Is voiceover tracking important? Last week Moises explained the process of rebranding Debbie Irwin Voiceovers and stated that we’re now in the marketing stage. But is it all working?
What Hansel & Gretel Taught Voiceover Actors
Why? Because tracking is especially important when you want to know how well a course of action you took is panning out. (No pun intended to those who know the root of “panning” in the romance languages.) So instead of bread crumbs, we assess our digital crumbs to get an idea of how we’re doing.
Everybody’s already onboard with social media. And the experts will tell you that your marketing efforts aren’t any good if you’re not tracking them. Questions abound. What should I post? Who’s my audience? Are they listening? Does any of this really matter???
A social media marketing strategy isn’t simply tossing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. (But frankly, there’s lots of pasta recently dubbed “performance art” as a consequence!) This is a science. And the key to understanding an experiment is analysis — hence we must track the results.
Truth be told, each of the major sites that we’re all on have analytic tools; and can provide a wealth of knowledge about your website — as long as you have someone who can interpret the data.
Tracking Software
Google Analytics is free, easy and an excellent place to start getting a sense of what visitors (new or returning) are doing when they come to your site.
Google Alerts is a great resource for keeping track of when your business and your clients are mentioned online. Simply set-up any number of Google Alerts for a variety of names and keywords, and then the results get emailed to you as they are generated.
Google Trends is another tool for social media marketing. It allows you to hone in on your long-tag keywords so that the language you are using in your online marketing efforts, blogs, and social media conversations is relevant to trending searches. It’s also helpful to see how a keyword or phrase is performing over time, letting you know if it is the right season to be talking about a specific topic.
But let’s pause for a moment and talk about what most of us are familiar with: Facebook likes, Twitter followers and retweets, blog subscribers and comments and Zamtistics listens and downloads of our demos; customer engagement and brand awareness are where it’s at.
Klout is a tool that tracks your social influence within all of your networks. Simply attach the app to your social profiles and the tracking begins. Klout measures social media engagement, and provides a visual map of influencers based on your connections to help you determine who you should be talking to and tailoring your content toward.
Understanding Voiceover Tracking Data
Entrepreneur Magazine makes this critical point that while all of the data that you’re aggregating
“…such as the number of social followers or social mentions — can be a good indicator of overall brand awareness. It provides little information about your ability to draw targeted leads to your site.
Instead, use an attribution program to tell you whether your social media campaigns result in positive leads or conversion growth.
Programs such as Marketo or Convertro measure how many social interactions, web page visits, or email opens it takes before one of your prospects becomes a customer. (Am I using these? No! These programs are more for the big guns, but worth mentioning here.)
Depending on the program, they may even assign a relative weight to each action so that you can see what kind of role every interaction played in the eventual conversion. This data will tell you if your social campaigns are performing effectively, it’ll show you how better to allocate your activities and marketing resources in the future.”
Why Track?
This is a lot to process for a small business, but the idea is still valid: what’s the net of all this social NETworking? According to Hootsuite, “…whether you’re using Hootsuite’s built-in Google Analytics report or performing link tracking directly on Google Analytics’ platform, always be tracking. As a social media manager, it’s important to prove the value of social media for the business, and one of the best ways to do this is to keep a record of your social media efforts.
URL parameters are key to link tracking, and they are an essential tool to prove social media’s effects on marketing goals like website traffic, leads generated, and sales.”
If you’d like to get a more in depth look at how to track your performance, I’ve added links to a few resources below that will help you and your brand #BeHeard
Resources
http://financialsocialmedia.com/track-social-media-performance/#sthash.TY4JxE4t.dpuf
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244669
http://financialsocialmedia.com/track-social-media-performance/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-url-parameters-for-link-tracking/
Next week we’ll discuss the importance of your demo(s).