Launching a marketing campaign is one thing, but tracking its effectiveness is a different ball game altogether that comes with its set of challenges. And, there are absolutely no second thoughts about why you should be doing it.
The question that looms over us is – what are the KPIs or metrics to measure the success of community marketing campaigns?
In this article, we will talk about exactly this and specify the right set of KPIs across different community marketing campaigns.
Always remember that your KPIs or key metrics for any community marketing campaign will depend upon three things:
- Campaign Objective
- Campaign Strategy
- Campaign Style
Let me explain how by sharing relevant examples of brands who successfully achieved their objectives via community marketing campaigns done with Convosight.
A. Dabur – New product launch
Dabur, a renowned consumer goods brand of India, launched its new product – Dabur honey tasties, sometime back.
| Campaign Objective | Increase awareness and amplification of Dabur honey tasties |
| Campaign Style | Content partnership |
| Campaign Strategy | Highlight key benefits and use cases of the product and advocate its USP |
Keeping these three factors in mind, the most relevant metrics that the brand tracked were:
– Engagement
– UGCs or User generated content
– Category conversations
– Brand mentions
– Brand share of voice
B. Charlie Banana – Build brand RTBs
Charlie Banana, the leading cloth diaper brand, aims to reverse the devastating impact of single use plastic diapers on the environment.
Know all about their community marketing campaign in this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
| Campaign Objective | Increase awareness on the benefits of cloth diapers and build engagement and consideration for Charlie Banana |
| Campaign Style | Community contests, surveys |
| Campaign Strategy | Identify the real brand evangelists with surveys, spark engagement with contests and challenges, and create awareness of any going discounts on the website |
Keeping these three in mind, the most relevant metrics that the brand tracked were:
– Category conversations
– Share of voice
– Brand mentions
– Brand association
– Coupon conversions
C. Nangrow – Sampling and lead generation
Nestle’s Nangrow is a toddler nutrition drink that supports kids growth and development.
Know all about their community marketing campaign in this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
| Campaign Objective | Leverage trials of the product by sharing samples at scale and drive its preference and adoption |
| Campaign Style | Content partnership |
| Campaign Strategy | Increase awareness of brain development in growing kids and drive consideration for Nestle Nangrow, encouraging members to try it by filling a free sampling form. |
Keeping these three in mind, the most relevant metrics that the brand tracked were:
– Sampling leads
– Category conversations
– Brand mentions
– Share of voice
– Brand association
– Engagement
– User Generated Content
D. Aashirvaad – New market expansion
Aashirvaad, India’s number one atta brand, wanted to create deeper penetration into the South Indian market where rice is the staple food.
Know all about their community marketing campaign in this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
| Campaign Objective | Expand into a new market, i.e. South India where rice is the staple food |
| Campaign Style | Community contests |
| Campaign Strategy | Host recipe-sharing contests around Christmas and Diwali and encourage members to tag other members to create further excitement around participation. |
Keeping these three in mind, the most relevant metrics that the brand tracked were:
– Category conversations
– Brand mentions
– Share of voice
– Brand association
– User Generated Conten
E. Sirona – New category creation and expansion
Sirona, an up and coming name in the feminine hygiene, sanitary, menstrual and intimate hygiene products, wanted to build the category of modern menstruation and drive consideration for menstrual cups.
Know all about their community marketing campaign in this 👉🏻 CASE STUDY 👈🏻
| Campaign Objective | Establish menstrual cup as the best solution for menstruation and create awareness around overall period pain management |
| Campaign Style | Content partnership |
| Campaign Strategy | Educate community members about the usage of menstrual cups, bust myths surrounding it, host expert live sessions and urge members to share their experience. |
Keeping these three in mind, the most relevant metrics that the brand tracked were:
– Category conversations
– Brand mentions
– Share of voice
– Brand association
– User Generated Content
If you’re wondering what other campaign styles or community marketing ideas exist, here’s sharing with you an image that’ll solve all your queries. 👇🏻
To understand all about how you can create a solid community marketing strategy, feel free to go through this blog 👇🏻
Community Marketing Strategy – A Complete Guide
Now that you have clarity on how you need to select what metrics to track for different community marketing campaigns, let’s dive deep into each of the mentioned metrics.
