In conversation with Deanne Napurano, Creative Director, Writer, Editor

Perhaps I’m being a little too esoteric with this line, but that’s even part of the point. We are all inundated with information and data. News flows constantly. We can dip our toe in the news river or dive in head first just by looking at our phones or our watches. Wherever we get our stories, the newsfeed continuously scrolls from critical global events to celebrity fashion to laundry-folding hacks to cute puppy videos and back again. Some marketers’ ads look like they could be personal videos of a friend of a friend giving you earnest advice on vegetable storage bags, lash-lengthening gels, or gaming apps. As a marketer, how can you hope to be noticed in the midst of so very much? My thinking? Stay in your lane. Do you. Don’t meet the overwhelm. Know the problem you solve. Communicate it clearly, honestly. Know that your efforts represent something worthwhile for your optimal client…and tell that story. That’s enough. Be steady, authentic, and clear. In a world of overwhelm, being enough stands out.

Over the course of planning, we learn from our own efforts. As we begin to articulate goals, we learn. We learn about the possible paths toward fulfilling those goals; we learn as we ask ourselves What will success look like? and How can that success be measured? Planning uncovers obstacles and opportunities. Planning teaches. Because it’s ongoing and subject to strategy shifts and market influences, it will always require navigational tweaks (and sometimes even U-turns). Here are a few notes to consider when beginning to plan your social media activity.

Set general goals for your social media activity.

• Increase website traffic.
• Grow an audience.
• Increase engagement.
• Build brand awareness.
• Generate leads.

Set goals specific to your organization.

• Increase contact us form submissions.
• Increase whitepaper downloads.
• Attract your target audience to a special event.
• Increase registrants for a seminar or conference.
• Garner more donations.
• Attract more qualified applicants.
• Earn new business.
• Grow email list.
• Leverage as a real-time channel for improving customer service.
• Increase video viewership.

For each goal, use the SMART framework – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely – or another goal-setting framework to help determine, record, and track expectations and achievement in a document or a preferred software program.

What does success look like?

For each goal, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics (measurements) that will help show when that goal is reached.

General goal examples:

For a goal of growing social media audience, we would look to metrics that include:

• Follower count
• Impressions
• Post reach

For a goal of increasing website traffic, we would look to metrics that demonstrate conversion, like:

• Website analytics for social media referrals
•  Link clicks from social media post to website and/or blog

Look for correlations; ask questions.

In the two examples above, we would watch the numbers associated with each metric and their relationship to each post on social media.

• Do those numbers show more people have seen the post? Engaged positively or negatively with a particular post?
• Was that a positive performance based on our goals?
• Should we increase or decrease a certain type of post? At a certain time?

Watching the metrics assigned to these general goals tells us a lot. But increasing this kind of performance may not get customers, partners, or applicants close enough to the organization to begin the kind of conversation that leads to doing more of what your organization is built to do.

Specific goal example:

A goal of attracting more qualified applicants is an example of a social media goal designed to bring a segment of your audience closer to you, so close that you would be engaged in a transaction that supports your organization’s purpose. The metrics to measure the effectiveness of social media activity around this goal may include:

• Determining the criteria for qualified submissions
• Tracking the number of qualified applicants received daily and overlaying that with the timing of social media posts encouraging submission
• Tracking website analytics, click-throughs/referrals, post link clicks, and post-engagement metrics

We have to go outside the metrics provided by social media platforms or social media management software to understand the full story.

Beyond metrics: Listening for voice-of-consumer (VoC) data

• Social media metrics can help bolster decisions that have been made based on more traditional methods of collecting feedback from your audiences
  • surveys
  • feedback forms
  • roundtable discussions
  • interviews
  • process-related comments
  • content-related comments
• Be wary of relying solely on social media metrics to change course in business or communications strategy
  • does social media capture all of your optimal audience?
  • does your optimal audience use social media exclusively for its news and communications?
• Use social media to listen and learn beyond your own posts’ metrics
  • audit social media posts for topics relevant to your organization’s offering
  • audit your industry’s thought-leaders for their hot topics
• Despite its popularity, social media may not reach all of your market

What are you learning from your social media efforts?

Common social media terms simplified

New to social media?

Considering advertising on social media?

I have been writing professionally for more than thirty years. For most of that time I’ve written communications for organizations whose teams seek engagement with educators, innovators, healthcare providers, patients, and students: a wide range, for sure, and an often-challenging one. With any writing assignment, I strive to bring the audience closer. That’s what successful communication does; it fosters a bond. Today, that bond-building communication is sometimes labeled storytelling. You’ve likely seen the word in the LinkedIn profiles of some highly regarded marketing gurus (or perhaps you’ve used it yourself). It sounds almost simplistic, easy, a child’s activity, but the act of storytelling is very far from inventing dreamlike tales about a product or service that the protagonist can use to slay the proverbial dragon. It’s serious writing that opens the door for your optimal audience to see themselves benefiting from a relationship with you. Although the language we use to describe it continues to evolve, storytelling has been at the core of good communications all along, like Dorothy’s power to get home.

