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.

Definition of a KPIKey Performance Indicators are measurable indicators of decision support. They are part of a process of progress and allow the management and monitoring of the activity (marketing, social media, customer relationship in our case). They are "reported" and analyzed on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. For marketing, they will define the criteria taken into account to measure the effectiveness of global marketing actions, a communication campaign, an action precise (RP, marketing of influence, new axes of content marketing targeted ..).Yes, but how to put them in place?Beforehand, before you can develop your KPIs, you must have clearly defined your objectives or at least those relating to digital and social media according to the degree of specialization of your position. What are your goals targeted through your digital actions? Improve your brand awareness, become an opinion leader, develop leads, detect influencers and ambassadors, strengthen customer relationship channels and improve service Digital marketing objectives are many, they are usually very closely linked : thus a goal of conversion via the downloading of resources on your website also depends on the activities SEO, Advertising, webdesign, social media, but also off-line through the campaigns of notoriety, the events. In order that they are relevant, the objectives must be derived from the overall marketing strategy, which is itself based on strategic corporate directives. Once these objectives are specified, you should keep in mind some rules that will prevail in the development and choice of your KPIs:1. Know your position in the marketing tunnelThe marketing tunnel is not a metaphor for an endless marketing project but a diagram representing, here for the digital world, the process of transforming simple Internet users into customers, or even better, into ambassadors of your brand. your function and its actions within this tunnel will help you to better specify your objectives and thus your KPIs.Adapted specifically to social media marketing, the tunnel schematizes the transformation of the data collected on the social networks then the qualification of these contacts to then feed marketing, customer service or sales department.
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.