The Social Marketer’s

GUT CHECK GUIDE

Introduction
This guide explains how to proceed when it’s time for your mid-quarter, mid-year, or mid-
week gut check. How well are you proceeding towards your plan, and how can you go
beyond feeling to knowing?

You’ll also learn how to run competitive analysis to understand how you’re measuring up, use
listening to find new audiences and move to “gutcheck plus,” and report into the rest of your
organization in a way that matters to them.

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 Gut Check: Your Own Performance
First thing’s first. Look inside. What’s going on with your brand? How are you performing--by
the numbers, not just your feelings, instinct, and assumptions?

Step 1: Track Your Year-Over-Year Performance

If you don’t pay attention to year-over-year progress, you’ll never understand how your brand
is progressing (or not) over the long run.

So, what can your brand do to improve–and get a greater return on investment for your efforts?

It’s better that you see this growth or lack thereof now, so you can optimize and adjust your
programs and reach or exceed last year’s performance.

If you are already keeping track of year-over-year performance, make sure you’re drilling
down into specific weeks, days, and holidays, too. That’s the next level of analysis you need
for a true gut check, allowing you to make concrete progress and remember learnings from
last year.

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Use Excel or Google Sheets to set up your year-over-year performance charts for whichever
metrics matter to your business, and keep track of monthly performance progress moving
forward. This will be especially helpful when setting goals in the future: you’ll know what
to expect during certain times of the year and industry events, and how to react to known
“lull” periods.

Step 2: Track Progress Towards Your Goals Now

How many days are left in your campaign

or quarter? What did you forecast? Are
those forecasts turning out to be accurate?

It’s time to face the music, make some

changes, and maybe even alert your boss
that things aren’t going according to plan
and you’ll need to make some aggressive
shifts (more ad spend, greater posting
frequency, investment in offline events and activities, partnership opportunities, expansion into
a different social channel, more of an integrated approach with your email or web team) to hit
those goals you set for yourself and your brand.

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 Gut Check: Your Competitors
Next, it’s time for your competitive gut check. On social, we have unprecedented insight
into the successes and failures of our competitors. This means we can use simple analysis to
identify and replicate competitors’ successes, avoid their mistakes, and understand how we
stack up against our biggest competitors at all times.

Step 1: Choose Your Competitors to Measure Against

Remember that the brands you benchmark against don’t necessarily have to be competitors
for dollars in the bank, or even within your industry: they can be competitors for a certain
brand voice or visual association you are trying to foster with your target audience. Your
target audience only has so many hours in the day to interact with brands on their social
feeds; you want to make sure your brand is front and center, and, if it’s not, understand why.

Running competitive analysis on the brands you choose to benchmark against helps you
understand where you’re advanced and where you’re falling behind. It also expands your
access to data about your target customer, helping you understand what these folks react well
to, what they ignore, and what they straight-up dislike–so you can create better content and
conversions in the future.

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Step 2: Make a List of Which Tactics Are Working

Which tactics are working for your competitors? Write them down so you don’t forget. Keep
a running list. Make an appointment on your calendar to do this exercise every month. In the
doc, take note of the total engagement each competitor received for the post or campaign.
This can help you prioritize between different tactics that you want to try. This is a great
exercise for onboarding and training less junior social marketers in your organization to have
a more analytical eye.

Step 3: Apply What You’ve Learned

What’s the point of analysis if you can’t use it?

Try one new tactic that your competitors are finding success with per month (at the
very least)

Present your competitive analysis to your larger marketing organization monthly to

keep your team posted on the latest developments

Run at least one counter campaign per year based on your competitive information,
and have visual collateral and copy ready so you can deploy quickly

Keep track of your “Top 10” per week: the top ten posts on each social channel
you’re active on between you and your competitors. Make it a goal to fill this entire
“Top 10” with your own posts by the EOQ

Check out what your competitors did during specific holiday seasons last year as you
are planning your campaign this year. Consider both social analysis and press pickup

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Thinking of starting or growing your influencer marketing program? Use your competitors
to understand which kinds of influencers you should focus on, which channels you should
use for influencer marketing, and what your benchmarks should look like as you proceed.