Let’s turn back a few pages in time.

David Ogilvy, the British advertising innovator who came to wide acclaim in the mid-twentieth century, credited his success to deep and detailed research into the habits of consumers. He also created the concept of “branding”, linking the product and product name so tightly that it generated a loyalty to the brand. In his 1983 classic Ogilvy on Advertising, Ogilvy writes about storytelling: “Don’t write essays. Tell your reader what your product will do for him or her, and tell it with specifics. Write your copy in the form of a story, as in the advertisement which carried the headline, ‘The amazing story of a Zippo [lighter] that worked after being taken from the belly of a fish.’”¹

John Caples, another old-timey copywriting pioneer, developed advertising methods in the 1920s that suggested that using exact specifics (that means 52.7% rather than 50%) ensures your writing feels more authentic to your audience. In his groundbreaking book Tested Advertising Methods, Caples teaches how details help create a far more compelling and authentic story than vague statistics.² (Caples wrote the indelible ad headline, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano / but when I started to play!—” turning the universal fear of ridicule into effective storytelling that moved readers.)

Helen Lansdowne Resor, is not only credited as the first woman to design and implement national ad campaigns, she broke ground for women in the advertising industry (another story to tell there!), changing attitudes, minds, and business practices. Resor developed an editorial approach to her advertisements that read like a feature story, incorporating testimonials, emotional resonance, and carefully crafted descriptions of how the product benefitted the user. Resor’s 1911 copy for the Woodbury Soap Company is still quoted today: “A skin you love to touch. You, too, can have its charm…”³

These are just a few examples of copywriters who intentionally used the power of storytelling (and called it storytelling) to bring their readers closer…and all of them were writing nearly a century ago, once upon a time.

References:

1. Ogilvy D. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage Books; 1983:81.
2. Caples J. Tested Advertising Methods (4th Revised Edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall Trade; 1980.
3. Burn D. “Helen Lansdowne Resor, Ad Legend”. Adpulp Website. https://adpulp.com/helen-lansdowne-resor-ad-legend/ Published July 9, 2020. Accessed April 23, 2024.

Most social media platforms and social media management tools provide some recommendations for the kinds of metrics (measurements) we should be tracking. There’s a lot of information available. Much of it is very helpful for influencers who attract advertisers and sponsors based on the number of followers and interactions they have on their social media accounts. For those of us who work business to business or organization to organization, we have to temper that information with more meaningful questions.

We may not find ready answers to these relevant questions by looking at the numbers provided by social media platforms and social media management tools:

• How can we look at social media metrics and understand how they translate into advancing our professional relationships or earning more business?

• Does engagement with a follower on Facebook convert to the submission of an application for employment, a consultancy project, or a contribution from a donor?

• What should we measure to give us a better idea of the success of our social media campaigns?

• How do we define social media success when it comes to our overall communications or marketing strategy?

Why measure?

Two words: budget and accountability. For some, social media can become a time eater. For some who pay to boost posts or advertise on social media, that time eater can also eat cash. There’s no “set it and forget it”.

We’re looking for correlations.

All social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) provide basic analytics  for your organization’s social media pages’ performance, including measurements for post engagement, impressions, and click-throughs. Most provide those analytics through a dynamic administrator dashboard accessible by those who have been expressly authorized by the owner of that social media page.

Most subscription-based social media management tools, like Hootsuite, consolidate and overlay your social media activity across several platforms and individual social media profiles into one dashboard. Additionally, they suggest optimal future posting times based on computer-analyzed past performances of posts. By offering a consolidated picture of posts and post performance, management tools aim to foster efficiencies in scheduling and reporting. As social media features continue to evolve, social media management tools continue to expand their service offerings to remain useful.

For those of us not engaged in retail transactions, we must find the correlation between social media performance, other communications initiatives (advertising, direct mail, etc.) and our ultimate growth (transactional) goals (securing contracts, forming partnerships, increasing application submissions, etc.) to understand the effectiveness of our activity. To do that, we must also work outside social media management tools for the most meaningful analytics.

Common social media terms simplified 

New to social media?

Considering advertising on social media?

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We are honored to be spotlighted by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) – and we’re proud to have achieved LGBT Business Enterprise certification.

“Certification as an LGBT Business Enterprise represents a big step in any business’s journey toward greater authenticity. We are proud to be aligned with others who also recognize this step as creating more opportunities to work toward equity with compassion and excellence,” explains Janice Mondoker, Partner.

Many thanks to the New Jersey Pride Chamber of Commerce (NJPCC) for featuring Stone’s Throw in a Member Spotlight. We’re lucky to be a part of the Chamber and celebrate its good works supporting equity and inclusion.