Top 3 Social Media Metrics to Define Your Brand Awareness

The competition in the global market is getting more severe among brands every year. Thus, it’s harder for businesses to gain a competitive advantage and increase brand awareness. To know what directions to take to grow your brand share, you need first to assess your current brand awareness state.

But how to define it? What metrics to track? Which metrics are actionable? How to measure them right? Business owners have so many questions and so fewer answers. Because a new metric emerges each passing month, it’s natural to feel lost when determining which ones matter for your brand recognition. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you sort everything out. 

In this blog post, we’ll clarify crucial social media metrics and how to track and interpret them to define your brand awareness.

 

Actionable Metrics in SMM and Their Importance

Let’s first start with a quick overview of a four-stage funnel where all social media metrics are categorized. In a nutshell, there are four main stages in a social funnel:

  • The awareness stage is a starting one and covers the topic of our article. Here, the main focus is to measure how users are aware of your brand; 
  • The engagement stage is where we evaluate the level of users’ interactions with your brand; 
  • Conversion stage metrics are to assess how many conversions are made by the users with your brand;
  • The consumer stage is the last but not least part of the funnel. The social media metrics at this stage aimed at understanding what people feel when interacting with your brand.

Thus, all these stages and metrics have particular goals and objectives. But what unifies them all is the idea to analyze how your marketing and SMM strategies work. This article will elaborate on the first stage of a funnel and metrics your brand needs to define awareness. 

 

3 Most Valuable Awareness Metrics in SMM

Post reach and impressions

These metrics are essential for evaluating brand perception among their users. Post reach indicates the number of views on your posts on social media networks. While impressions denote the number of times your posts appeared in one’s timeline. 

To calculate post reach, you should know the number of your followers and views of one post you choose. Below, you can see the formula to count it:

If you realized your post reach score is low, there are several tools you can use to increase it. For example, using the growth tool called Lempod, you can boost your post reach by ten times on Linkedin. Or, for instance, you can find out the hours when your audience is the most active and post your content accordingly.

Social Share of Voice (SSoV)

The primary goal of any business on the road to brand awareness is to become the top of mind in the user’s consciousness. The Social Share of Voice metric was created to indicate how many and often users mention your brand in the social media networks. This includes how often your brand name was tagged or used in a hashtag by someone. Thus, there are two main directions brands should take into account when measuring this metric: the volume (the number of mentions) and the sentiment (positive or negative connotation of these mentions). Knowing this data, you can compare your competitors’ results, analyze your current market share, and find areas for improvement. You can measure your SSoV by incorporating social listening tools such as Mention or Brand24.

To increase this metric’s score and overcome competitors, here are some tips on this topic:

  • Avoid long periods without any posts on your social media. Brands need to be active, so will be your users. Schedule your preferable social media content plan and post it regularly; 
  • Generate engaging and share-worthy content to keep your users interested;
  • Try to post various content formats to test which one gets more mentions and virality among your audience.

Audience Growth Rate

Your audience is your main focus at any stage of the funnel, especially at the awareness stage when you start growing your brand. So, counting their amount is one more significant metric every business should pay attention to. The main idea behind this rate is to measure the enlargement of your audience over particular periods (a day, week, month, year). Based on this metric, brands can analyze what factors or conditions influence the user’s churn, make data-driven decisions to increase it, and compare the results over time. The formula to calculate this rate is pretty simple:

Also, you could employ followers tracking tools to facilitate this process. Here are a few examples for Instagram: Follower Analyzer, Reports+, Followers Insights.

Closing thought

Tracking the key social media metrics allows brands to assess the current number of your posts’ shares or user’s growth and get useful insights on your marketing and SMM strategy. By analyzing data from these metrics, you’ll know what areas to improve or what changes to make to skyrocket your brand awareness.

We hope this article was helpful for you, but it’s not the end of our topic. We shared the list of tips only for the funnel’s first stage; other metrics are yet to come soon.

Digital Transformation and Optimization

Although digital technologies have been around for a while, a fair share of SMEs and large-scale businesses still find it difficult to fully digitize their processes. Its components, implementation costs, goals - there are a lot of myths and misconceptions regarding digital transformation.

