Your school’s social media marketing is not just about creating content and posting it online – it’s also about evaluating your content to see what works and orientating it towards your target objectives. Social media marketing should not be based on intuition, but on a continuous process of refinement. You should check if your social media strategy is generating engagement, whether it be in the form of comments, enquiries or site visits. In order to improve the delivery of your social media content, you must be able to measure the degree of success of your previous and current social media content.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that determine the degree of success of your school’s marketing activities. While there are many metrics that can be found in your social media analytics, you only need the ones that correspond to your school marketing strategy. It is your role as a school marketer to identify which KPIs you need to monitor regularly in order to gauge your progress. While there is no general rule on which KPIs should be prioritised, you can discern which ones matter the most as you proceed with your social media marketing initiatives.
Here are four steps you can take to determine your school’s social media marketing KPIs.
Identify your school brand
What is your school brand, and is it being reflected properly by your staff, facilities, students and parents? By knowing your school’s mission statement and core values you will be able to determine which direction you must take with your school marketing, identify the objectives you need to reach and develop a strategy to attain them. You can succeed in crafting, observing and attaining the best KPIs with a clear understanding of your school and where it’s going.
Study your existing metrics
You will need to take a look at all the metrics your school is currently tracking. From there, you will be able to see which metrics will be crucial as your KPIs. In order to determine this, you must view each one of them in line with your school marketing strategy. Keep in mind that not all metrics are important to achieve your goals, and having too many metrics can complicate your evaluation and make you lose your focus.
Get everyone involved
Determining your KPIs is a team-oriented process, since your school values must align with the goals and aspirations of the staff. It’s essential to have your staff members work together in the right direction. Each staff member must not only know what your KPIs mean, but also identify what roles they must play in order to reach them. By working as a unit, you can easily develop your KPIs and achieve them.
Refine and review your KPIs regularly
It’s important to periodically check your KPIs to determine if they need to be met or omitted. Whether your school is heading in a new direction or the marketing landscape has faced a dramatic change – there are many reasons why the KPIs you choose to measure against might change. Reviewing your KPIs is as equally important as reviewing your school marketing strategy regularly.
As school marketers, it’s essential to see the big picture and observe how your marketing strategies work in light of your KPIs. Your social media initiatives and goals are important components of your school marketing strategies, and they begin to be attainable once you establish and align with the proper KPIs.
