FIVE KEY METRICS FOR MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR BRAND

Businesses, irrespective of their scale of operations, use social media marketing to drive visitors to their website. However, the real success of these campaigns lies in analyzing and understanding how it impacts and effective your social media marketing efforts were in driving visitors to your site.

Listed below are 5 metrics that will help you measure this:

1. Visitor Bounce Rate:

If you have a large percentage of people who visit your landing page but leave or deviate instantly without reaching their goal (finding relevant information on your website), then your website suffers from high bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your website too soon, without spending much time on the landing page.

Studying your website’s bounce rate numbers will help you to attract and retain customers more effectively.

2. Visitor Conversion Rate:

If you notice that visitors go beyond the landing page, navigate through various pages and perform desired tasks on the page, it indicates a healthy conversion rate. This refers to the number of people who come to your website with a goal to do a predetermined task and their successful rate in achieving that goal.

3. Visitors’ Time Spend:

Do you have a steady flow of new visitors every day or are you stuck with a group of loyal old customers alone? While your website content should be informative and engaging for your already existing visitors, efforts should also be made to incorporate such content that gets the attention of people hitherto unaware of your site.

Analysing and understanding the visitors’ time spend will help you to take the necessary steps to enhance the content of your site.

4. Click Path:

Do you see a pattern in your site visitors’ navigation? If yes, have you pondered over the reasons behind it? What does it tell about your visitors’ (read customers) behavior? Click Path analysis helps you decipher customer behavior on your site, and find ways to improve it.

5. Keywords and Traffic Sources:

Analyzing which keywords are leading visitors to your site allows you to understand what words/ phrases are used to describe your products and services. Knowing this will help you in your efforts to match the right keywords with your products thereby ensuring greater visibility and top ranks in Google search.

Similarly, studying traffic sources of visitors tells you how they first found you. In other words, it gives you an insight into other online arenas where your site is mentioned. 

3 Ways How Your Social Audience Can Help Your Brands Do Better Business

Your social audience is an important part of your social marketing plan. Hence, you keep them in the center

of your brand marketing design and devise plan and strategies to please them, satisfy them and retain them. But did you know that they can also be a source of critical insights for you? And that you can leverage their power (yes, your social audience is very powerful) to do better business?

By carefully listening to your audience’s likes, interests, habits and beliefs, you can glean some insightful and very critical information relating to your brands, services, products and overall business. You can use this information to:

Identify Market Changes

Your business arena is constantly evolving; new players make their foray here every other day and those already existing are diversifying and modifying their business plans. In such a scenario, for you to survive, you must be flexible enough to make changes to your product and services according to the shifts and changes in your market.

And the best person who can give you timely updates about changing market trends is your audience. Because of their genuine interest and passion for products and services that you (and others in your market) offer, your audience will be constantly tracking and responding to the market trends. Listening to their conversations will reveal a lot about what is currently happening in your market.

Measure Brand Reputation

What is the vibe that your audience are exhibiting when they talk about your brands and services? Is it positive, negative or neutral?

Sentiment Analysis can help you to critically examine the success and effectiveness of your customer service initiatives. If your brand constantly sees high negative sentiments, then it means that you need to modify your products and services whereas considerably positive sentiments indicate that all is well with your brands and services.

Revise Marketing Tactics

Social media marketing is all about interesting and useful content that your audience can like and share. If you fail to provide rich and resourceful content, your social marketing efforts will not be successful.

Keeping this in mind, examine what content your audience likes best and provide them with just that. If you find that certain content is always ignored by your audience, then it’s a lesson for you to completely do away with that type of content.

Shout Analytics can help you leverage the power of your social audience, to know how, write to info@shoutnalytics.com

Key Social Media Influencers: How They Can Help Your Brands

One of the key to successful social media marketing is finding your key social media influencers. Such influencers are those people in your product/service community who are widely followed and liked for their opinions. Others (read your audience) believe and trust the influencers. They are the person to rely on when it comes to useful information on issues and news related to your product or service. Since the influencers are considered as a sort of subject-matter-experts by their social community or communities, what they say and do often serves as a “guide” to others.

Importance of Influencers:

Digital marketers must take influencers seriously because of their sheer ability to influence others. As I mentioned earlier, these people have an innate quality or rather ability to get people to do things the way they do it. What they say and what they do influences their followers in such a way that they trust these influencers for getting appropriate, authentic information related to products and purchasing decisions.

Identifying influencers:

Use the common characteristics listed below, to identify the right influencers for your business

·         Influencers are involved actively in various movements and endorse a lot of public causes.