From the universal remedy that’s going to fully reshape the way you connect with clients to a money-drainer that doesn’t improve businesses’ efficiency in any way, there are various conflicting opinions about digitally transforming and optimizing your operations. 

To understand the essence of digital transformation, business owners need to understand the components, techniques, and strategies it involves. Here’s the full introduction to digital transformation and optimization. 

 

What is Digital Transformation?

The most straightforward definition of the digital transformation phenomenon is the integration of technology into all facets of business operations, with resulting major changes in lead acquisition, customer support, and team management. 

Digital transformation is both a functional and cultural change. As well as adopting new management tools, business owners need to commit to reforming management strategies and become open to collaboration and automation. 

As for the main components of digital transformation, the following are the most impactful ones:

1. Improved customer understanding

Digital transformation encourages business owners to implement consumer-facing technology. Using big data, in-depth analytics, and other innovations to understand customer needs, shorten buyers’ journeys, and diversify shoppers’ experiences is among the chief objectives of digital transformation. 

Business owners have to focus on creating an infrastructure for customer data gathering, storage, and processing – be it data mining platforms, analytics dashboards, advanced analytics, or other tools. 

2. Digitizing processes

Improved information governance is among the chief points of digital transformation. Now that technology is used to run taxations, manage and pay employees, support customers, and develop products and services, keeping paper-based documentation is inefficient and wastes resources. 

If a business owner wants to commit to digital transformation, switching to digital databases should be his chief priority. Ideally, digital information governance should come hand-in-hand with improved accessibility – that means choosing cloud management tools over on-premises solutions. 

3. Data-driven team management

Since we mentioned that digital transformation is, first and foremost, a cultural change, it should be adopted from within the company. To be successful at preparing their businesses for all-digital operation, business owners need to start by training their teams and investing in project management tools. 

To prepare an organization for digital transformation, its leader has to:

  • Spread awareness of such concepts as data, automation, and analytics, as well as explain the opportunities and the threats the company faces when leveraging the power of these innovations. 
  • Adopt digital-friendly team management strategies – Agile, Waterfall, design thinking, etc. 
  • Determine which tools will help employees improve communication efficiency, create a friendly collaborative environment, and increase each team member’s personal productivity. 
  • Set data-driven goals and benchmarks that would help monitor the team’s performance, compliance with business goals, and continuous growth. 

4. Digital globalization

Digital transformation is a highly open-minded framework. To leverage its full power, business owners need to keep tabs on the latest trends and tendencies in the world – such as increased globalization and interconnectedness. 

What does digital globalization mean for businesses? For one thing, company owners will need to build with scalability in mind, ensuring that the system they created can go cross-border and stay competitive in foreign markets. Other than that, business owners can embrace the benefits of globalization by hiring professionals from all over the world and taking less time to fill in job openings. 

Last but not least, local businesses need to be aware of globalization and understand the risks that are going to manifest if multinational corporations invade the company’s local market. With these considerations in mind, company managers will be prepared to strive in the digital, global, and interconnected world. 

5. Transforming business models

When bracing themselves for digital transformation, business owners need to understand that implementing new changes is impossible without destroying or remodeling existing systems. More often than not, digital transformation will call for business model revision and major changes in the way teams handle lead acquisition, client management, and customer support. 

Here are the strategies business owners are recommended to choose when committing to digital transformation:

  • Improving the existing offer by introducing a digital experience
  • Introducing a digital-only revenue stream without cutting off your online community
  • Fully replacing physical products with digital or creating a convergent digital-physical offer

 

Digital Transformation Benefits

Digital transformation is the only way for businesses to stay competitive in today’s increasingly digitized society. The companies that miss out on implementing digital innovations are slower, less scalable, and struggle to resonate with customers as deeply. 

