In 2020, managing your social media metrics is one of the driving forces for any Consumer Packing Goods (CPG) company looking to retain higher engagement on their social channels. Brands understand that today’s shoppers are making purchasing decisions based on their experiences. Whatever the value is in the product, brands need to know how to connect with shoppers by their packaging, quality, and mission to get shoppers to buy.
According to McKinsey & Company, only 39% of consumers feel financial pressure today, compared with 77% in 2009. Understanding that fewer consumers are cutting back on spending shows that there’s more room for opportunities to create meaningful experiences for customers, and social media is the perfect platform to create that connection.
However, the first step is to get a clear, straightforward attribution of your social media KPIs — which can be difficult for any CPG marketer diving into social media for the first time. Here are the main social media KPIs to get you started.
7 Important Social Media KPIs for CPG Companies
Interactions: The number of interactions that a page or post receives and the types of interactions (likes, comments, and shares).
Interactions per 1,000 Followers (Interactions per mile): It is the total sum of interactions (likes and comments) divided by the number of followers a profile had at the time of the post and multiplied by 1000. This identifies how engaging the post is.
Reach: The total number of people who saw any given post since it went live. The higher the reach, the more people know about your brand (theoretically).
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The number of clicks on any given post (%). You can measure the actual success of a given piece and align your branding with the interests of the audiences.
Cost-per-Click (CPC): The cost of each click on a paid post and the average spend required to generate one click from your audience on paid content.
Cost-per-Action (CPA): The cost of any specific action related to a promoted post or story (likes, comments, etc.). CPA can be calculated as budget spend for a given post divided by the number of actions taken via that post.
Likes, Comments, and Shares on Paid Content: One of the paid social media metrics that are truly vital is paid content engagement. It’s important here to note that we do not mean likes, comments and shares you have paid for, but on paid promoted posts. Genuine engagement on your paid content, on the other hand, points to well-targeted content that attracts and engages your audience.
Engaging Instagram Posts in the CPG Industry
Measuring social media performance metrics is critical for maximizing brand awareness on social media. By analyzing social key performance indicators, you can optimize content to maximize social effectiveness, resulting in increased interactions and engagement rates. Reaching a larger and more engaged audience will increase consumer recognition of your brand.
During Q4 of 2019, @SlimJim has dominated the Instagram sphere compared to most CPG food profiles worldwide. Even though Slim Jim doesn’t have the largest following and they didn’t post as much Wilton Cake, Slim Jim’s top post gained over 150k interactions.
Therefore, sometimes quality is better than quantity. But to get higher interactions and engagement, you have to focus on your content. And to do that, you can easily start by developing a content strategy that can hook your audience and boost your engagement.
Digital Spend in the CPG Industry
In order to increase your reach, most CPG brands turned to paid ads to gain an advantage against their competitors. Throughout last year, the evolution of CPC has a steady upward incline toward the end of the year.
This is a normal trend in the CPG industry due to customers searching and buying more during the holiday season; therefore generally, CPC will naturally increase. However, entering the social media paid sphere can be challenging, especially when you’re investing more money to get a better reach. With a solid plan and in-depth research into your social campaigns, you can benchmark where you stand and make accurate budget decisions.
In addition, according to the relative spend of last quarter, most of the relative spend goes toward Facebook feed, which is 34.11 p.p. higher than spending on IG feed. To target the right audience on Facebook, you can create audience marketing personas to truly understand your audience.
The Takeaway
Marketers for CPG brands are constantly concerned with how consumers recognize and perceive their brand. And as nearly every marketer would agree, the best way to gather this information is by understanding the perceptions of a consumer on a personal level. And social media presents the opportunity to do just that.
With the proper social media metric tool, CPG marketers can take it one step further and quantify the increase in social brand awareness, boost engagement, and achieve the results they need!
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
