The 6 Rules for #DataDriven Social Marketers

By  Jan Rezab, CEO Social Bakers

The only way to grow your marketing potential today is by using data to make informed choices. Here are the 6 things you can’t forget.

Jan shared the first 6 rules of #DataDriven marketing. Here is a  bit more details about each idea:

1. Data must be connected with business outcomes

Reporting on social media marketing shouldn’t come down to counting Fans or Likes with no logic behind your actions. Connect the data to what social really drives in – sales, increase of brand awareness, website traffic, or other real business growth areas coming from your investment in social.

2. Not creating data for data’s sake – create smart data

Don’t just report numbers because you need to send a report. Compare data at large scales, and find the patterns that show how people are really interacting differently with content over time. It’s always better to have smart data than inflated data. It’s about viewing the right data.

3. Don’t keep data in silos

#DataDriven social marketers bring everything together to make a comprehensive picture of how social drives activities in different parts of your organization. That means making sure that your whole organization is aligned on social media data! From Content to R&D, you need to talk about how social data can inform every aspect of your business and make it smarter.

Just look at paid media, which is an incredibly business-relevant metric. For brands, Facebook has become a paid channel.

But marketers need to know how to report on their paid media. There are 166 social ad metrics for Facebook alone! It is essential for marketers to be able to pick the most relevant ones for their campaigns, draw insights from them, and show the rest of their company so that everyone can work together with those insights.

LEGO is a great example of how taking data out of silos can make campaigns more successful for the entire organization. When LEGO produced video ads, they looked at video retention data and found that YouTube video viewership dropped exponentially after the first 5 seconds.

Then they used that data to inform the production process by placing CTAs earlier in their videos, and then counted only the views that made it to their CTA. That’s smart, #DataDriven marketing in action.

4. Empower your boss to see quantifiable value of social

Right now, social marketers are using social data primarily to report. That’s great, but it’s not enough. This is where opening up data silos comes in handy – when you can show your CEO that social is being used to drive a specific number of objectives from other areas. Show them the percentage of applications received by an HR department that recruits on social, an increase in purchasing intent by users of your new mobile app, the average lead quality sourced from social – your team will be given more resources, and the whole organization will benefit.

5. Understand the background of each metric

Too often, marketers will make business decisions based on metrics they don’t fully understand. After all, a “view” doesn’t mean someone has seen your whole video- it’s a 3-second view. And this happens across so many metrics – everyone wants to see their reach increase, for instance, but don’t consider what goes into reach when they calculate it. You need to clearly understand what’s behind each and every metric in order to know how to accurately report your results and go forward using them.

6. Insist on a business case for social activities

When your CEO asks you to “Show them the money,” you’ve got to have a business objective you’re achieving with your request. That means that you can’t just be trying to hit a certain benchmark on social, you’ve got to be able to show the monetary value of hitting that benchmark. Earn a seat at the decision-making table.