Will Relationship-Based Metrics Prove More Important?

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Will Relationship-Based Metrics Prove More Important?

Oct

By Alisha Paul, Director, Marketing & Social Media, ICUC Moderation Services

Marketers who are trying to increase budgets are working toward measuring social media investments in different ways, proving that relationship-based metrics may in fact relate back to the bottom line.

Companies are setting aside a greater percentage of their marketing budgets for social media according to a September 2011 report by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association called CMO Survey. The continuing trend says that as of August 2011 marketers were spending an average of 7.1 per cent of their marketing budgets on social media, and planned to increase this number to 10 per cent over the next year. Within five years, marketers expect this number to reach 17.5 per cent.

However, if we look back to past CMO Survey’s we can see that social media budgets are increasing at a slower rate than initially expected. In August 2010, marketers reported social media budgets at 5.9 per cent and expected them to reach 9.9 per cent within the following 12 months, nearly three percentage points higher than actual August 2011 levels.

To prove the success of social media outreach, answer the constant and looming ROI question and of course, keep their budgets up, marketers are looking at different metrics which are more customer-relationship-based than financial.

The top five social media metrics being used by marketers are: hits/visits/page views, repeat visits, number of followers or friends, conversion rates from visitor to buyer and buzz indicators, otherwise known as web mentions. While there metrics are definitely measurable businesses are still struggling to show how they translate to dollar revenue.

Relationship-based metrics such as these may actually prove more important given the opportunity to change socially engaged customers into loyal, repeat buyers who share information about their favourite brands via their own social networks, as well as word-of-mouth.

Posted in Featured, Social Media