Practical Analytics + Social Media

With the fast pace economy, internet explosion, and high use of technology, there is so much data outburst. Not simply managing but also analyzing this data and synthesizing it into reports and dashboards is vitally important in any sector of business and marketing. If you're working in a marketing analyst role supporting a marketing team or even running your own business it's important to understand how social media analytics work and its impact on the business. 

Now, the big question is: Do Social media platforms track analytics? The answer is pretty much all of the popular social media platforms have some amount of analytics built into them. Sometimes these require a free, pro, or business account to access but there's at least some basic information available. You can find built-in analytics for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. However, there are plenty of other third-party platforms like Sprout Social and HubSpot that not only help you schedule your social media calendar but also let you extract information and data from those platforms. These platforms have built-in dashboards that aggregate the performance of your accounts together so you could analyze and effectively calculate the return on investment (ROI) on your social media campaigns. Moreover, you can also compare how your company is performing in relation to its competitors. You can also track how your business is performing on different platforms in an aggregated easy-to-read way.

Beyond the platforms that we most commonly think of as social media, there are other areas that are often lumped in as well. To illustrate, customer sentiment mining is a unique metric on certain forums typically like LinkedIn. Social media analytics help look for information on the positive-negative or neutral perception of customers as they comment about a specific product or even a specific service. Social Media Analytics on different forums is often dedicated to a specific thing that a company is doing. 

Have you ever tracked what are people saying on Reddit or forums that are industry or topic-specific? What type of data is available? There is a fair amount of variation from platform to platform about what's available. The naming for different analytics or metrics can vary but there are a few key things that seem to show up on every platform. Even if it may be called something slightly different, the major metrics that cross all platforms include the following: 

Followers show how many people are requesting to see your content and support your content 

Impressions are how many people saw the post or video content

Engagement measures how many pages of your post a user clicks through to within a single visit from those who saw the content that was posted. How many interacted with it depending on the platform. This could be video views, link clicks, likes etc. It is one of the most important metrics across social media platforms because it shows if people are interacting with your posts. 

Engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions, click-through rate, or post clicks. These aren't exactly the same metric, but the availability differs by platform shares, how many people shared your post, or retweeted your content shares.

Beyond these universal metrics, you'll also find additional metrics depending on the platform including information such as: How people found the content? Where do they refer to it? Did they find it on search? Was it a suggested video on YouTube? These types of metrics can be very helpful for building a future strategy to continue growing on a channel or a platform.

Let’s now talk about practical analytics: How can social media analytics drive business improvement? Tracking different social media metrics can indicate what things are working well and which things aren't. This can clue you in as to what may need to be changed.  For instance, if the content is getting a very high number of impressions but the engagement rate is low then you don't need to focus your efforts on getting the content viewed. Whether that's video, text posts, photos, etc. put in front of more people, rather one must focus on how to make it more meaningful for the people that do see it. It's also very important to know what your goal is for a specific piece of content be it a video, a photo, or a text post. For instance, you have special holiday hours and you’d like everybody to be aware that the storefront has different hours. In this case, you don't necessarily need people to comment or be very engaged. Instead, you just need them to see it. They don't necessarily need to interact with it. All they need is a clear update on your business hours. However, if you're launching a new product, your goal is to probably convert people viewing your content into paying customers. Consequently, your goals are very different for posting a product versus posting an announcement of a change in hours.  

There are undoubtedly a lot of different social media metrics. So how do you decide which are the most important to analyze? Track metrics that align with why the content is being made in the first place. Focus on what you're trying to accomplish with and put in place standardized metrics across the platforms that you can analyze. Using analytics, you can also understand if you're accomplishing the set goals. Sometimes the goal is awareness and sometimes it may be fundraising and at other times it might be product sales. Knowing these goals across the platforms can be helpful to drive your social media marketing strategy and adapt while periodically checking the metrics. When you get more familiar with tracking metrics, you may discover other trends over time and which metrics perform better. Are things improving or are they staying the same? Are they declining? Social Media Analytics can inform business decisions regarding brand performance and promotions. Additionally, a social media expert should focus on the action users take and the interest users show on your profile as it can be a great indicator for your company’s next decision in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Although it's interesting to look at the numbers, a good social media expert tracks and analyzes metrics and can articulate the analysis to drive change with better decisions. Conducting A/B testing can help you understand how to tweak your content to improve metric performance.

