The ability to track and measure campaign performance is as important as the campaign itself. But how do you effectively measure the success or failure of campaigns run across various channels, using various mediums, as today’s marketing campaigns often are?
The best way to gain an accurate and complete view is to use social media analytics and reporting to understand every aspect of your campaign – before, during, and after.
But what does thorough campaign analysis consist of? What matters most, what indicates the need for immediate action, and what tells you whether you reached your target audience or not?
There are several metrics and methods you can use. Here are some key ones to include:
The Role of Sentiment in Campaign Analysis
We talk about sentiment monitoring within the scope of social media monitoring a lot – because it cannot be overstated. Social sentiment is the top qualifier for nearly every other metric you can measure. It’s the map that tells you which roads are clear, and which need rebuilding.
Sentiment tells you where to focus your efforts by highlighting consumers’ strongest emotions. For instance, Samsung, had a stellar showing at CES 2021 and sentiment is soaring right now at 75% positive on a scale of -100 to 100%. And anticipation of their Galaxy S21 along with their new partnership with K-pop sensation BTS is really driving traction right now.
This is information that Samsung can use to tweak their marketing campaigns and future partnerships – along with everything else.
In exactly the same way, brands must look at the way consumers talk about them, and the feelings expressed in these conversations, to understand whether a campaign is hitting its mark.
Use Consumer Conversations Online to Understand Campaign Impact
This is where sentiment becomes a layer informing other customer insight data.
Social conversation plus sentiment tells you where consumer attitudes are shifting. And this isn’t just about your brand, but about them, and everything they love talking about. Understanding what conversation your campaign messaging inspires is key to making smart next moves.
It also helps capture demographic segments you can get even more personal with. You can’t hit every individual consumer mark with a single message – so segment your audience and reach them accordingly.
Where conversations happen is another important factor. Be ready for surprises, and to shift campaign direction if your Tik Tok video isn’t getting the excitement you expected, or if your Instagram Reels take off like wildfire. The whole point is to know such things in real-time and be nimble enough to adapt and maximize your efforts wherever they’re succeeding.
Don’t forget about image analytics, as images account for much of the online conversation – sometimes in lieu of any words at all. You don’t want to miss out on this data because your listening tools only analyze text.
Finally, combine data from other sources – like sales, CRM, surveys and star reviews – for a comprehensive understanding of campaign effectiveness related to all Voice of the Customer (VoC) data. This may happen over time, as well as in the moment. Both measurements have their place.
The idea is to use both real-time and historical data to track owned, earned, and paid efforts against brand goals, and adjust as needed.
It’s easier to understand when you see how other brands have done it. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of examples to illustrate common use cases. Check them out below!
Conversation Volume
The simplest place to start is with overall volume of conversation. Is your campaign resulting in people talking about your brand? How much? And what is the nature of that conversation?
Using NetBase Enterprise, we see a spike in conversation on January 14th surrounding Samsung. This is the day they launched their new line of Galaxy S21 smartphones, and it definitely got people on social talking.
The internet was already awash in anticipation for the reveal since leaked photos were already driving conversation in December.
But looking at mentions, posts and potential impressions aren’t enough, however. Understanding what’s pushing sentiment is necessary to provide context to the larger discussion. Here’s a look at a few of the sentiment drivers that are turning up the conversational volume this past month.
That’s great for an overall picture of the topic but what about that huge spike on the 14th? Clicking on that area of the timeline allows us to zoom in for consumer insight research behind the surge. As you can see, words like @SamsungMobile, learn and #GalaxyxBTS are at the top of mentions – details worth noting that didn’t show up at the top of the overall discussion.
And digging in a little further we can see that regional divisions of Samsung are pushing the #GalaxyxBTS collaboration hashtag hard throughout SE Asia.
What People Are Saying
And these differences between what is driving a sub-topic, or campaign and the broader conversation underscores the importance of discerning who’s saying what, and when. Searching your social conversation by keyword in Quid Social reveals the words getting the most traction within your campaign.
Here’s what that looks like when we extracted the top keywords from a recent analysis we ran on top makeup and beauty brand, CoverGirl.
Not only does it tell us that outlast, free and color are the top trending keywords, but it also shows what topic clusters in which the keywords are getting the most use. It’s consumer intelligence like this that’s super useful for tweaking existing campaigns or designing the next one.
And precision is critical here as what people are talking about matters when evaluating a campaign. You might think you know what will appeal – but you have to leave room for the discovery of other ideas.
Other Interests Within Your Audience
But you don’t have to limit your analysis to the campaign as a topic. It’s always important to understand all aspects of conversation surrounding your brand – and to let that conversation inform the actions you take.
