Five Ways to Measure the Success of Social Impact Marketing

In an era of conscious consumers, where 81% of people want brands to address societal issues, it’s a good time to be a social impact brand. It’s also a good time to market your social impact brand – global studies show that 91% of consumers say they would switch to a brand that supports a cause if it offered similar price and quality and 92% say they would buy a product with a social or environmental benefit.

Social impact marketing helps your company grow and the more you grow, the greater your capacity to do good and affect change.

But you can only grow if your marketing resonates with people. The way to ensure that’s the case is to measure the success of your campaigns. By measuring, you can see what works and what doesn’t and continually tweak your marketing to keep people engaged.

Regardless of whether you want to build awareness, increase traffic to your website, promote a specific cause or generate sales, here are five ways to keep tabs on the success of your social impact marketing. (Each of these metrics can be measured using Google Analytics, social media insight tools such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and Twitter Analytics and social media management platforms.)

To build meaningful connections, people first need to see your message. Reach tells you how far your conversation has spread across social media and how big your potential audience is. The more people your content reaches, the more chance you’ll have of it succeeding. 

Look at the reach of your posts, hashtags and events. Then compare them with engagement…

Engagement looks at how many of the people you’ve reached are taking part in the conversation. How many likes, comments, shares and clicks you receive will determine how many more people see your message. They’ll also determine how visible your content is. 

Google and social media platforms like popular content. The more popular it is, the more they’ll favour it. For things like blog posts and landing pages, this means featuring prominently in search results. For social content, it means sticking around in people’s feeds for longer. 

The type of engagement to track depends on what your goals are. If you want as many people as possible to see your message, look at how many shares and comments posts are getting. If you’re more interested in visiting your landing page, look at the number of clicks.

Earned media is the content that’s created every time someone who’s not affiliated with your brand mentions you. It’s essentially free advertising. And it’s a great way to measure the success of social impact marketing. Because for people to talk about you they have to be aware of you and if they’re aware of you, you’re doing something right (or wrong…but hopefully not).   

Earned media can be a mention in a blog post, vlog, social media post or in the press. You can track mentions by setting up Google Alerts or using a free tool like Social Mention.

To know what kind of impact you’re having, you need to know what people are saying and how they feel about your brand. Sentiment measures the emotion or opinion of the mentions you’re getting.

Tracking sentiment will give you an idea of:

- How satisfied your customers are 

- How loyal your customers are 

- How likely is it customers will engage with you in future

- Tracking earned media mentions is one way to measure sentiment. The other way is to ask customers directly in surveys, live chat conversations and phone or face-to-face interviews. 

When gathering customer feedback, make it easy for them by using a scoring system like Net Promoter Score (NPS) (you’ll know these as the 0 to 10 scales that brands often use rate satisfaction, 0 being extremely negative and 10 being extremely positive). The more straightforward it is for people to answer questions, the more likely it is they’ll do it. 

Social impact affects employees as much as customers. If they aren’t excited and engaged by your message, customers won’t be either. Your team is the voice of your company. They’re the people pushing your brand and championing your values. Make sure they’re fully on board with what you’re doing. Ask for their thoughts and use their feedback to improve.

Not everything you do with your social impact marketing will work. As the old saying goes: "You can’t please all of the people all of the time.” But you can please some of the people a lot of the time. With a message that’s true to your purpose and the right metrics to measure and improve, that’s enough for success.