59d117611.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2855,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854\/revisions\/2855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}