The Metrics That Are Getting Marketing Teams Fired

You're reporting on a metric your CEO doesn't care about, sales doesn't value, and ultimately the algorithm doesn't reward anymore. And there's a good chance it's the first number on your reports. Well, in today's video, I'm gonna tell you not only why you shouldn't care about that number, but what other metrics you should be focusing on, not only in your reporting, but as you build your content moving forward. But before we get into that, let's think about an example.

We've probably all seen this company. It could be a competitor in your industry, whatever it may be. they've got a couple hundred thousand followers. They're posting all the time.

Their feed looks nice. But when you go into the individual posts, you notice something. You see 30, 40 likes, one or two comments with people leaving fire emojis or biceps. And you think to yourself, hey, something isn't adding up here.

Well, you might be onto something. And it's because for a long time, brands focused on one metric, and that was followers. They wanted to know how many followers they could get. And rightfully so, because the old way social media worked is that platforms actually rewarded you for having more followers.

Say your brand had 100,000 followers. What would happen is you knew that 5% to 10% of that audience would see your content. So it was logical to say, I'm going to build my followers up. And as I do that, more and more people will see my content as a baseline.

Great. Well, not only did the game change, it changed on every platform. See, as TikTok came onto the scene, it changed the game for everybody. Now, instead of serving your content to a certain amount of your followers, the platforms just rewarded the best content, period.

Followers, in a sense, didn't really matter anymore. And that trend has continued across all platforms. We now live in a feast or famine social media world. What that means, your content is going to get put out to a base level of users.

It's going to be the test audience. If it performs well with that test audience, it's going to get a wider net, a wider net, and a wider net the more people that watch it. So this is how you see accounts with no followers seemingly going viral. And it's because other metrics now have started to influence how content performs, and it's not follower count.

And look, part of this is unfair because businesses were told by Twitter, were told by TikTok, remember, hey, you should invest in followers. Hey, you should go and get more followers. And we all spent money doing so. Now, we don't want to be an old man yelling at the clouds saying, hey bring me back the Instagram of 2015 We need to adapt and we need to change our strategy Well when it comes to the strategy that works it tough See over the last 13 years I probably sat in hundreds of meetings when it comes to marketing teams and executives and the marketing teams will present their metrics and say, look, here are all our numbers.

Here's our growth. We're so fantastic. And then the executive team will come back and say, okay, well, why are sales flat or what's the ROI of this? And then that conversation usually devolves into an argument over what's the value of brand?

What's the value of an impression? What's the value dollar amount of social? And what happens is the marketers are on their heels, but the executive team is responsible for the bottom line. So they want to push and pressure where I think it's appropriate.

The marketing team is going to be seen as really an arts and crafts department until proven otherwise. We've got this whole scenario, right, where people are hyper fixated on followers, they get into a a reporting situation or they have to talk to their executive or sell a social media plan upstream. And it turns out the CEOs aren't informed, the executives aren't informed. So they might even say, hey, what's our follower growth?

We want followers. And see, that's the problem with marketing right there. That gap, it is a misunderstanding between what is actually effective and what executives expect or what they have heard. So we have to bridge that gap.

And the first part of bridging that gap is aligning our metrics to the company goals, not the other way around. And see, marketing teams aren't reporting on incorrect metrics because they're bad at their job. What's happening is they're going on and they're getting 15 different pieces of information from 15 different sources, all telling them what to measure. The result, you get a pile of confusion.

And think about it. Instagram pushes reach as a valuable metric because it wants you to spend more on ads. LinkedIn with impressions. YouTube with video watch time.

They are all incentivized to keep you on as a customer. Now, what we need to do is think about our metrics internally as a business. What metrics are incentivized to keep our customers coming back? Because those platforms are not giving you neutral advice.

They are protecting revenue. And it's time for you to protect yours. Now, we're in a sea of attribution craziness, right? You can almost attribute for everything.

And although I think this is largely good, there are some things to highlight, right? For years, CFOs signed off on billboards and commercials. CMOs won awards for things that they paid to be distributed. And the attribution was at best, very, very high level, right?

