With our world moving ever so quickly, more and more people are accessing content via smartphones. Current records indicate 50% of the United States population has a smartphone. That number is expected to raise to just under 70% by 2017. People gravitate to smartphones because it is like having a mini computer at your fingertips. You can send an email, GPS an address, and check your social media feeds all while you are on the go.
Constant access to the online world via smartphones means social media marketing (SMM) is becoming more and more popular. The purpose of social media marketing is to increase your company’s brand exposure, while simultaneously broadening your customer reach. Being present on these platforms allows your target audience to follow your company. You can send status updates on your products and services, and companies can even pay to extend the reach of their posts.
Seeing that people spend time on social media for an average of 2 hours per day (that number almost doubles when it comes to the weekend), paying to boost your status updates can go a long way. Therefore, if a company’s ad pops up on someone’s news feed more than once in a day, that person is more likely to click the ad and check out the company.
According to Ascend2, 57% of B2B marketers say conversion rate is the most useful metric for analyzing landing page performance. By focusing on the conversion rate, marketers are able to define the buying process for consumers by creating a roadmap that works to get buyers from one funnel stage to another until they have become customers. While prospects are shopping around to select the perfect vendor, marketers, in turn, are focusing on improving performance by measuring conversion rates to strengthen performance.
Defining Brand Metrics
The branding process also holds key marketing metrics as they pertain to various branding efforts and the direct alignment of these efforts to company goals. Best-in-Class performing companies manage the effectiveness of their brand initiatives from funnel-based insights as they are gathered from various brand awareness campaigns that have somehow impacted consumer behavior at each sales pipeline stage.
By breaking down target audiences and segmenting them, marketers are able to better manage branding efforts by creating more intricate and high-impact strategies to target prospects and customers in the sales pipeline.