Although committing to digital transformation is a decision with long-term implications and multiple responsibilities, the benefits of jumping on the bandwagon by far outweigh the hurdles:

 

  • Increased transparency: Both on the operational and consumer-facing level, digital transformation means having a clear view of the way the company operates, how it is perceived by prospective clients, etc. By introducing digital tools, you will be able to track promotion efforts in real-time, as well as provide the team with all needed performance data so that every person on board has a big-picture view of the goal when completing day-to-day tasks. 
  • Facilitated collaboration: Project management tools, communication, documentation, and talent management platforms speed up collaboration, help implement uniform standards across all company’s departments, facilitate employee onboarding, and reduce the amount of manual work a manager needs to perform to keep the company afloat. Automation platforms help fill in paperwork, administrate payments, and handle most common workplace concerns, allowing team leaders to focus on strategizing, research, and ideation. 
  • Reduced operation costs: Using technology instead of paper-based documentation, switching to remote work models instead of in-house departments, and automation instead of onboarding new hires help business owners keep a business sustainable and cheaper to scale. 
  • Customer-centric strategies: In digital transformation, implementing new technology is only the means to the goal of connecting with customers more efficiently, cutting the amount of time needed to negotiate and close deals and increasing clients’ satisfaction with the company. There are plenty of consumer-facing tools business owners can implement as part of digital optimization efforts – CRMs, analytics platforms, etc. 
  • Data-driven decision-making: Since digital transformation provides business owners with hard evidence for building promotion, marketing, and scalability strategies, team leaders can fully remove the guesswork from decision-making. Being able to rely on data when researching new markets or considering product expansion opportunities will protect business managers from risks and will help maximize returns on investments. 
  • Higher customer satisfaction: Digital transformation allows business owners to go hand-in-hand with customer expectations – 24/7 availability, accessibility from anywhere in the world via any device, real-time updates, etc. By introducing technology to all facets of business operations, teams will be able to process more customer inquiries, provide website visitors with relevant content, and meet consumers’ expectations. As such, the level of satisfaction with the company’s services will grow by huge numbers. 

 

Best Digital Transformation Practices

Although a necessity for businesses, digital transformation is a risky endeavor if you don’t have the right mindset or infrastructure to approach it. The good news is, there are ways to protect your business from failing at technological innovation – consider transforming operations with these practices in mind:

  • Establishing project governance and stakeholder management practices: Successful digital transformation implies attracting sponsors willing to back the project financially. Other than that, make sure to regularly update project stakeholders on the progress of the business’ remodeling and run progress meetings to make sure that the transformation process is going in the right direction. 
  • Encouraging technology adoption within the team: Take some time to train staff and get people on your team up to speed with technology tools. Otherwise, poorly skilled employees might end up slowing down the team’s efficiency instead of speeding it up. 
  • Implement incremental improvements: Although it is tempting to fully tear the existing business model apart and rebuild it, keep in mind that such a rash decision leaves the company exposed and non-functioning. Instead of changing the way the business operates all at once, start by implementing low-impact changes that will make adjusting to large-scale reforms much easier. 
  • Account for risks when strategizing: When planning, take possible delays, economic fluctuations, and other external factors into account. A good digital transformation strategy is an agile one – this way, no risk can catch you by surprise, and there will be a contingency plan for any prospective challenge. 
  • Prioritize end-user adoption: When executing digital transformation strategies, business owners often get too caught up in technical details, spending too much time refining the facets of the company that do not impact end-users in a meaningful way. To always stay in touch with business goals, make sure to constantly collect user feedback and prioritize customer satisfaction over a technically impeccable solution. 

 

Digital Transformation Examples

The good news is, digital transformation has been proven successful by numerous companies. To see how business owners successfully integrated innovative solutions into their workflows and customer acquisition practices, take a look at these digital transformation examples. 

