Determining the success of a B2B social media campaign is often equally crucial as it is problematic for B2B marketers.

To identify and maintain success, social media strategies should remain fluid and adapt to meet the changing habits and needs of their target audience.

Platforms are no exception to this rule and continue to change and evolve. The pandemic has proven to be a catalyst for change in the way prospective clients use and interact with social media, with LinkedIn coming out on top.

However, to fully take advantage of a trend such as this, B2B marketers need to first identify the successes and failures of their social media campaigns to optimise their effectiveness.

By measuring campaigns, marketers can prove the worth of their social media and refocus their budgets to get the best results from their campaigns.

Establish Goals and The Desired Results From Your Campaign:

An essential part of any campaign is first identifying its objectives so that strategies can be developed to meet them.

The role of an effective social media campaign is different for each company and its desired audience but typically succeeds in:

• Decreasing costs
• Increasing brand awareness and sales
• Increasing engagement
• Making improvements to the overall customer experience

Without established goals, determining if the results from a social media campaign are indicative of success becomes difficult.

Focus on and use what you want to achieve to fuel your social media campaign strategy and assess its efficiency.

Define and Track Valuable Metrics:

Measuring the ROI of B2B social media campaigns is a complicated task that can be simplified by identifying key metrics that demonstrate a campaign’s accomplishments.

1 Reach

Assessing your reach is a great starting point to determining the success of your campaigns, if no one is finding your content, it’s time to change your tactics.

Reach can be quantified by:

• Comments on your Youtube videos
• Connections on LinkedIn
• Facebook page likes
• Followers on Twitter
• Video views on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
• Views and Subscribers to your Youtube channel
• Site visitors

These can all be tracked with analytics reports provided by social media platforms themselves or by using third-party services.

2 Engagement

Accurately measuring engagement is the next step in identifying the effectiveness of a social media strategy.

Successfully driving engagement relies on paying attention to different metrics that are specific to each B2B marketer and the goals of their social media campaign.

Engagement metrics may include:

• Link clicks on social media posts
• Twitter interaction; Retweets, Mentions or Direct Messages
• Facebook and LinkedIn comments
• Comments, Likes, and Shares of your Youtube videos
• Comments on blog posts
• Earned media posts: client reviews, ratings, and recommendations

Clicks and click-through rate (CTR) in particular can act as benchmarks for improving your content’s performance by indicating which pieces of content are attracting more visitors than others.

Measuring click rate and how clicks are being driven can be facilitated with attribution models (covered below).

3 Share of voice (SOV)

Share of voice in the context of social media refers to a measure of the market your brand owns and how your campaigns are performing in contrast to your competitors.

As a result, SOV can be instrumental in evaluating social media ROI.

Share of voice can be improved by tracking both positive and negative mentions of your brand as well as specific keyword traffic.

By regularly collecting this data, B2B marketers can improve their SOV by staying active, creating, and sharing engaging content.

This is key to ensuring a brand stands out and is represented effectively across social media platforms.

4 Conversion rates

Conversion rates are typically best based on interaction with your proprietary website and content via links from social media posts.

These interactions are indicative of how many visitors have taken the next step in the lead generation funnel and how proficient your content is in driving this process.

Google Analytics offers the ability to track conversions with goal tracking by keeping an eye on each conversion activity you have available.

Such as:

• Content downloads
• Form completions (for gated content or lead generation)
• Online sales
• Phone-in leads
• Webinar registrations and direct downloads

Campaign tracking in Google Analytics is another useful tool for identifying data for conversion by building trackable links for social media posts.

Translate Data Into Measurable Success:

After establishing key metrics, implement tactics that allow you to use the data you have collected to improve the success of your campaign and strategies:

1 Combine CRM data with your social media data

Social media campaigns and interactions with potential leads can enrich your CRM platform with valuable insights.

Social media data can be used to create strategies for leads generation and opportunities, by recording and learning from engagement with prospects.

Social activity with clients can also be documented for future lead generation and social media tactics.

2 Identify the value of traffic

Not all traffic from your social media will be equal in value.

Determining the value of traffic during a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign is a proficient way of avoiding wasting budget on ineffectual channels.

Measuring how many visitors your campaign brings in versus the overall cost of a campaign can be used to determine the cost of conversion.

Additional insights from tracking visitor’s interests and demographics can identify the most profitable platforms and strategies for targeting the right businesses and executives.

3 Implement attribution models

Attribution models allow you to ensure that your social media campaign is working by assigning value to each point of engagement with a prospect and crediting how they found you.

As such, attribution models measure the weight and success of different touchpoints so that strategies can be altered and improved.

Models can be built to focus on first touch, last touch, or multi-touch interactions that map a client’s journey towards making a purchase.

Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) can add extra detail to attribution models by allowing you to add tags at the end of a URL. This means you can track link clicks associated with specific campaigns, by seeing where they came from and what type of traffic it is.

In this way, attribution models leverage social traffic monitoring to help marketers assess how social media is driving interaction with content.

4 Translate social data into top-of-funnel marketing results

Tracking and using social data is essential to identifying correlations between social media metrics and successful top-of-funnel campaigns.

Measuring interaction with social media against performance data such as sustained sales, and on-site conversions can help to establish successful strategies and social media ROI.

Conversion goals in Google Analytics can be set for specific landing pages to evaluate traffic coming in from different social platforms.

As mentioned above, using UTM tracking is an effective strategy for fulfilling these goals. Additionally, UTMs can be used to link social media efforts to top-of-funnel results by recording traffic sources and effective keywords.

This is another proficient mode of assessment that can help to define social media success and guarantee its effectiveness in driving other performance goals.

Adapt and Refine:

To ensure a campaign’s effectiveness, it is imperative to be flexible in your approach and make constant adjustments based on feedback.

1 Compare social media performance with your other marketing channels

By comparing interactions with your various social media platforms against your other marketing channels, you can learn more about how leads behave and respond to different types of content.

For example, how your social traffic converts can indicate how much nurturing leads require and how effective your resources are in attracting them.

To optimise your social strategy, touch base with other marketers and departments in your organisation to ensure that your social media efforts are calibrated to achieve company-wide goals.

Analysing all of your channels together allows for you to properly assess social media ROI and implement changes as you see fit.

2 Run creative tests

Testing social media efforts is key to developing a successful campaign and keeping it fresh.

Start with a broad hypothesis that aims to prove or disprove specific assumptions.

Your hypothesis can then be narrowed down as testing progresses to measure the performance of important campaign features.

Testing aligns both the creative and marketing teams by focusing their joint efforts with data.

This helps to identify effective strategies and promote inter-departmental relations and overall efficiency.

3 Perfect and polish content

With 72% of marketers using social media to promote and distribute their content, it’s important to identify which types of content are optimal for your audience to stand out from the noise.

Prioritising content that informs and appeals to prospective clients is a solid strategy for boosting your B2B social media campaign’s ROI.

Optimised content promotes engagement and provides valuable data for making changes during campaigns or for future projects.

4 Actively research and build trust with clients

As previously mentioned, a solid understanding of prospects is the best way to empower your social media campaigns.

Carry out regular research of your target audience’s needs, common keywords, and what they respond the most to.

Use your content and publish on platforms your target demographic uses such as LinkedIn to build trust and relationships with clients that later encourage sales.

To Summarise

Be sure to make your social media campaign stand out by taking distinctive approaches to appeal to your specific audience.

Using your knowledge of potential clients in tandem with valuable metrics is an effective way to consistently adjust, perfect and measure the success of your social media campaign