Tracking Netflix’s Success: ROI & KPIs
Netflix might be the biggest streaming service around the world. With over 371 original shows and movies and counting, the platform continues to make good on its promise to entertain the world. As a company made up of the world’s biggest fans of entertainment, they have one simple goal of helping their subscribers find their new favorite stories, no matter where they live or what language they speak.
With a mission statement like that, Netflix is pursuing its overall goal to be a leader in the international entertainment industry. One of the company’s primary objectives is to deliver exciting content with a global presence. They never want to take their customers for granted and therefore, strive to exceed expectations with their quality content. And when it comes to their award-winning content, Netflix takes the commitment to ensure it brings new perspectives and brings us closer.
Just like any other company or brand, Netflix can track its success by outlining SMART goals, setting key performance indicators (KPIs), and practice social listening.
To establish a great SMART goal, it needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For the current state of the streaming service, a great SMART goal to establish is increasing paid subscribers internationally by 5% by September 30th (the end of 2021’s third fiscal quarter).
With a notorious social media presence, Netflix would easily be able to track social KPIs in order to reach this goal.
One KPI Netflix should consider is reach. While their social presence is doing great to reinforce its part in their subscribers’ life, it’s important to also track reach to see if the company’s content is reaching potential new customers. By tracking posts’ reach, Netflix can see if they are reaching new markets. This might look like promoting content or creating paid ads on social.
The $20 billion streaming service should also track the conversion rate. Conversion rate is an excellent KPI to add to tracking the success of this SMART goal as it tracks a viewer’s journey from social to a website to see if they completed a goal on your site.
Measuring these two KPIs will be able to help Netflix evaluate if their social strategy is helpful in meeting this goal and calculate their return on investment (ROI). And if this is executed well, Netflix might be able to have a high ROI considering tracking reach and conversion rate are inexpensive to do. However, Netflix might also think about putting money behind ads and tracking click-through-rates even though this does not necessarily show if a viewer took any action. The overall goal is for these KPIs is to reach new customers and track to see if they bought a subscription.
Another way to see if this goal is successful is for Netflix to routinely do social monitoring and listening.
While monitoring brand mentions and hashtags, Netflix has the opportunity to take action based on what followers, and non-followers, are saying about them. It’s easy to look at the data but it is important to consider the mood of the people behind it. Understanding and acting on this properly will help Netflix continue to expand its reach.
I suggest that they focus on listening to what is and what isn’t working. There are a plethora of ways to get new customers (or free users) to sign up for paid subscriptions. Trying to see how users are responding to that and adapting the approach will be extremely useful when trying to attain their goal.
Ultimately, if Netflix continues its outstanding social presence and listen to people on social, they should be able to hit this SMART goal easily.
