Benchmarks

For social media, first and foremost, I believe the benchmarks must be purposeful in how they relate to the business. For example, my brand runs quarterly sweepstakes. We utilize these sweepstakes in a variety of ways - off- and online - to drive awareness to the brand, and engage, excite, and interact with our consumers.

Throughout the sweeps, we run online advertising campaigns, employ QR codes on the POS at retail, send communication through our email blasts, and talk about the sweeps in our conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

All of these items are tracked - how many clicks and when; how many scans; of those who opened the email blasts, who clicked on the sweeps link; how many people responded to/liked the conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Then, evaluating those numbers against the number of overall people who actually signed up for the sweepstakes will allow a broad overview of how effective each of the connection points were. Ultimately, this information informs the base, or our starting point.

From there, we establish communication and promotion strategies that will improve upon our previous results. Those strategies are then, in turn, communicated as benchmarks for what we think is realistically achievable and (maybe, more importantly) what is within the budget.