Benchmarking Social Media Programs

We went through an exercise yesterday on my team to determine if we would or would not continue with a program we had piloted. It brought up some very good question around what our decision criteria is for investing in a marketing program. In order to decide if the program in question was a good investment with a possible strong return for us we broke out the decision criteria in a grid, then benchmarked it against what we know we can get by investing in our channels.

Here's the grid:

We listed our decision criteria along the Y axis and listed our possible investment opportunities along the X axis. The program in question is Program C. We piloted 2 other programs over the summer and wanted to compare return on those vs other opportunities. Social media is challenging to evaluate on a CPM. If I had a CPM I could measure it and figure out what my best investment is. But there isn't clear CPM in social media because it's not possible to give a value to an experience or engagement the way we can assign value to a display ad. I can measure engagement like 1000 RT's resulting from a Tweet from @MSWindows but it's impossible to compare that impression against a digital ad impression because the relevance and value for a consumer seeing a RT is likely higher than seeing a banner ad.

In our chart we evaluated the possible programs against our goals for social media efforts; build community, brand favorability, passalong, ability reach new consumers and hit our target audiences. I know I can do all those things in Facebook, YouTube and Twitter so any investment I make outside those channels need to be able to deliver the same value. I need to evaluate the investment against my opportunity cost of not running engagement ads in Facebook or sponsored video placements in YouTube with that money.

We came to the decision that we would run Program C (we are not continuing A or B). The main objective of the program is to drive fans to our social media channels. After the program is over I'll be able to measure the program's success against the cost of running engagement ads on Facebook. I have historic data that tells me how many fans I can drive from engagement ads which I will use to compare the programs. When I make a decision to run a program and spend some of my marketing dollars I am clear in the beginning what we are looking to achieve and what we are benchmarking against. This program will be benchmarked against engagement ads.

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