Retail

In retail, business owners need to be on the frontlines of digital transformation in order to meet rapidly growing customer expectations. The following practices have proven the most efficient when digitizing and optimizing retail businesses:

  • Automating customer support using chatbots
  • Implementing IoT tools for warehouse management and supply chain monitoring
  • Combining digital and physical in-store experiences (AR displays, connected apps, etc)
  • Leveraging the power of social media to connect with new audiences and prospective customers – creating corporate pages, running social media ad campaigns, etc

Manufacturing

As for manufacturing, the following digital transformation trends are gaining traction among business owners:

  • Internet of Things and interconnected factories
  • Predictive analytics with AI and machine learning
  • RFID tags and blockchain for warehouse management
  • Automated factory equipment

Banking and insurance

Digital transformation presents unique challenges in banking and insurance – such as reliability and data security. That’s why SME owners in these domains need to focus on the following objectives:

  • Creating an interconnected database across all branches of the institution
  • Building international open data banking platforms
  • Providing customers with new experiences in financial education and asset management
  • Automating insurance case processing and assessment

Healthcare

As one of the most conservative and high-stake industries, healthcare lacks the agility needed to be among the frontrunners of digital transformation. Having said that, business owners can bet on the following practices as a way to improve the efficiency of day-to-day healthcare facility operations:

  • Adopting telemedicine applications
  • The development of predictive healthcare
  • On-demand healthcare tools

 

Digital Optimization Benefits

Although the impact of digital optimization is not as evident, it’s a reasonable strategy for businesses that operate in heavily regulated industries – such as banking, healthcare, or law. Here are the benefits of adopting digital optimization practices:

  • High adaptability as business owners and teams have enough time to adapt to every low-impact change.
  • A sustainable strategy that can later mature into a full-on digital transformation strategy.
  • Business owners can implement changes without having to set aside current business goals or reduce the number of processed orders and closed deals.
  • Doesn’t require heavy investments and full commitment the way digital transformation does. 
  • Business owners have full control over the pace of digital optimization; they can stop the process or speed it up anytime, without triggering irreversible changes. 

 

It’s Time to Go Digital

Even if you can’t make up your mind as to whether digital optimization or transformation is the right business development choice to make, the need for introducing new tools and innovations both to consumers and the team is not up for debate. The sooner you commit to digitizing your operations, the more competitive you will be in today’s increasingly connected economy. 

Find out if digital optimization or transformation is right for you and what it takes to get started by contacting Zazmic. Our experts will run a thorough business assessment and create a personalized strategy for your company. Don’t put innovation off and start using the full power of digital tools!

Digital Business Transformation: Rising from the Ashes of the Post-Pandemic World

The post-covid world will never be the same. As pandemic confines consumers in their homes, the door has been literally shut on businesses that don't yet exist in the digital world. For businesses, digital transformation has become a synonym for survival and rebirth for a new life in the post-pandemic world. Traditional brick and[...]

Challenge #1: If you’re not in Google, you don’t exist.

A website is the virtual front door to your business. If you don’t have a website, you don’t exist for a consumer looking for a product or service online. What’s more, if you don’t show up on the first page of Google, 75% of potential customers will never find out about you.

Solution: Web development & SEO

It isn’t just enough to make a simple webpage. What you need is a website that is designed to attract consumers, is easy and efficient to use and will make them repeat customers. This is where web development and SEO comes into play. A strong web development team can create a website specific to your business that will handle all of your customers needs. This team will utilize specific trends in your market to create a website that will not only grab your customers’ attention, but keep them on your website looking through your products/services. SEO is just as important. Having a great website won’t mean very much if people can’t find it in the first place. SEO, or search engine optimization, does exactly what it sounds like. An SEO specialist will utilize trends specific to their audience in order to optimize their relevance in search engines. Most consumers will not look past the first page of Google search results, so you have to ensure that your website has great searchability. SEO uses data to figure out what words and phrases are being searched the most by your target audience. Then, they will create content for your website that utilizes these keywords and increases your searchability on the web. With these two tools combined, your customers will be able to find your business and purchase whatever product/service they need, all from the comfort of their home.

SEO is just as important. Having a great website won’t mean very much if people can’t find it in the first place. SEO, or search engine optimization, does exactly what it sounds like. An SEO specialist will utilize trends specific to their audience in order to optimize their relevance in search engines. Most consumers will not look past the first page of Google search results, so you have to ensure that your website has great searchability. SEO uses data to figure out what words and phrases are being searched the most by your target audience. Then, they will create content for your website that utilizes these keywords and increases your searchability on the web. With these two tools combined, your customers will be able to find your business and purchase whatever product/service they need, all from the comfort of their home.

Challenge #2: Social media is setting an unparalleled pace and scale of communication to keep up with.

Social media is currently being utilized by almost 4 billion internet users. Social platforms are where your existing and potential customers reside, seek entertainment, and interact for over 2 hours a day on average–a gold mine for your competitors! Not surprisingly then, more than half of all online brands are discovered in public social feeds.

Solution: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is a lot like meeting someone at a party: everyone is enjoying themselves, some folks are working the room, striking up conversations, showing off and oozing charm in hopes to be noticed and remembered, others just observe. The great thing about a social platform is that most people see it as an enjoyable place where they go to relax, entertain, and chat with friends. SMM, therefore, is a unique opportunity to put a face to your brand, give it a voice, develop its “personality”, if you like, and connect with your target audience where and when it is most likely to be open to communication. All you need is to find the right group, at the right times, and with the right message. Remember that you sell a story, not just a product or service.

Of course, there’s much more to it than that. Marketing to the most powerful communication medium is based on certain brain-racking rules and principles–basically, there’s a science to managing campaigns–and this is where an SMM specialist comes in handy. Whether outsourced or hired in-house, a dedicated brand manager is absolutely necessary for your campaign’s success. Keeping an eye on ever-changing platform algorithms and making adjustments to your strategy is a full-time job that requires a good deal of experience and knowledge. Not to mention, you will also need to help brainstorm content ideas and monitor the content that comes through to ensure your quality standards are being met. That kind of balancing act takes a lot of experience and skill. Luckily, this is where SMM specialists thrive.

Challenge #3: You have to stand out in a hyper competitive environment.

While hypercompetition is linked to many factors, globalization and technology are two of its fundamental drivers affecting almost every industry. Communication technologies, which are predominantly reshaped, accelerated, or enabled by the Internet these days, play a critical role in expanding markets and boosting competition. As a result, businesses today are being exposed to competition at an unprecedented level.

Solution: Online advertising

When it comes to technological developments, though, it’s a two-way street. While being one of the driving forces of competition on the one hand, technology also provides opportunities for businesses to keep ahead of that competition at the same time.

In the age of digital disruption when barriers are blurred, online advertising becomes a global marketing tool. By investing in paid ads, you can get your product or service in front of your potential customers the instant it crosses their mind and they are actively searching for it online. It’s your mission to be their first option and choice. You have to reach them faster than your competitors do and let them know you are nearby, ready to meet their needs asap.

Challenge #4: Your business model needs to constantly evolve to adapt to changing consumer behavior.

Hypercompetition and customer-centric economy dictate new rules: to gain a competitive advantage, businesses are expected to provide a lot more value in whatever they sell than simply price and quality. With so many options to choose from, consumers can afford to be picky. People will prioritize safety, convenience, eco consciousness, flexibility and speed above all else. If you can offer these things for your customers, they will be much more likely to choose you over the competition.

Solution: App development

The major cultural and technological shifts of recent times call for transformation and innovation in the way businesses deliver value to customers. The idea is not new: you aren’t selling a product or service, you’re selling an experience.

What’s considered a good experience in the post-covid reality? The lockdown presented fulfillment issues that challenged all businesses and made brands fully rethink their online experience. This pandemic, which locked millions of customers indoors with so many services suddenly out of reach, has taught us a lesson: accessibility and timing are the key.

By offering customers the convenience of using your online platform, you reside in your customers’ smartphones and become their personal service provider that they have at their fingertips. This way, you are enabled to respond to your customers’ needs, resolve their issues quickly, and simply make their daily lives easier.

Challenge #5: ‘Digital workspace’ is inevitable, and companies are forced to reconfigure themselves within a short time frame.

The pandemic didn’t just force customers home, it did the same to business owners and employees. This led to many businesses closing their doors for an extended period of time. However, some businesses were able to adapt to a work-from-home system. Now that the country is steadily reopening, many businesses are questioning whether office spaces are even necessary. Not to mention there are also still many businesses that cannot physically open their doors due to reopening restrictions.

