I am often told the same sad story over and over by business owners who have hired someone internally or used an outside vendor to do their SEO, Website, Social Media or Adwords campaigns and paid them monthly to get the job done. After several months, they could not tell if their online efforts had made a difference. Do you notice anything wrong with this picture?
Most small business owners can tell you the benefit of all their investments and typically stop any that are not profitable as soon as possible. I rarely find small business owners paying for a service without asking for some concrete results in return. However I find key communication steps are not taken when it comes to online marketing purchases. This is probably due to a feeling that the business owner or manager is out of their area of expertise.
In my Social Measurement Laptop Workshop for business owners, I suggest that online marketing should begin with setting the goals that the program is supposed to meet and establishing how to measure the campaigns success. Most of us watch our outgoing expenses very carefully and hold our vendors accountable — particularly during the recession. However I still find that many companies skip this step when it comes to online and social media efforts. If that is you, our next Laptop Workshop will save you time and money.
Just like any other marketing investment, you can validate the work of online marketing vendors. You simply need to learn how to set goals and measure their results using FREE online tools that are already available to you. It starts with asking the question “What action do I want my target market to take that would benefit my company the most?” Then the social media program should be set up in order to maximize that outcome.
The real problem is lack of communication by the business owner to set clear goals and let the vendor or staff know what is expected of them. In addition, the vendors and staff need to know they will be held accountable to show how they met those goals or communicated to the management why the goals are not achievable. The absence of these conversations often leads to investment failure which could have been avoided by using some FREE online measurement tools.
Here are a few examples of the tools I teach business owners to use in a laptop workshop I designed to help business owners and managers take control of their social media results.
Let’s start with Facebook. Did you know that you can easily measure the numbers, sex, age, location, frequency and language of your fans. In addition you can see what posts you made that caused them to act or share your posts and which posts resulted in no action at all.
When it comes to your website and SEO, the best source of accurate information is using Google Analytics, a FREE application that can be used once your website is tagged with a piece of programming (provided by Google for free) on each page. You an use Google Analytics to measure a wealth of information right down to how your website or blog are being used including: unique users, pages viewed, time on the site, which keywords led visitors to your site, referral websites and much more.
Twitter can be measured using several tools from monitoring sites like Twitalyzer to Klout, Hootsuite and many other free tools depending on how you manage your online media.
Take control of your online results so you can measure the results of your Social Media and Website investments, join us for a SCORE (SBA) Laptop Bootcamp in Torrance on 9/19. I will be teaching business owners like yourself more about how to measure your online efforts and set goals for your staff or vendors in order to get more from your investments starting now. Workshop presenter, Liz Harsch, has been helping small and medium sized businesses make the most of their marketing investments since 1988. Her company, Tailor-Made Advertising is an Authorized SCORE workshop presenter and an awarded Constant Contact Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. For more information about her company, visit tailormadeadvertsing.com. To schedule her as a speaker for your organization, association or department, send her an email at tmademkt@verizon.net.