Top metrics to measure community marketing success
Success is measured by understanding the change in conversations in communities, and the different metrics that help track them are:
1. Category Conversations
Track the increase in category conversations vs the pre-campaign period.
Simply put, it refers to the increase in conversations that happened for a particular product category after the campaign was executed.
For instance, Aashirvaad Organic ran a six-month campaign across 58 communities to create awareness for its whole organic range of products, including atta and pulses.
The campaign successfully created brand awareness and drove consumption, and saw conversations for the organic food category increase from 0 to 48,116 across these communities.
So, the increase in category conversations was 48,116 here.
Sharing a few snapshots for your reference below.
2. Brand Mentions
Track the increase in brand mentions vs the pre-campaign period.
It’s similar to the above metric, except you track the increase in the number of times a brand was mentioned across community conversations after the campaign was executed.
Aashirvaad Select partnered with Convosight to explore community marketing to understand how their potential consumers perceive their advertisement, drive awareness around packaged atta and their ingredients, and facilitate purchase intent for the product among members.
For the same, Aashirvaad collaborated with 30 communities with over 1.7 million women and homemakers. The campaign was successful and helped achieve all the brand objectives.
Aashirvaad received 3230 mentions across all relevant conversations in these communities.
Since there were no conversations around the brand, the increase in brand mentions would be 3230.
3. Engagement
Keep a tab on the total engagement on campaign which is defined by the number of reactions and comments your brand posts (that include admin posts and distinct UGC posts done across the campaign duration) get in communities.
A good engagement, i.e. the sum of reactions and comments, is a good indicator of things working out for your brand and product.
You can track the engagement based on the community marketing platform you’re running your campaign on.
If we look at Facebook groups, reactions account for like, love, anger, sadness, and wow.
On the other hand, comments are the conversations that happen under the campaign posts.
Have a look at this admin post done in collaboration with Dyson. It got 107 reactions and 158 comments which means the engagement on it is 265.
Add the reactions and comments you received on all campaign posts, i.e. all admin posts and all distinct UGCs to track how your campaign performed.
4. UGC or User Generated Content
This is one of the most essential metrics when tracking the effectiveness of any community marketing campaign, as it gives an idea of the impact your campaign has had.
What is User Generated Content?
UGC or user-generated content is the original, brand-specific content done by customers and potential customers in communities and across social media channels. UGCs may appear in new posts, comments, images, videos, stories, or other such formats.
Have a look at a great user-generated content example below.
OPI, the famous Nail Lacquer brand, partnered with women-only communities on Facebook to announce that their mini nail paints are available on Nykaa, citing their benefits and encouraging members to try them out.
Look at the admin post from one of those communities wherein she shares some nail-care tips while flaunting OPI nail colors on her long, beautiful nails. Towards the end, she encourages members to share their nail care, styling tips, and some pretty nail pictures with OPI nail paint applied to them.
This admin post generated a lot of user-generated content in the community, and here are a few examples.
The above are distinct posts done by community members in response to the admin post.
Track all of these and add them to the total hashtag comments by members on admin posts, and you’ll get your UGC number.
5. Sampling leads
As the name suggests, these refer to the number of leads you get from the surveys you run as a part of your community marketing campaigns.
Simply put, track the total number of members who filled the survey you shared in the communities.
Check out how a community leader, in collaboration with a brand, encourages her members to fill out the survey on salon preferences.
Surveys help you gain some excellent insights into your customers and their preferences. However, do make sure to do a quality check on the leads you received. This would include removing duplicate responses and sifting through incomplete contact details and email addresses.
Ideally, the number you get after doing this hygiene check will be the number of unique leads you received for your survey.
Nestle recently surveyed a few parenting communities for its toddler nutrition drink, i.e. Lactogrow. As a part of it, they collected names, contact details, addresses, and a few other details of the members along with the consent that they are authorizing the brand to send their product to their respective addresses.
6. SOV or Share of Voice
It is an incredibly useful metric that shows how your brand is faring compared to competitors.
What is SOV or Share of Voice exactly?
