Beyond social media publishing: Marketing performance management

When you publish a social media campaign on a platform like LinkedIn, you need a way to gauge the audience’s response. What are people saying about it? Who’s engaging with it, and are they taking the desired next steps? What messages and visuals capture their attention, and which barely make a blip on their radar?

Without the ability to monitor and measure campaign performance ― or understand what those measurements mean — each new campaign strategy is built on ROI’s worst enemy… guesswork.

Marketing performance management refers to the tools and practices marketers use to evaluate how their content is performing — so they’re not forced to rely on guesswork when optimizing their campaigns. It typically involves using AI, automation, modeling, and machine learning to:

• Gather and analyze data from multiple platforms and channels

• Identify and visualize trends in the market and your audience segments

• Make predictions of future outcomes

• Generate recommendations for subsequent actions

For social media marketers trying to engage with B2B prospects and customers, seeing how audiences engage with your brand is crucial for knowing how to tweak, pivot, and optimize your messaging for better results. This is especially true on platforms like LinkedIn, where business-minded audiences go to connect and network with other brands. If you want to improve your LinkedIn marketing approach, you have to know what’s working and what isn’t. With that information, it’s much easier to create campaigns that keep conversations flowing, build meaningful customer relationships, guide prospective customers along their journey, and manage brand health with confidence.

Today’s AI and automation technology make it easy for marketers to glean valuable insight into how their messaging performs with target audiences on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. From there, they can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts and more effectively strategize short- and long-term plans for growth.

If you haven’t noticed, people aren’t shy about saying what they like or dislike on social media, regardless of which platform they’re using. While comments and engagement work a little differently on LinkedIn than on other social channels, the overarching rule is still the same — if someone interacts with your brand, you need to understand the implications it could have on your business’s image and the customer journey. Listening to those responses helps you know who your customers are and what they want to see from your brand. By keeping one ear open across all channels, marketers can access real-time insight into what’s landing or missing the mark.

So… go ahead and read every social media conversation on every channel. Got it.

To be truly efficient, marketing performance management relies on having the right tools that let marketers scrape conversations across multiple channels. This saves marketers from manually sifting through every single interaction, looking for brand love or sniffing for signs of a fire.

Best-in-class tools like Talkwalker, now offered through Khoros, listen to real-time conversations on LinkedIn and across multiple channels, using AI and machine learning to go beyond simple keyword searches to discover the sentiment behind the customer’s words. When measuring performance, the best listening tools provide a much-needed holistic view of which message is landing, where spending and efforts are wasted, and where the opportunities exist to engage on new channels.

Every touchpoint along a customer’s journey has the potential to make or break their interest in your brand. Push too hard or ask too much of them, and you risk scaring them away. Keep a safe distance or stick your messaging in the wrong place, and you risk fading into the shadows while a competitor steps into the spotlight.

The data you gather helps set your engagement needle at a level that feels right for your target audience. To do that, you need a social media suite that lets you manage all the different variables ― content, audiences, channels, publishing calendars, and team workflows ― from a single platform. The most comprehensive suites include:

• A unified view that lets you manage the planning, scheduling, and publishing for all channels in one place

• Built-in governance that ensures your messaging stays within the approved framework on multiple accounts

• Features for directly engaging one-on-one or with multiple audiences at a time

• Listening tools that integrate with your publishing platform so you can easily apply what you learn to your campaigns

With a better understanding of who likes what, you can plan and schedule your engagement for the exact moment, platform, and audience where it will get the most desired response. As with listening, social media suites help simplify orchestrating all these touchpoints without sifting through spreadsheets and calendars, trying to align your listening insights to the next steps.

Putting your short- and long-term LinkedIn and social media marketing strategies into action requires having the right tools — and a marketing team that’s confident using them. As you continue learning about different marketing performance management tools and practices, look for solutions that check off these critical features:

• Is it intuitive? Adding a new solution to your tech stack is no small decision. An intuitive solution with drag-and-drop capabilities and an easy-to-view dashboard will speed up adoption and ensure greater confidence among marketers.

• Is it unified? A tool that lets marketers publish content, view analytics, and listen to engagement from a single platform will save them from hopping between tabs and applications, and help eliminate errors.

• Is it ROI-proven? Listening and engagement tools reduce tedious manual work and help identify waste, which can significantly impact ROI. When looking to support your marketing performance management efforts with technology, look for solutions with a proven track record of generating a return, saving time, and making the best use of team talent.

Lastly, it’s critical to find strategic tech partners who understand your goals and work to support them. Interested in learning more about how you can deliver messaging that entices, builds relationships, and drives conversion across channels? Check out all Khoros offers in partnership with Talkwalker to help companies boost productivity and grow brand love, all in one solution.