Defining Successfully Executed Tactics

There is no single measure of a successful tactic. Tactics can vary wildly from one community to the next. You can, however, use a relatively simple process that was outlined earlier.

A successful tactic will reach a large percentage of the target audience, have a considerable impact on the audience, and have a lasting impact upon the audience. To measure this, we need some rough proxy metrics.

You usually don’t need to be precise here. Just get a rough idea if the tactic did reach a large percentage of people, whether it impacted those people, and whether it lasted for a long time.

1. Reach. This is the easiest to measure. You identify what percentage of the targeted audience was reached by the tactic. You might define this as views, contributions, or any proxy metric which would best correlate with reach. The most important thing to remember here is we’re looking at the percentage of people reached, not the absolute number. Fifty people attending a webinar might look bad, unless it’s the fifty top community members you were trying to reach. Most tactics that fail simply didn’t reach enough people. So, the first thing you want to measure is whether the tactic reached a significant (usually >50%) of the target audience you were trying to reach.
2. Depth. Now you need a metric which correlates with depth of the tactic. Depth is the degree to which it impacted each individual. This is a hard measure without undertaking surveys of each tactic. So, you can use a simpler proxy along the lines of rating, average time on page, repeat visits to page, questions asked, responses to the CTA, etc. Your goal is to find out if the tactic affected the people who were reached by it.
3. Length. The third thing to measure is the longevity of the tactic. There are two types of longevity. The first type is when it it affects members reached for a long period of time. This might lead to a sustained change in behavior. The second type of longevity is when the tactic is popular for a long time. This means it continues to attract a large percentage of people (these might not be the same people). Very often, the tactics which show sudden success lose popularity quickly, whereas the unknown tactics gradually scale and become increasingly popular in the long run. At this stage, we want to know how long the tactic was valuable for.

Tactics to avoid are those which are popular with a tiny percentage of members. Unless this tiny percentage precisely reflects the people you want to reach, these tactics are usually a bad idea. Yet, they can often appear very successful because you’re getting positive feedback from the small percentage of people they do reach.

Likewise, tactics which appear popular by reach but have no depth (high bounce rates, low follow throughs) suggest it’s not great.

Finally, any tactic which does not have a big impact might be easy to cut.

Analysis Of Videos

Now you can analyze why the videos did or did not succeed. We are specifically looking at the execution here. This means the planning stages. The typical questions to answer here might be:

1. Were the videos well promoted? Here we look at how promotion of the videos compared with other promotions. This is simple benchmarking. What were the open, click-through and sign-up rates like for the videos compared with similar activities? This will tell us if the promotion of the videos differed in any significant way. Were they promoted better or worse than any other activity?
2. Did the audience like the videos? This can be shown in the ratings of the videos or the length of time they were watched. You might compare this against similar videos or simply ask the audience to rate whether they liked the video, found it useful, and provide any other useful feedback. These are proxy metrics.
3. Did the videos have the intended impact? This is done by experiment. You can measure the friend connections of experts before the video runs and then after the video to see the impact.

This analysis will reveal why the tactic was or wasn’t well executed. You can also gather additional information in terms of resources or effort.

If the video didn’t reach many people, was it badly promoted? If the audience didn’t like the video, was this because they didn’t find it useful or because it was badly made? If it didn’t have the impact, was this because they didn’t consider the person an expert?

Using the example below, you can see that the video still had a high CTR (click through rate). This suggests that the audience is receptive to videos. However, the video had a much lower average viewing time than other videos. This suggests it’s something about the video itself. Notably, the 17 seconds suggests that something within the first 17 seconds was the problem.

This lets us draw on some useful insights. Namely, that an easy fix would be to create a more exciting introduction to the videos that hooks people. This might involve skipping the introduction and diving straight into the single most important piece of advice shared by experts.