Share of voice is defined by how often people are talking about your brand vs all other brands in your product category.
How is Share of Voice calculated?
To calculate the share of voice, divide your brand measures by the total market measures.
The formula would be – Number of times your brand was mentioned / Total number of brand mentions x 100
Look out for the total number of brands being talked about in communities in your product category, and then have a percentage distribution of brand conversations across all brands.
For instance, if five brands are typically talked about the most in the hair care category, then Share of Voice breaks down the % distribution of brand conversations across all five brands, giving the brand perspective on how often it’s recommended or being talked about.
Track how often your brand was talked about during the campaign vs the pre-campaign period to measure the campaign’s impact.
Bingo recently partnered with Convosight to drive awareness around its Whacky Face Contest and encourage people to participate. The brand successfully achieved its objectives as there was a huge influx of member posts and a lot of conversations and reactions around the brand, taking the share of voice to 98% as compared to the pre-campaign SOV of 78%.
You can check all about how Bingo did it in this 👉🏻CASE STUDY👈🏻
7. Sentiment Analysis
This is another powerful metric that helps you gauge your customers’ and potential customers’ reactions to your brand or product.
Confused how? Let me share with you in detail:
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing hundreds and thousands of content pieces online and comprehending the emotional tone attached to them – positive, negative, or neutral.
It provides clarity on how satisfied / not satisfied customers are with your product and service.
Here’s an example of positive brand sentiment.
Santoor partnered with Convosight to increase awareness of its Royal Sandal Soap successfully achieved its objective and even achieved 91% positive brand sentiment.
How do you analyze sentiment analysis?
By paying attention to the words used and understanding the emotional context of the person behind that content piece.
For instance, in the above snapshot, the comment reads – “I love the fragrance of soap and really love it.”
The keyword is love here that clearly signifies that the member prefers to use Santoor soap and denotes positive sentiment.
However, please remember that you cannot manually analyze brand sentiment.
Santoor got over 4.4K mentions in their campaign. Now imagine going through each one of them individually to analyze the sentiment! It’s super time-consuming.
This is why you need a tool to measure brand sentiment.
What free tool can be used to measure sentiment?
There are tons of tools out there that can help you measure brand sentiment. The onus is on you to pick the one that best fits your campaign objectives and is aligned with your budget.
You can either choose to opt for a free tool or a paid one.
Since Santoor partnered with Convosight for its community marketing campaign, they got their hands on all relevant metrics through Convosght’s community marketing platform itself.
Have a look below at the word cloud that tells the sentiment for Santoor soap among its customers.
Note: All sentiment analysis tools are 90% accurate. There is no such tool that gives 100% correct analysis.
8. Brand Associations
As the name suggests, this metric refers to the number of conversations that are in any way associated with the brand.
Sharing one such conversation below for your reference where a member talks about ITC products in their conversation.
By calculating the actual number of brand mentions, one must pay attention to and track intent-based conversations and those related to brand benefits.
Intent-Based Conversations: These are the conversations that happen around your products’ usage, purchase, and recommendations.
Brand Benefit Conversations: These are the conversations that talk about one or more benefits of your brand and product.
These conversations make up for some excellent insights that help save your market research costs and allow you to innovate with your products and services as per your customers’ feedback.
How to track all these metrics?
With the help of third-party platforms like Convosight.
Its machine learning powered Conversational Analytics Tool helps track conversations happening in communities based on keywords.
From category conversations, UGCs and brand mentions to sentiment analysis, Convosight helps you track every single one of these metrics.
You can check out this video that explains all about it. 👇🏻
If you’d like to know more about how we can help, please feel free to reach out to us. Our community marketing expert will get in touch with you!
Parting Words
We covered different types of metrics to measure the success of community marketing campaigns.
No matter the type of campaign you’re running in communities, all of these metrics will be crucial, except for sampling leads which are specifically for surveys.
However, do ensure that you collate all these metrics and present them in a dashboard or some other compelling format so that you’re better able to derive insights. Then you must use those insights to make the necessary adjustments to your community marketing strategy and ensure they are better aligned with your business goals.
Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.
Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛
