Are you stuck or have you noticed that you haven't made any progress with your business or page for a while? Then it's a good idea to collect baseline data. We'll explain what this entails and how to do it best in this article.
What is a Baseline Measurement?
In short, it is a photo or overview of the current situation within your organization or page. So, when you choose to conduct your baseline measurement, you go through all the points that are important to your organization and measure them. For certain subjects, you will need to formulate a number of questions that provide a clear picture of how your organization is currently structured and how it operates, what people think of it, and how it is generally being reacted to.
You can formulate the following questions for this:
- On which platform is your target audience located?
- What is being said online about your organization?
- Where is your organization being talked about?
- What kind of people are talking about your organization?
- What online reputation have you built?
Additionally, it is also important to map out the above-mentioned points of your competitors. Where are your competitors doing well? and what are they focusing on?
When you know what the competitor is focusing on, you also know where the opportunities lie for your organization.
The previous questions were there to be able to sketch a certain picture of your organization, it is also very important that we can measure a number of points. Such as how many followers you currently have, how many monthly visitors come to your blog, and for example, do you receive comments on your posts?
- How many followers do you have on your social media channels?
- How many email subscribers do I have on the newsletter?
- How many likes do your Instagram posts average?
- How many monthly visitors does your website have?
- How often is your article or product shared?
Now that you have a clear picture of where you stand with your organization and where your opportunities lie compared to the competitors, we will continue with setting goals.
Where do you want to go? How many likes do you want to have? What kind of customers do you want to attract?
Write down these goals for yourself, clearly when you want to achieve these goals and try to detail them as much as possible (SMART).
Results
You have agreed with yourself when you wanted to have achieved the goals, when this moment arrives, take the questions again and fill them in again.
Now that you have put this in a clear overview, you can easily see which goals you have achieved and which ones you haven't. In addition, you have gained some clear insights into what works for your organization and what doesn't.
For the goals you haven't achieved, it is now important to create a plan of action. Why have I not achieved this goal? What can ensure that I will achieve this?
A baseline measurement of your business ensures that you gain insight into the processes of your website or social media platforms. When making a baseline measurement, it is important that you are critical of the results, but also clearly formulate the goals.