With this shift, it seems inevitable that at least some businesses are going to turn this temporary work-from-home strategy into a more permanent business plan. However, not all business owners are going to be prepared to run a digital workspace, and, if that is you, time is not on your side. If your competitors have already integrated a digital workspace into their business, then they are in a prime position to continue providing the products, services and support that your customers need.

Solution: Digital workplace transformation

So, what you need is a solution that will be able to stand up to the challenges of a remote working environment. The two most crippling challenges are communication and collaboration. Your employees won’t be able to just walk down the hall or gather their coworkers for a last-minute meeting. Luckily, the solutions are readily available and easy to use: cloud infrastructure and collaboration & productivity platform.

G Suite is an all-in-one solution for workflow challenges such as messaging, file sharing, scheduling, etc. It has tools for messaging and virtual meetings, calendars and scheduling, data and file storage, projects, presentations, accounting, etc. Utilizing these tools will allow you to adapt your business to a remote working environment.

Another tool that will allow you to thrive in the digital workplace is the Cloud. When most people think of cloud platforms, they think of data storage that can be accessed from any device at any time. However, this is only one part of a cloud platform’s infrastructure. When you use a cloud platform, like Google Cloud, you are actually getting a wide range of benefits that will help you adapt to a digital workplace. Google Cloud, for example, has services such as Cloud Endpoint and Cloud Translate, as well as networking benefits like load balancing and DNS. And that is just a small part of its cloud infrastructure.

Using tools like these will allow you to coordinate your team more effectively, and will give them much needed resources to succeed in a digital workplace. Having an established remote working plan for your business will allow you to compete with, or even put you ahead, of the competition. You won’t have to wait for restrictions to ease or worry about the safety of yourself, your employees, or your customers. It will be business almost as usual.

Challenge #6: As the whole world is moving life online, crime is growing exponentially in cyberspace.

Unfortunately, there are those that are willing to do whatever is necessary to profit during the pandemic. Statistics show that there has been a significant increase in various types of cybercrime during the pandemic. With everyone stuck at home, worried and looking for a distraction, it makes sense that they are turning to the Internet for some relief. This also opens them up to these cybercriminals. The same thing is true for businesses that are moving to a more online plan. So, how can you protect your business and your customers?

Solution: Cyber security

While cybercrime can be a scary thing to think about, we are lucky to have cybersecurity to fight it off. Choosing the right tools, prevention features and providers can mean the difference between being a victim of cybercrime and fighting cybercrime. So, make sure you are using trusted services, such as Google, that have security measures in place to protect your business and customers.

Services such as data encryption are a keep part of that protection. Firewalls, secure interservice communication, insider risk and intrusion detection, secure service deployment, data disposal, and more are all necessary for protecting against cybercriminals. You should make sure that the service you use provides these security measures, and preferably more. Google is yet another good example here. They provide security services as access transparency, data loss prevention, firewalls, asset inventory, key management, data encryption, etc. They also provide protection against identity fraud, one of the most well-known cybercrimes out there. Tools such as Cloud Identity, Certificate Authority Service, Context-aware access, Titan Security Key, and more all work together to keep frauders from getting your or your employees’ personal information. You should also make sure that you are choosing providers that will take your business’ cybersecurity seriously. Certified providers are the best option. Zazmic, as a certified Google Cloud service provider, is a good example.

Cybercrime is a serious issue, and it is growing. With more people working from home, and just on the Internet more in general, we are more vulnerable now than ever. However, cybercrime is also preventable if the right precautions are taken. Taking cybersecurity into consideration early in the development of your digital workspace will protect you, your business and your employees down the road.

Summary

Our living and working environments have changed and will continue to change post-covid. There is no such thing as going back to what was normal; however, this gives us the opportunity to shape a new, better normal that will prepare us for the future. Now is the time to prepare your business for the post-covid world and the challenges and opportunities that it will bring. Using this checklist will ensure that your business is ready to face the digital transformation that is underway, and will give you the tools you need to thrive in the digital world.