Each firm is unique and their familiarity, experience, and expectations with social media vary as well. Along with an active social media presence, architecture and engineering firms have disparate goals, with some focused on an increase of followers or likes, while others want to see an increase in post frequency and activity. Either way, marketers within and outside of the AEC industry have finally moved on from the notion that you simply just had to have a Facebook or Twitter account. This is where analytics, and the type of measurements needed, become very important in decision-making for your architecture firm’s management and the marketing team.
Why Analytics Are Important for You As a Marketer
- They act as a major driving force behind the creation of a new marketing plan, or simply adjusting a current one.
- They drive action by creating benchmarks and allowing you to set goals, regardless of if they are activity-based or interaction-based.
- They provide guidance on what has and hasn’t been so successful with regards to achieving those goals, allowing necessary changes to be made.
Why Analytics Are Important for Firm Management
- Being able to justify an idea or strategy with concrete data doesn’t just allow your principals to see evidence, but it provides a foundation for communications moving forward.
- Analytics allow you to set realistic goals with principals based on reports and even comparisons with competitors. At times, management may expect an unreasonable amount of followers within a given time and good reporting can illustrate what is possible and on par with benchmarks.
- The frequency that analytics are run and what specific data is gathered is all relative to your management team – and that’s okay! Run reports and share data at intervals that make sense for your firm’s schedule, ensuring that at least monthly the team is looking at current data.
Social media analytics provide answers and drive well-informed dialogue. They allow a marketing team to see why a certain campaign worked or why some channels were more successful than others, just like Google Analytics does for websites. While their use will vary considerably from firm to firm, their importance cannot be overstated.
– Robert Purdy