10 rules for developing relevant KPIs
Setting up KPIs will help you in the decision-making process based on the social ROI that will emerge. Only one question remains: how to create effective KPIs?
It happened. Your supervisor wants to estimate the Return on Investment of your actions on social media, for himself or for the big boss.
You are a community manager, a social media manager, a digital marketer, a social media experience manager, and you can tell him that, of course, our presence, our campaigns, our interactions with prospects and customers on social networks, "forcing that reports, it creates visibility, trust, loyalty, acquisition "… Nothing to do: the boss wants in-di-ca-teurs, the famous KPIs, key performance indicators.
2. KPIs want you wellHaving quantified performance indicators allows you to better achieve your objectives in time, to evolve them and of course beforehand, to fix them knowingly.3. Good or bad?
There are no good or bad KPIs in the absolute: there are your KPIs, those which correspond to the objectives of your function in your company.
4. Adapted KPIs
The KPI must be personalized as much as possible to correspond as closely as possible to your daily activity and your means. Ex: if your actions and means (community management, social selling, ads) focus on Twitter, your KPI "growth of social media communities" is too broad and needs to be refined (growth of followers) or segmented in web media (Twitter, Facebook, blog, Instagram …).
For this customization, you can also integrate regional, product, or demographic targeting settings. Imagine indicators compared to your main competitors, if you know them: it will increase their relevance (eg: Growth of your engagement rate on Twitter UK vs growth of that of your competitor).
5. Do not underestimate the qualitative
All is not quantifiable. The qualitative criteria, if they do not allow to measure in the proper sense and thus to constitute KPIs, will help us to analyze the KPIs and better understand them. Thus, qualifying a quantitative indicator on the acquisition of influencer X via qualitative indicators (stars, fans, ambassadors, experts) will allow a better analysis.6. Analyze
There is no point in setting up KPIs, if, beyond the simple performance report, you do not analyze them: you have to put them in perspective per period, according to your marketing actions, your budgets, your resources . The analysis should ideally predict the performance of future actions (predictive) but also improve the whole process (prescriptive).
7. Do not forget the "repository"
A KPI is good, a KPI with a repository is better: if you have the chance to have reference indicators constituting a standard to set the level of your objectives, use them: this will enhance the relevance and legitimacy of the KPI, and will motivate you to reach this reference value.
Ex: your main competitor generates an average engagement rate on his Instagram posts of 3% for images, 5% for videos? Remember these 2 KPIs and evaluate a goal consistent with your means, your performance vs those of your competitor. Studies by specialized firms providing reference variables by sector of activity. The ideal is to collect data directly from the social media monitoring for brands of your competitors in earned media (the conversations of Internet users on the web and social networks) or owned media (the content you manage on your website and on social networks).
8. Use measurement and collection tools to analyze your data
Use tools for measuring and listening to social media, CRM platforms and Marketing Hubs to collect all your data needed to develop your indicators (mentions, audience, leads, engagement …).
With this type of tools, you will be able to automate data collection and metrics generation for many marketing activities.
9. Choose the KPIs
"Too many KPIs kill the KPI": Do not be too greedy: there are many indicators to measure the performance of your actions in digital marketing and social media: it should choose 1 or 2 per category of phases marketing (notoriety, satisfaction, interaction, etc.), to avoid going away from your essential objectives, to complicate the collection and reporting.
10. See further
Digital marketing, its domains, its metrics and the capabilities of the collection and measurement tools are constantly evolving: stay on standby to discover new KPIs that are appropriate for your objectives.