Leverage Your Customers For Growth Let your customers measure success for you and you'll have a better idea of how to reach your goals.

If you don't want your business's spurts of success to end up just a flash in the pan, you need to measure your business progress against your goals. This allows you to adjust your plans for future success accordingly. But how?

Back in the nineties, NASA designed an interplanetary weather satellite to orbit Mars. However, it deviated from its planned trajectory and was destroyed in the atmosphere, simply because of a minor miscalculation; a result of the NASA team and their contractor using different systems of measurement.

By the same token, business owners need to determine what metrics to use to measure their progress, before they can work out what still needs to be adjusted to get them to their ultimate goals. Many businesses know this, but many don't know they're doing it wrong.

Connect with customers

Most organisations use the same key performance indicators such as sales, customer retention, and product quality to track their progress. What's the problem with this picture? They're measuring where they are now in relation to where they were before, leaving the question of where they want to be, and how to close the gap, to guesswork.

Why waste time testing one strategy after another when you can find all your answers in one place: With your current and prospective customers? They'll tell you exactly where to aim and what to do to get there. This is why customer surveys are the proverbial toolkit of business progress tracking.

A customer survey is simply a series of questions that you ask your customers, to gauge their satisfaction, so you can hold on to them and collect ideas about how to improve your business offerings. There are a number of ways to distribute these surveys, but it's no surprise that social media is trumping phone calls, text messages and emails as the preferred platform for customers to communicate with businesses and brands.

Viable customers

What you choose to ask your customers is entirely dependent on what goals you wish to outline and track. That's the easy part, but it's significantly harder to gauge the effectiveness of social media campaigns like these because you need to know what to look for.

You can measure awareness using metrics like volume, reach, exposure and amplification. Retweets, comments and replies will tell you how engaging your content is, and you can keep an eye on traffic by tracking URL shares, clicks and conversions. Plus, there is a plethora of additional plug-ins to this from ORM and sentiment tracking tools for deeper analysis of this data.

The catch is that in the past, businesses had to compete for space — on billboards, in magazines, during ad breaks on TV — but now it's all about timing. So the first challenge is making sure your social media post questions are being seen by as many of your customers as possible. On the flip side of the coin, people don't have to have any previous experience with your brand to interact with you on social media, so another challenge is calculating which of your respondents are actually viable customers.

Leverage your data

You'll need to tap into the analytics that speak to who your followers are, and then focus on finding ways of channelling them on social media, based on their geographical location and the kind of content they are most likely to consume. Then test your social media measurements against your key performance indicators. Yes, we're back where we started, but this time you'll be armed with what you need to leverage this data, in order to achieve your business goals.