Social Media Analytics set a pathway to strategizing your company’s branding and marketing activities. Social Listening can indicate what’s happening now and analytics help you anticipate what’s next. So, are you ready to launch your firm’s success pathway with Social Media Analytics?

Brand Management: Expectation vs. Reality

Brand management is an interesting area within corporate life, as it is not like finance or supply chain where one can easily identify the major goals of the work. Before working in the field, one might think that brand management main goals are understanding how the brand or product is perceived in the market, how to enhance and change that image, and the strategy to achieve that (whether that’s through product design and innovation, advertising, or brand guideline optimization). At larger corporations with huge internal marketing teams, those concepts could be all you focus on. However, majority of the time, those who pursue a career in brand management will be what a former boss of mine called “the hub of the wheel.” This means that a person in this role will be the decision maker for a brand’s financial health, product assortment, product development and life-cycle management, and promotional efforts with inputs from your cross functional partners.

Here is a secret of brand management that you don’t really get to know until you are in it. Most of your time will not be spent coming up with the new breakthrough innovation that will rock the industry, but rather you will spend your time (especially early in your career) ensuring that the brand stays profitable, that your sales team has the materials they need for buyer meetings, and making sure that you have the right product assortment. Below I will spell out what that might look like for you using examples from my own experiences:

·       Profitability of Product Line

While working at Henkel in their laundry and dish detergent in their private label division, the name of the game was “P&L management.” In private label brands, products are low cost and low margin. That meant that findings ways to even decrease costs a couple pennies or increase costs to our retail partners could be the difference between hitting margin goals or having to discontinue a product. I‘ve spent many days in our finance manager’s office with our product development team sweating over overhead costs, packaging costs, and even if we could lessen our product by 2 oz without changing price. The ultimate choice on these decisions came down to my team based on if we thought we could increase our bottom line without hurting top line sales.

 

·       Partnership with Sales Team

As the brand manager of SABRE (the world’s largest pepper spray company), one main task, was ensuring the sales teams were prepared for every meeting. In the world of CPG brand management, when most of your sales are B2C vs DTC (selling in store vs selling mainly online from your own website), these line reviews (when buyers decide what they will sell in their assigned part of the store) are make a break for your business. Many times, your sales team goes into meetings with buyers from places like Walmart, Walgreens, and Wegmans trying to either save the shelf (keep the number of SKUs sold in store) or expand the shelf (get more items in store). Oftentimes, the store isn’t expanding the number of items they will sell in store, so you are looking to generally compete with other companies in your categories for the same number of hooks.

 

The role entailed creation of sales decks for every major line review focusing on product and brand attributes, company information, and advertising or in-store campaigns that would benefit the retailer. As a brand manager, the person in the role would work with sales to give them a timeline of new products to excite the buyer as well as inputting costs, price, and margins. Without these things, sales cannot do their job. Brand managers also provide guidance for the stores E-commerce strategy for the products you manage and what materials (video, imagery, content) you can provide. One of the biggest tips for any line review is making everything turnkey for the buyer since they typically have a lot on their plate and anything to minimize time they need to work on your product’s success in their store once the deals are agreed upon will help you win the business.

 

·       Proper Product Assortment

My favorite thing in brand management may be SKU rationalization (or SKU-RAT for you cool kids). This is when you check the brand’s total SKUs (which can be in the thousands sometimes) and decide what to keep, what to sell off at a discount, and what is worth eliminating immediately. This is a tougher process than you may imagine as many of the SKUs (even the negative margin items) may be important for a sales rep or an account as a loss leader. Thus, a brand manager needs to see and understand the whole picture of where each SKU fits into the brand ecosystem outside of just profitability and brand fit. This is one of the ultimate team collaboration processes as it involves nearly your whole cross-functional team and forces you to use skills involving marketing, finance, supply chain, management, and sales. As a brand manager, your biggest win in the company comes if you can eliminate the right products and increase your margins without sacrificing revenue or customer relations.

 

Brand management is an ever-evolving field that varies across different brands and companies. Overall, you will need marketing skills and cross-functional knowledge to be successful. A mentor of mine once said “Brand Management is 50% marketing and 50% entrepreneurial, and that ratio can literally change every day depending on what your brand needs.”