Strategic Evaluation

Module 4 - Instructor Blog Post

Avinash Kaushik, author from our Module 1 readings, said, “Digital analytics is the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your business and the competition to drive continual improvement of the online experience that your customers and potential customers have which translates to your desired outcomes (both online and offline).”

Today consumers are in increasing control, and can start their purchase journey at any point. It is important to analyze the customer, not the channel or the device. Businesses need accessible, reliable and realistic data to understand the customer.

THEN - The funnel metaphor (Harvard Business Review, 2011)

For years, marketing assumed that consumers started with a large number of potential brands in mind and methodically narrowed their choices until they’d decided which one to buy. After purchase, their relationship with the brand typically focused on the use of the product or service itself.

NOW – The consumer decision journey (Harvard Business Review, 2011)

Rather than systematically narrowing their choices, consumers add and subtract brands from a group under consideration during an extended evaluation phase. After purchase, they often enter into an open-ended relationship with the brand, sharing their experience with it online.

Creating a measurement plan

While some of you may have taken Social Media Marketing or other social media courses that touch on planning, it would be remiss of us not to touch analytics as a part of social media planning.

The reality is that analytics tend to be thought about in relation to evaluation, and where does evaluation come in planning – at the end! Except not really.

The idea for planning is to set a course or a road map if you will.  In an ideal world, where ideas always come to fruition, the plan would be 100 per cent solid and it would always come to fruition exactly as planned.  I heard a recent statistic that only about four per cent of babies are born on their estimated due date.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this also applied to the delivery accuracy of plans in their true form.  Four per cent even sounds a bit high for large organizations and complex projects.

In any case, the plan is a road map.  It tends to be written as a linear document with evaluation at the end but nothing about it is linear.

Let’s just think about this – what did you take into consideration or think about as you worked on Assignment #1 and #2?

• Opportunities for your organization?
• Barriers to implementation (resources, relationships, permission, timelines, etc.)?
• Target audiences?
• Key content?
• Tactics?
• Tools?

For many of us, we were taught to plan starting from a desired outcome or the goal that we want to achieve.  But how many of us actually can start here?

What makes sense in planning is to start with what you know to be true, and to build from there. 

If our minds start with what is possible then start there.  If our minds start with what is measureable then start there.  If it is target audiences then start there.

The trick is to pay attention to how everything fits together.  If you are absolutely set on a target audience being key to your organization’s business objectives then you may find that your opportunities or barriers are different, and the same can be said with your tactics.  For example, sentiment analysis will have more weight if you’re strongly tuned into people connecting with and sharing your content.  Whereas ROI might be really important if resources are a barrier and you need to really demonstrate to a particular group the merit of using Twitter to see a five per cent increase in sales.  (Although we’d argue that ROI is a poor measure on its own because it can’t actually determine if Twitter was the true reason for a sales increase).  In any case, a social media evaluation plan won’t come together in a purely linear form.

It will come together as it makes sense for you to put it together and then it is your job to make sure that everything in the plan aligns.  Everything in the plan should intuitively relate to the other elements of the plan.  When you read the elements of the target audience it should clearly connect to your business objectives and your approach to performance indicators and your analysis and evaluation.

Here is a breakdown of steps to creating a social media evaluation plan. Be sure to also reference the Social Media Evaluation Template in eClass as a guide as well. 

Step 1: Document business objectives

        - Why do we exist? It is important to understand the goals and objectives of your business.

Step 2: Identify purpose

         - How does our social media presence support why we exist?

Step 3: Choose performance indicators

         - How do we know if we are making progress on your goals and objectives?

Step 4: Choose target audience

           - Who are we trying to reach to help us achieve our goal(s) and objectives and why?

Step 5: Choose evaluation methodology and tools

         - What method(s) and tools will we use to identify whether we are making progress on your goals and objectives and why?

Step 6: Choose metrics to watch

         - What metrics will we explore to support our evaluation methodology and why?

Step 7: Analyze and Evaluate

          - What do we understand about the progress we are making on our goal(s) and objectives?

Step 8: Make recommendations for continuous improvement

       - What do we recommend as adjustments to our social media approach or next steps and why?

References:

Harvard Business Review (2011). The Consumer Decision Journey. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2010/11/using-customer-journey-maps-to/