More and more marketers are turning to digital platforms for advertising and promotional purposes. However, with their transition to digital, they’re often times lost with what to measure and how it relates to their business. In this post, I’ll highlight a few ways to effectively measure a digital audience.
Step 01: Defining a goal.
Just like traditional marketing, the first step is to define a goal. What are you hoping to accomplish from your digital media initiatives? Do you want people to talk about your product? Do you want people to buy your product? Do you want people to promote your product? Do you want people to use your product? Once you’ve decided on a goal, stick with it and modify it only if necessary.
Step 02: Tools.
Good tools are important. However, there are numerous tools that can help you track your digital audience. Just like the number of Twitter applications, the space is cluttered with good and bad tools. The following is a list of selective tools that we’ll be using to track your digital audience:
- Viralheat: Social media measurement tool which presents data through a dashboard
- Bit.ly: Link tracking
- Feedbruner: Email subscriptions and RSS readers
- HootSuite: Twitter client
Step 03: What to measure.
There are way too many metrics in the digital audience space. However, we’ll focus on 3 crucial ones:
- Twitter: Twitter’s potential is tremendous and is used by tons of people on a daily basis. It’s great for niche content as well as for mainstream content.
- Facebook: Your brand should have a presence on the world’s largest social network. If you take a look at your favorite companies, you’ll notice that they spend a good amount of time promoting their Facebook page.
- RSS/Email: Whether you’re in the content business or not, you need to have a content presence on the web. You can use this to market your services, sell your expertise or talk about your industry. You can measure how many people read your blog or subscribe to your content via RSS / email subscriptions.
Step 04: Measuring your audience.
- General buzz: One of the reasons we selected Viralheat is because it allows nearly everyone to track their social media presence. You can sign-up for a free trial and see for yourself. It takes less than 10 minutes to setup and a few more minutes to gather information.
- Link tracking: It’s important to know how many people are actually clicking on your link and it’s crucial to use that same link across all your social media profiles. Promoting your site on Facebook? Use Bit.ly. Promoting your product on Twitter? Use Bit.ly. The service is free and provides great analytics.
- Facebook: Every company should have a Facebook fan page. It takes just a few minutes to setup and allows you to interact with your customers in an intimate manner on a platform that they’re familiar with.
- Twitter: While Viralheat is a good platform to track Twitter mentions and buzz, you should use HootSuite to schedule future posts and manage multiple profiles. Often times, your audience may be in a different time zone than you. HootSuite can also push out your message to multiple social networks, including Facebook.
