As I mentioned in “Does Reflective Marketing Include Blog Commenting?” the goal of Reflective Marketing is to build audience. While it’s true that this should be the goal of all marketing a typical link acquisition campaign is not tied to audience metrics. Reflective Marketing strategies look like link acquisition strategies but Reflective Marketing really needs to focus on creating reasons for people to visit your Website. This may be done with or without links. Remember: Reflective Marketing is NEVER about getting links.
What You Can Measure With Reflective Marketing
You can measure a lot of different things in Reflective Marketing. That doesn’t mean you should measure everything possible but you need to know what can be measured so that you can better decide what you should be measuring. Reflective Marketing metrics should be custom-tailored/bespoke for each marketing campaign.
1. Audience Demographics – You need to know who you’re trying to reach, approximately how large an audience they are, and similar data. Compiling an audience demographic profile is necessary for any Reflective Marketing campaign.
2. Audience Reach – Pundits disagree on the importance of using reach as a marketing metric. However, when you have to prioritize your spend for marketing it’s better to put the money where you’ll reach the most potential audience members. Still, you need to be careful to look for something that approximates “True Reach” as many advertising platforms try to put the best possible estimates on the reach their inventory grants you. For example, about the SEO Theory blog receives about 20,000 visitors a month but it most likely only reaches an audience of 5-8,000 people (and I generally assume the core audience is much smaller than that).
3. Audience Share – It’s useful to know how much of your desired potential audience a specific Website reaches. You probably will never gain 100% coverage (there is a great deal of overlap between competing sites’ audiences). However, if you want to “brand” your reflective strategy across the Web then measuring share is not as important as knowing the demographic.
4. Brand Search Queries – Although you may already have strong brand search referral traffic, if you launch a Reflective Marketing campaign you may still see an increase in this kind of traffic. If the traffic declines when your campaign ends that’s a pretty good sign that the spike was due to the Reflective Marketing strategy.
5. Channels – If your Website posts updates to social media services like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, et. al. those are Reflective Channels and the more productive channels you create the better. You could also classify any aggregator Website that republishes your RSS feed (like AllTop or Zebby) as a channel.
6. Coined Expressions – If you can introduce a new term into the popular lexicon then measuring how many people adopt that term gives you an interesting metric to work with. You may be able to track virally-announced brand names this way (no advertising).
7. Direct Referrals – If you placed a link on another Website then this is a simple metric to count, although there are circumstances where the referral data may be stripped so never assume you have a complete count of referrals.
8. Follow Up Articles – Sometimes a really good post or comment inspires someone else to write something about a topic. If they mention what you shared that is an indication of successful Reflective Marketing. You could further refine this metric by analyzing the number of links that you get from the Follow Up Articles (I would count links to reflective placements separately from links pointing directly to your own sites).
9. Indirect Referrals – Harder to measure than Direct Referrals, you can usually estimate part of this value by looking at where people land on your Website. If you see a spike in a content section that is being targeted by a Reflective Marketing campaign that cannot be explained by Direct Referrals or Search that is a pretty good sign of an Indirect Referral spike. Indirect Referrals may also occur in search if people begin using specific queries as a result of your Reflective Marketing.
10. Number of Placements – This is a weak metric, more useful for project management than determining actual marketing success but if you’re conducting an ongoing Reflective Marketing practice (multiple campaigns) it will help you to know which of your placements produced better results. Not only will you reduce duplication of effort you should be able to fine-tune your Reflective Marketing practices to focus on more efficient placements.
11. Secondary Mentions – People who see your Reflective Marketing efforts may mention those outreach instances on their own Websites, forums, or social media networks. This is not an easy goal to realize so tracking this metric produce little to no data. On example of where you would want to use this is if you mention outside your site that you have crafted a solution to a widespread problem and people repeat your announcement.
What You Should Expect for Return on Investment
Since Reflective Marketing builds audience there is a reasonable expectation that it will produce sales or other important conversions. In fact, this is exactly why I turned to Reflective Marketing years ago. After Google repeatedly downgraded my affiliate pages I gave up on generating revenue from search traffic and instead focused on growing non-search traffic for that content. The results were satisfactory; with more inventory I might have stayed in the affiliate game longer.
Aside from conversions you can also measure brand-related value, such as recognition, visitor loyalty, etc. As you build a core audience you’ll be able to offer them additional value in the future, improving the results of new product or service launches.
Reflective Marketing is not a first choice for producing sales or conversions. It should complement your other marketing strategies but you need to tame the beast. If you don’t know what to expect from it then you should watch your metrics carefully and determine if you can successfully build audience through Reflective Marketing. This kind of marketing requires a different skill set from running around the Web and getting links.
Reflective Marketing is NEVER about getting links (even though I said you could measure links in some cases above).
At the end of the day you should be able to show some gain somewhere in your audience profile from Reflective Marketing. If you cannot find the gain then it’s not worth doing (until something changes).
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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Guest Post Link Building: Why It Hurts the Web
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for Non-expert Websites
On-Page Optimization SEO Checklist
SEO Metrics Online: Which Measurements Should You Use?
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