Learning who your advocates are and starting a relationship with them is the most important thing.

Everything should lead back to sales if it can.

So you need to know what the definition of sales is for your organization.

Is it a specific product or service? Or is it getting people to an event?

Whatever it is, you should tie that to your efforts.

Once you have that defined, then you calculate your costs for each of your marketing pieces. Add them altogether and that’s your marketing spend.

Take your marketing sales (return), subract your marketing investment, and divide by the investment.

So if your return is $30,000 and you spent $10,000 on your marketing, you would have an ROI of 2. But if your return was $15,000 on the same spend amount, you would have an ROI of .5. You want to try and maintain an ROI over 1.

Now this is a little different for us in the dairy industry when we don’t have a specific product to sell in a specific area – we are beholden to all dairy products.

So how would I measure our success?

I believe it is through Share of Voice and our Advocate Program.

Consumers have thousands of choices to make daily.

What is Share of Voice?

Quantitative: This is an overall number evaluation. i.e. if milk is mentioned among 10 times per every 100 references to our market (including competitors over the same time period), the share of voice would be 10%.

Qualitative: This is a quality analysis of the number evaluation placements. i.e. if milk gets mentioned in the NYT or Washington Post or CNN/Fox News, then it gets scored higher than if it was mentioned by a blogger website. The reach of the Tier 1 is much higher than the Tier 2 website.

Tone: Was it positive or negative? This is difficult to do for machine analysis because many things we say when we use negative terms actually could mean we really like it. i.e. I could kill for some ice cream.

There are lots of things that could influence Share of Voice.

I believe that if we create more online advocates, we could help positively influence our Share of Voice to the positive.

And if there’s more Share of Voice to the positive, we could increase sales.

But remember this is only one of things influencing our Consumer Confidence efforts.

So I would focus my metrics on building advocates.

Who are our advocates?

People that love dairy products and don’t mind voicing their favorable opinion of them. We know that many people love our products – milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, ice cream and whey. Good stuff, right?

Many people probably don’t know, however, that there are lots of people out there voicing their opinions about how much they dislike all of these things. Does it have an effect on sales? Most definitely. Especially as younger generations turn to the web to get information on the things they think they should be consuming and liking. Check out this report from Zuberance about the importance of advocates in your marketing.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Your CRM tool is your favorite marketing tool when it comes to your advocates. It can hold their contact information and the notes on your conversations with them. It can track your interactions with them whether these be via email or social media.

So the main metric you want to be tracking in the CRM is “are you adding more advocates with their correct information?”

There are lots of ways to get an advocate’s information into the CRM and we’ll discuss that in another post.

Email Marketing (Newsletter/blasts)
Email marketing is still one of the most efficient and effective ways to market. So this would be my next best metric when it comes to outreach for share of voice. Email metrics I would track are:

• Sends: How many emails are you sending?
• Click-Throughs: Are advocates clicking on the Call-to-Action in the specific email?

Website Stats
Of course this is your home on the Internet – is it doing what it can to capture those advocates that visit?

• Email Collection – The main Call-to-Action is getting them into your CRM database so you can email them when you need to.
• Traffic – Your web traffic helps see how often people are visiting and what they are doing once there. More visitors are great but look to make sure they are spending quality time.
• Traffic Referrals – Where are people coming from? Google, direct, email, social media? You can measure all of this and should.

Social Media
Social media is still a bright and shining star in communication vehicles. You need to be there because people expect it especially to answer questions and keep them entertained with humor, recipes and insights into our products and how they are produced.

• Click-Throughs to CRM – Are you engaging the advocates, and creating a stronger relationships through email and social media?
• Engagement – How often are they sharing, commenting and liking your content?
• Follows/Likes – How many people are liking your Facebook, following your Twitter profile or following your Pinterest and/or Instagram profiles?

So these are a few things that I would be interested in reporting out. I think it’s dangerous to really push things like impressions and reach (especially the numbers coming from Facebook and Twitter) because they aren’t going to be at the same level as traditional media reach (TV, radio, newspaper) but those are overblown as well.

Stick to what you have – to me, this means growing your number of advocates and getting them in your Word of Mouth Advocacy Program to influence positive Share of Voice.  I believe this will lead to more sales.

So am I missing some metrics here? I would be happy to add more.

Love this infographic from Jay Baer and Zuberance.