·         They nurture an extensive social network(s).

·         They are looked up to and impactful and have a large number of followers.

·         They are active members of several varied groups

·         They are Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

How are they useful to your business?

·         They endorse you – others endorse you too.

·         They trust your product – others do the same

·         They recommend your product – others will buy it

·         They review/ vote your product – others will trust it, use it to choose your product over your competitors

·         They share your product news – others get to know about you.

To sum up, influencers are people who have the strength in their thoughts, ideas and opinions to influence others. Social media marketing is all about finding new audience and building an engaging and trustful relationship with them. As influencers have a wide reach and a strong say in their (or your) communities, social media marketers must take them seriously and must aim to harness the influencers power to influence others, in order to widen the market for your product and also give it more visibility. 

Why Online Reputation Management is Critical for Banks and Financial Institutions

In this age of social media where consumers’ opinions have the power to make or break businesses, Online Reputation Management or ORM is very critical for business organisations and their brands.

A negative post or a tweet by a dissatisfied customer, when gone viral, can derail any organisation’s online reputation. The same holds true for the BFSIs too, only that the damages incurred here due to poor ORM are much more than any other industries. Here, the loss of even a few customers means a loss of hundreds of financial accounts.

It is for this reason that organisations in the BFSI industry are making streamlined efforts to build a strong presence on the social media and striving harder to maintain that reputation. Aligning a fool proof online reputation management strategy along with their social media and marketing policies is imperative for BFSIs.

Effects of Bad ORM in BFSIs:

A report in the Huffingtonpost.com about an annual Reputation Management survey conducted by Harris Interactive found that financial institutions like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase experienced a very bad Reputation Quotient. The study points out that Bank of America’s dismal performance was due to the excessive negative publicity that it garnered for charging customers $5 for debit card usage (the plan was later dropped), alleged foreclosure abuse and inaccurate mortgage practices.

However, Harris Interactive’s Reputation Quotient study 2013 indicates that, though there has been a marginal increase in the performance of individual financial institutions, the overall standing of the banking and financial industry shows 54% and 51% negative reputation respectively.

Jorge Yui, in his research paper on Social Media and Reputation Management in the Financial Services Sector has mentioned some parts of the Financial Service Consumer Experience Survey, 2010. 18% of respondents to a question said that they used social media to express frustration with their personal bank experiences and 17% used it to aid their decisions about purchasing the products and services of the bank.

Measures BFSIs must take:

In order to achieve good ORM, banks and financial institutions must harness the power of Big Data competent Social media Analytics (SMA) tools to closely monitor, analyze and understand the needs, likes and problems of their customers.

Relying on SMAs allows BFSIs to anticipate and even prevent ORM crisis in real time.

So, do you agree with me? Comment with your thoughts or mail to info@shoutanalytics.com

How Is Social Media Changing Your Branding Strategy?

Social Media has taken Marketing to a new level. New-age thinkers swear by it, and the ones who ignore it would soon be history.  It has given the local market a gigantic platform and new mediums to reach out. We've arrived at a stage when social media presence decides a brand’s existence, something so unheard of just 5 years ago.

Social media has also changed the dynamics of branding. Instead of looking at this as a threat, one ought to see beyond the obvious to understand and appreciate the long term implications and benefits that Social Media would offer a brand.

As though to adapt to this revolution, Branding, which once focused on bringing forth the brand’s message to the end-users; is now concentrating and viewing it as a two-way process. This allows the consumers to communicate and increase the opportunity and thereby, to own it. Business Houses have accepted the fact that it is time to metamorphose from the age of “commercial yelling” to “commercial conversation”.

 The advent of Social Media has increased the interactions between the brand and the end users, and essentially changed the way Business Houses view their consumers. Although the fundamentals of brand building are untouched, the marketers have an added onus to the traditional “etching the brand in the minds of consumers”. Social media has forced the brands to think on additional parameters viz:

1)      How to build relationship to gain trust?

2)      How to bridge the emotional disconnect or gap, in order to stand out and gain a decisive identity?

3)      How to nurture loyal fans?

However, social media is not to be mistaken for brand overhaul. It merely provides a heightened platform to the brand to better acquaint the world of your thought, leadership, identity and product offerings. Hence, campaigns are being overhauled and strategies being revised to incorporate the social media facet to brand management.

Branding forms the backbone of any product and hence it’s vital to pay meticulous attention to strategy it. Branding, however, has changed ever since the advent of Social Media. We wouldn't be wrong, if we were to say “Social Media has compelled us to rethink -reinvent our strategies”.