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 Gut Check: Your Creativity Levels
If I ask you “Are you being as creative as you can be?”, what is your immediate response?
Let’s give your social marketing program a little creative boost.

Step 1: Start Listening

Listening gives your brand insight into your

audience’s identity, location, and earned
conversations across all relevant social channels
so that you can produce the right content and
post it on the right channels for maximum impact
on awareness and engagement.

Listening allows you to answer the following questions:

Themes can expose purchase intent and preferences for product “flavors”

Keywords can tell you which terms people are associating with your brand or industry

Sentiment Analysis can tell you whether the commentary around your brand or chosen topic
is skewing positive or negative right now

Who is talking about my brand and competitors?

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Identify influencers and activate them to grow your share of voice against competitors

Understand detailed demographics and psychographics so you know who your audiences
are and how to better relate to them

Where are people talking and engaging?

Identify regional or geographic trends in social conversation to better target campaigns

Step 2: Put Together an Insights Doc

This is where you compile all the insights you’ve learned about your customer and your brand
perception in the marketplace.

Step 3: Book a Meeting

Get more brains in the room. Book a meeting with your marketing team to go over your
results and brainstorm future campaign ideas based on these ideas.

Step 4: Turn Brainstorm into Actions

Action items, here we go. What are you going to do with these insights from eavesdropping
on your audience or soon-to-be-audience? Challenge yourself to build a whole campaign
around these findings, and keep track of your results when compared on non-listening-
informed campaigns you’ve deployed in the past.

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 Gut Check: Your Reporting System
Do you have a set-in-stone reporting cadence and system? Do you know why you have the
goals you have, or why you’re working towards certain numbers? Have you really thought this
through in a business-minded way (like the other marketing sectors of your org do)?

Step 1: Choose Your Goals Well

Choose goals that matter to your business, not just the health of your social media profiles.

One of the most difficult elements of developing a social media marketing plan is defining
success and the metrics which will represent that success. There are an assortment of numbers
to choose from that range from the much maligned “vanity” metrics to advanced data, like
Lifetime Value of a customer: Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC).

With many options and little precedent, a lot of marketers and social media managers are left
asking, “Where do I start?”

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First, and most importantly, you need to establish the ultimate bottom line goal. This goal can
come in the form of something like increasing sales or generating leads or lowering customer
acquisition costs or simply building brand reputation.

No matter what you choose, the goal must then be tied to a numerical value, a deadline, and
support your larger marketing strategy.

Step 2: Choose Your Metrics

Which metrics show you that you are reaching those goals you set in step 1? The next phase
in the process is to build out the objectives that will result in your ultimate goal, when tied
together. One example can be in the form of sales, where these objectives may be aligned
with the typical sales funnel of driving awareness, consideration, purchases, and retention
from social audiences (aka social selling).

For instance, a goal can be decreasing the cost of acquisition through social media by 5%
within one year. Then, your objectives will branch out from what’s necessary to achieve this
goal over the time allotted.

From here, your metrics will be applied to track success on a micro-level.

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Step 3: Set a Consistent Reporting Cadence

Have a consistent reporting cadence, and one “source of truth” document available to
your whole team where your goals and metrics live. This will keep expectations and results
transparent.

Let’s say you’re presenting/reporting monthly. Your report deck should include four slides at
the very minimum:

Your Purpose: Your goals for the month, in the context of the marketing org’s goals

Your Value: The value you drove and results you saw

Overall Progress: Putting your metrics/campaigns/month in context

Next Month: List what you learned from the data and how you’re putting this knowledge
to work next month (AKA your action items).

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Conclusion
You’ve done the right thing. You’ve asked the tough questions. You’ve been honest with yourself.
You’ve given yourself a proper gut check. More than a gut check. Let’s call it gut check plus.

And now you know how to fill the common gaps which so many social marketers struggle with.
Or you’re patting yourself on the back for finding no gaps at all, because you’re that one in a
million marketers who has the perfect campaign development and measurement system set up.
But, chances are, you’re one of the rest of us. Now it’s time to get better, one step at a time.

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