“It’s no longer about reach and frequency. It’s about how you get the community to engage and build overall loyalty.” Do you agree?

Measuring ROI (Return on Investment) in marketing is especially challenging. In this article, Constellation, a large wine producer, is using a combination of traditional marketing tools (e.g. survey) and new technologies to quantify ROI. Surveys are posted on social media to gain insight about the market. For example, the survey found that 48.9% of people increase their purchases of the brand since becoming fan. However, in my opinion, this method is not specific enough to know which of the company’s marketing campaign that made them fans of the brand in the first place. Yes, this can be used to measure success, but it is still far from a good measurement.

In class, I learned that marketing needs to have specific objectives, which is based on the overall organization’s goals, and the appropriate measurements or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For instance, increasing brand awareness/online presence can be the objective and the KPI would be gaining 50 new followers each month. An ROI explanation written by Avinash Kaushik made it crystal clear on how to measure performance in detail.

And another key point, it is good to know how and where your customers are. If your customers are more engaged in Twitter, then do more marketing (and customer service) on Twitter. On the contrary, if they are more engaged on Facebook, do more marketing on Facebook.

In a nutshell, building overall loyalty through engagement with community is important, but we still need to be specific (i.e. able to quantify) in measuring performance.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhuyghe/2014/08/25/wine-tech-measuring-the-roi-of-digital-media/ & http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/