Nowadays marketers are held to a different standard We have a lot of metrics We can see what effective and what not We can hide behind vast amounts of ad spend and then justify our creative The times have changed and that is good because if we know how to utilize the metrics properly, then we can actually learn, create great content. Two, we can speak to the executives in a way they understand. And three, not only will we get job security, but we'll also see company growth. So before I get into what metrics you need to focus on, I need you to answer this question.

What does your business need from social media? Very simple. Does it need brand engagement? Does it need pipeline creation?

Does it need a place for the CEO just to put out the vision of the company? I need you to get crystal clear on what the purpose of the social media accounts are. That is the first point in understanding and using metrics in any meaningful way, because different metrics are going to signal different things. And a startup trying to get its first hundred customers is a lot different than an enterprise client that's just trying to have market share and protect brand image.

Completely different vehicles operating on the same marketing platform. But now let's get into the metrics that I think you should stop following or maybe just stop valuing at the same extent. Number one is going to be followers. See, the platforms have now shifted to serve you content based on what you have watched and engaged with, not who you followed.

So although followers may trickle up, I do see them really as a legacy metric at this point, where we want to be focusing on other metrics in the platforms. Two, posting frequency. And what I mean by that, I think there's a lot of value in posting a bunch, but only if you iterate and learn. Just filling the calendar for the sake of filling the calendar is going to lead to mediocre results and ultimately a waste of time.

So when we think about the marketing calendar and posting frequently, we have to think about iterating and learning and fine tuning the content as we post. Without the learnings, posting frequency is a giant waste of time. Next, one word comments, looking at that as engagement. Look, if somebody drops a fire emoji or biceps or says, so cool, I know that's two words, that engagement isn't meaningful.

And the algorithms actually know this to be so. So we really want to look at meaningful engagements and how we get that. Next, reach in isolation. Now, what I mean by this, you can have low reach, but if that reach is at your targeted audience, that is more valuable than having a very wide net that generates no interest.

So we want to be looking at how do we generate interest and how do we do so with our audience and weigh that against reach. Look, if you're only getting your post in front of 500 1000 people but they are all your target audience that fantastic But really really understanding who your audience is is gonna be the starting point before you look at reach in isolation Okay, now we're at the juicy stuff, the stuff that actually matters. And I wanna say this when it comes to social, I think if you really, really focus on these, you're gonna be in such a good spot when it comes to your content.

Number one, shareability of the content. Is this content something that someone can send to a friend, repost to their feed, et cetera? You have to say to yourself, would somebody share this? The answer is no.

Okay, the post isn't dead in the water, so to speak, but it's almost there. The second thing you gotta ask yourself, is this worth saving, right? Is this in-depth, is this a knowledge-based post that somebody might save and come back to later? So that is a post, you know, ultimately for personal consumption, and we wanna look at this.

Number one, would somebody share this with a friend? Number two, would it something they would use themselves? So a knowledge-based. Shares, saves.

Those are the two things I want to focus on. Then number three, I want to look at impressions, right? Impressions are going to be a pretty good guide on how our content is performing. In the feast or famine era of social media, it is important to understand what cranks and what levers you can pull that will increase impressions.

So once you get those, you say, well, how do I build a report that gets my executives on board? What you need to think about is this. Think about a metaphor. We need to stop thinking about how many people walk by our business and how many people actually walk in the storefront.

If you're an online business, B2B is the same thing. Somebody might watch our content. That's the first part. We have to get in front of them.

But then I think, how can we get them to engage? How can you DM with them? How can you get them sharing? How can you get them commenting in a meaningful way, not just a one word response?

This is where we need to focus. Because when you start to build relationships with your audience members and real relationships, That means actually DMing with them. That means actually going back, liking their content, commenting on their content. That is how you start to build the relationships and ultimately get people to engage deeper with your business.

Why do we want to do this? Because when it comes time for them to make a purchase decision, we want to have a bunch of goodwill that we have built up with that customer so they are more likely to choose our business. So to sum this up, the video was never really what are the metrics that matter in social? The video really was, what are the metrics that matter to your business?

You need to figure those out and then work from there. I'm Jordan Shelton. I hope you like this video. If you want more practical marketing tips, please give me a follow, like, subscribe, all that good stuff, and I'll see you next time.