This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
How Is SONAR Measured?
The SONAR Content Distribution Model™ incorporates many online marketing tactics: article marketing, online press releases, social media and bookmarking, and interactions with like-minded individuals in message boards or forums.
When you look at SONAR marketing, much of the tactics are search engine and social media related.
Many online marketers are deploying social and search engine marketing strategies but don’t necessarily know how to quantify the results and measure them against their marketing budget, goals, and resources available.
To help measure my SONAR and social media and search engine marketing initiatives, I looked at the analytical data from three vantage points based on my real-life experience: Internet marketing, direct response, and PR. Because many of these core elements are in SONAR, the forms I used to measure each of these efforts separately are the same that I use for measuring SONAR. I call them the three Os—outputs, outcomes, and objectives.
The Three Os—Outputs, Outcomes, and Objectives
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Outputs—Measure effectiveness and efficiency, such as new subscriber sign-ups and spikes in website traffic during your campaign. Outputs also measure analytics, such as referring website sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages.
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Outcomes—Measure behavioral changes, such as internal customer and subscriber feedback (calls, emails, and forum postings) on your website, and external reputation monitoring or visits to targeted chat rooms during your campaign to see the buzz.
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Objectives—Compare direct product sales during the time of the campaign to other sales that occurred before the campaign. Objectives establish a baseline, giving room for sales assumptions tied to your effort.
Several free online tools can help track and quantify your SONAR and social media marketing efforts:
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Google Analytics—Check the Referring Sources page to see how much traffic was generated by the social media sites you’ve been active in. Look at overall traffic to the website during the same time period of your efforts. If you have a sign-up or email form, look for lead spikes during the time period of your effort.
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Google Alerts—Set alerts for your name, your company name, and keywords in your content. You’ll get notified via an alert if your content or your message gets picked up and goes viral.
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Back-Link Checkers—Google Webmaster Tools enable you to check back-links going to your site during the same time period as your effort.