Where It’s At: I Got Two Analytics And A Cyfe Account
In college, I found I had a knack for management and followed a retail and foodservice path. I became the manager of a Starbucks that made $55K a week by the time I was twenty-two. I loved my job. It combined my passion for helping and guiding others with my constant need to be challenged by solving problems with empirical data. Being the advocate for my team and getting them what they need to do their jobs better by compiling data got me out of bed in the morning.
A month ago, almost to the day, I started a new job. I hung up the proverbial “apron strings” and traded them for a standing desk and jeans on Fridays. I’m a marketing coordinator now. More than ever, I advocate for my potential clients by analyzing innumerable data.
I’m taking over a position that’s been vacant for a few months, and it’s my job to grow the phoenix from scattered ashes. To understand where to begin building the foundation, I start with the numbers. Analytics is the foundation for growth in any position, but especially in marketing.
After taking this position, I observed a lack of energy and labor spent on social media. What’s so unique about social media is that, save for the cost of work and any programs or tools you use to develop content, it’s a cheap, organic way to gain more brand awareness. So, that’s where I started.
Every day I have a list of tasks I perform, and on my daily task list, I start by analyzing reach and engagement rates. These overarching data help me get the “big picture” right from the start. If my boss were to come in at any second and ask about social media performance, I would have the critical numbers to give him. If anyone in the company were to ask me about our social performance, I would use reach and engagement rates to explain the overall health of our social media.
Reach rates show us how many people look at our posts and our page. Engagement rates tell us how many people liked, commented, shared, etc. Most social algorithms (but particularly Facebook, the one we use the most) rely on more engagements to get in front of people’s faces. The more you engage with a page, the more you’ll see their posts. That’s why engagement is the cornerstone metric that reveals health to a company-level team.
When informed by more specific metrics (like demographics), I can share engagement and reach at monthly or quarterly team meetings. Marketing isn’t the only thing in my company, and the time that I get to share with the rest of the team is limited. By sharing generalized KPIs that everyone understands, expressing the health of social media as a marketing technique is easy for everyone to understand.
For myself, I need a little more specific data. I use demographics and engagement rates at particular times, “like” rates, actions taken on our page, how long people were spending watching the video we just posted, and many more. I do loads of A/B testing to see if targeting the time of day or a different style of ad (carousel vs. still image) changes our engagement rates or reach. I look at the nitty-gritty. I see how long it took for someone to stop watching our latest video or if they followed the link to our website before it ended. All of these smaller, more detailed metrics are what define the quality of larger KPIs. Understanding the behaviors that delivered our higher engagement rates helps us produce more content that reaches customers and gets them where they want to be.
The levels that I describe here are unique because my boss is a marketing expert and the CEO. When reporting to my boss, he may ask about my A/B tests or how long someone watched his most recent video, but he cares about demographics more than anything else. He wants to know what kind of customers are engaging with his content and if they convert into sales. KPIs are essential to him, but money is the bottom line. I use Cyfe to track every conversion and demographic that comes through all sources. We’re looking for conversions, and he wants to know how we got them and how to get more leads using that data.
Taking a job that’s in ashes and treating it as an opportunity for growth is risky. If you start with numbers and define SMART goals, driving success in a new position should be a piece of cake. Understanding social media metrics and who needs to understand which KPIs results in ownership and success for your goals. Or at least, I hope so.