Boosting sentiment towards your brand is an endeavor that can be waged on many fronts. Using social listening to dig into the various interests of your brand’s audience offers ideas to speak to, even just periodically, to help touch the areas that resonated with your consumers.
For instance, digging into the interests of social media users talking about Popeyes reveals that many fans of the brand are also pet lovers, as you can see below.
And this is an instance of an interest that’s easy to capitalize on as Popeye’s Instagram shows. Peppered throughout are posts including pictures of cute dogs like the ones below.
It’s posts like these that are super simple yet show the brand making an effort to resonate with various consumer interests. And the best part? Watching the consumer love grow over time in your social media sentiment analysis.
Demographic Distinctions
The best way to understand consumers’ hearts is through psychographic information, as illustrated above. The attitudes, opinions, and behaviors of social consumers tell brands how to relate to them on a human level.
But that doesn’t mean demographics don’t factor into the equation as well. This is often where you’ll first see your audience isn’t quite what you expected. Whether it’s noting that World Cup fans are primarily focused in the U.S., U.K., and South Africa, or that Comic Con’s audience is 45% women, you need to know.
From there you can look deeper to learn what attracts each group specifically, and segment further. But first you have to know they exist.
Track Social Analytics Before, During and After the Campaign
Campaign analysis isn’t something that only happens after a marketing initiative has run its course, as if it’s a separate entity. Instead, campaign analysis is simply an extension of social media content analysis, with campaign-focused parameters.
Before you launch any marketing program, you need to understand the lay of the land. That’s where your all-the-time social media data analytics comes in, telling you where there’s audience interest in certain topics, trends, etc.
This is the information you use to build a campaign with predictive social media analytics, rather than guessing at what might work. If you take your social media and data analytics seriously, you should have a pretty accurate idea of what will work.
Still, nothing is guaranteed, so you must continue tracking results throughout your campaign to be sure you’re getting the reaction you anticipated and desired. If you are, great! Keep going.
If not, look to your social listening and sentiment analysis tools to tell you how to adjust for a strong finish.
And after your campaign is over, is that it? Not at all. You should continue to track the results of your campaign to understand any lingering online chatter, calculate the effect of your campaign on your goals – i.e., conversation volume, engagement, sales, etc.
For example, we recently covered 5 Branded Promotions On TikTok That Took Off in which we highlighted recent influencer campaigns that hit the mark with fans. And since dancing is the thing to do on Tik Tok, KFC jumped in on the action creating their own dance challenge – #DoTheColonel.
It beckoned users to showcase their best “colonel moves” by following a short dance routine. The campaign received 216 million video views, 53,000 entries and an impressive 12.44% UGC rate.
And in digging into the intel surrounding KFC campaigns, we explored others such as their recent mini movie, “A Recipe for Seduction” starring Mario Lopez. The short film reverberated with fans – and with campaign hits stacking up back-to-back, it’s obvious that KFC is diligently mining their campaign intel and capitalizing on what resonates with their base.
Here’s a look in Quid’s news and blogs dataset at how quickly their short film gained attention. Coloring by sentiment shows the majority of the conversation in green indicative of heavily positive media sentiment surrounding the endeavor.
And that’s not all though. When you’re analyzing your campaign when all is said and done, be sure to measure the differences between the social and media responses. By creating a dashboard using Netbase News it’s easy to break down campaign performance side by side using brand topics and categories as we did here with Popeyes now famous chicken sandwich.
Things on social media can and do change quickly, so you should always be monitoring results. And when the time comes for a periodic social media audit, campaign performance should be part of your evaluation as well.
How Is Intent to Purchase Affected?
If sales are a campaign objective – and ultimately, they always are – you want to know your marketing is creating that drive in your audience. Luckily, social media analytics offers that view, along with everything else you can measure.
In fact, you can track every part of your sales funnel from brand awareness and perception, to intent to buy, actual purchase, customer service, and consumer loyalty via social analytics tools.
And all the rest of your data can be combined with your social media listening software for a full spectrum understanding of your customers and prospects at every stage.
This is the value of campaign analysis – and of social media tracking analytics overall. Every business decision is supported by the insights you uncover, and every business endeavor can be measured along the way.
So put campaign analysis to the test if you haven’t already. The only way to lose is by opting out.
This has been part 3 of our Social Media Analytics Guide for 2021, designed to keep you in-the-know on the tools, metrics, and skills necessary to compete in an increasingly global arena.
Read the other parts of this comprehensive series by clicking below:
- What is Social Media Analytics and Why Is it Important?
- What Is Social Media Monitoring?
- What Is Social Campaign Analysis?
- What Is Social Sentiment Analysis?
- What Is Social Listening & Why Is It Important?
- What Is Image Analytics?
- What Is Audience Analysis?
Want to learn more? We’ll walk you through a demo of our campaign analysis tools. Just reach out!
