Social Strategy: Media Activation Guide by KPI

Marketers looking to increase brand awareness and engage with consumers have various media activation tools at their disposal. From pay-per-click (PPC) and social media ads to programmatic retargeting and video advertising, countless social strategies are worth trying and even more key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their performance.

Here are some common social strategies, along with tips on how to optimize your efforts, measure your campaigns, and analyze the results to provide insights that improve your efforts each time. 

Why paid matters

Unlike organic social media strategies, which rely on strong writing, design, and community management skills, paid social media strategies require more technical knowledge. These skills include ad optimization, A/B testing, audience targeting, and performance tracking. 

Paid media placements are vital to a successful social strategy because they efficiently and exponentially expand your campaign reach while giving you more precise control over to whom, how, and when you market to consumers on their buying journey. Here are some examples.

Align CTAs and behaviors

Paid social strategies can be tailored to support key initiatives and drive specific actions. Whether launching a new line of products, promoting in-store sales, or simply educating consumers about your products’ features and benefits, you can create the second-front push behind the behavior you want consumers to perform by choosing the right call to action and platform optimizations.

Expand the reach of influencers

Influencer marketing can be an effective tool for reaching a creator’s audience, but repromoting their content can expand that reach exponentially beyond those initial followers. The average post on an Instagram account only reaches 1-10% of the followers organically, and to increase action, you must increase awareness. Paid boosting guarantees the content will be seen by more people in a more targeted and optimized way. In addition to boosted posts, you can repurpose influencer content for out-of-home placements, e-newsletters, blogs, and in-store activations.

Target audiences with greater precision

Promoting a local event to a broad audience or a niche product to all shoppers does little to attract consumers who are actually likely to participate. With paid social, marketers can hone in on the most relevant shoppers by targeting based on age, geography, interests, or income.

Through partnerships with third-party audience providers, IZEA can further identify and target your brand’s audience based on lifestyle and behavioral triggers beyond what the social platforms can target. Ultimately, this allows your brand to reach consumers who are lower funnel and higher in consideration – and more likely to make a purchase.

Improve ROI

Stop wasting money on broad campaigns simply to gather a few sales crumbs. Optimizing your brand’s (or influencers’) content and delivery with paid media amplification maximizes your campaign investment and success against your KPIs, improving your ROI. 

Expand your assets’ shelf-life

Creating assets—or paying creators to make content—can chip away at your resources and budget. By reusing your posts to retarget consumers, you’ll lengthen the life of your content from days to months—or even years. 

Aligning Your Activation + Campaign KPIs

As you begin looking for ways to align your media activation with campaign KPIs, it’s important to recognize that a blanket cost per mille (CPM) strategy isn’t yield the results you want. Sure, a CPM campaign may appear the most cost-effective, but the digital marketing strategy to earn those impressions can add up quickly, and rates can fluctuate with the season.

Instead, consider your brand’s goals and objectives for each campaign and devise a paid social strategy that specific key performance indicators can measure. Here are some examples:

Awareness

Trying to boost brand awareness and gain new users? Use social strategies that offer a broad reach and solid user engagement and can be measured with basic KPIs on any platform. While reach is about visibility and getting your brand’s name and products or services in front of unfamiliar consumers, engagement is about interaction (e.g., likes, shares, comments, clicks). The higher the engagement rate, the more of an indication that followers trust the content and find it entertaining, valuable, or helpful.

Education

Brands looking to educate consumers about their offerings, industry, or features and benefits of a specific product or service can look at cost per view (CPV) and video view rates (VVRs). The metric measures how many people watch a video and for how long. Several factors will affect your VVR, such as the content itself, your reach and target audience, and your industry, but there’s much to learn about how long consumers watch and when they drop off.

Conversion

Sales teams are always eager to see conversion KPIs because it often means commissions in their pockets. But marketers can look at click-through rates (CTRs) and conversions (e.g., purchases, downloads, newsletter sign-ups, webinar registrations) to determine if their campaigns drive action from their target audience. If CTRs are high but conversions are low, it could be an issue with product pricing or stock issues, lack of reviews, slow load times, or even defective landing pages.

Enhancements to Consider

Beyond running PPC ads or boosting social media posts based on geographic locale, some enhancements can improve your social strategy before, during, and after campaigns. Consider some of these supplemental ideas:

Third-party custom audiences

Regardless of the quality and relevance of your content, it will be virtually useless if it doesn’t reach the right target audience. Consider using third-party audiences to deliver personalized content to a well-matched, segmented cohort.

Using curated data sets of characteristics based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and preferred platforms and devices, these lists can help drive action, increase conversions, and improve your campaign ROI. 

Marketers have options for obtaining these third-party custom audiences: They can buy them from data marketplaces or create their own list by uploading an existing customer list and generating a “look-alike” audience.

e-Commerce add-to-cart integrations

Marketers looking to increase sales and improve customers’ experience on their e-commerce store can use add-to-cart (ATC) integrations. These tools connect customers’ online shopping carts to relevant functions like payment processing, inventory management, and shipping. 

For consumers, the benefits include reduced frustration, increased transparency, and fewer calls to customer service. Brands benefit by decreasing workloads, expediting sales, increasing customer lifetime value, and reducing customer service involvement. 

Sales lift studies

To determine the impact of each campaign on sales, marketers can rely on sales lift studies. These pieces of research measure campaign sales during a specific time frame to determine the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising efforts. 

Using methods from pre-post measurement and A/B testing to controlled experiments and attribution tracking, these sales uplift studies can account for other factors to compare sales accurately had the promotion not been launched.

Not all marketing teams have someone with the knowledge, skill, or time necessary to develop a robust social strategy. Consider outsourcing your brand’s media activation efforts to an experienced digital marketing company or invest in a platform that offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help you launch, manage, measure, and analyze campaigns to maximize your social strategy efforts to scale. If done well, the ROI will leave you asking why you didn’t do it sooner.