There is no denying this fact that social media campaigns have become the biggest marketing tool for businesses to create brand awareness. With the rapidly increasing popularity of social media marketing, many businesses are engaged in investing a hefty amount in these campaigns with the hope to enhance conversion rate. However, have you ever notice whether these campaigns paying off your efforts or just putting your investment at the risk? Measuring the success of various campaigns is a core aspect of a marketer’s job. It is important to evaluate, how your marketing efforts are contributing to the business’s bottom line.
While it’s pretty common to know that the majority of online businesses are conducting their social media marketing completely in the dark. Investing in social media campaigns with no clues as to how social media contributes to the success of their business is a great risk. If the truth is told, it’s not entirely their fault, measuring ROI on social media campaigns is a challenging task.
Why Does Measuring ROI on Social Marketing be Troublesome?
Some say that measuring the ROI of social media is just impossible! Like traditional billboard advertising, some businesses throw up their social media campaigns and hope for the leads. Trusting that something good will come from their marketing campaigns is good, but it is important to measure whether they are driving any profit to your business or not.
Tracking and measuring the success of social media campaigns is not as difficult as it may sound. Many companies marketers try to measure social media success through the social channel and determine the metrics including “Likes” and “Comments”. However, business is primarily concerned with website visits, emails, calls, sales and the number of subscribers.
That’s not all! While measuring ROI with social media, it’s important to incorporate other advertising channels as well. If you are using PPC advertising, try accessing social media in terms of cost-per-impression. If you are focusing on lead generation, then try measuring in terms of cost-per-acquisition, and so on. This adds credibility to your efforts and makes it easier to compare social media marketing with other forms of online marketing.
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What are the Best Ways to Measure Your Social Media Efforts?
Measuring the performance of your social media campaigns is never impossible. You just need to know about the right tactics to uncover the real conversions and quantify efforts. Here’s the key to determine real ROI from Social Media Marketing:
1. Have a Clear Objectives
Creating brand awareness through social media (sharing, liking or followers, etc.) is important but not always.
Many businesses believe that their social strategy is connected to business outcomes. So to show value, you need to set social media objectives that are further aligned with business and departmental goals. Your social media objectives should be based on business conversions, brand awareness or perception, Customer experience, security and risk mitigation.
2. Set Your Business Goals
Know what exactly you want to drive from your social media campaigns. Experts recommend using the S.M.A.R.T framework to define your business goal. Each goal must be specif, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.
For example:
Brand Awareness
What it is: Increase awareness of your new product before it launches and takes attention away from your competitors.
How and when to do: Boost your social share voice by 10 percent quarterly.
3. Examine the Right Performance Metrics
To track the performance of your campaigns, you need social media metrics to determine whether you are achieving your marketing objectives and meeting goals. The so-called “Vanity” metrics can help you evaluate the overall health of your social presence and allow you to measure yourself against competitors.
Other metrics you could track to prove ROI including audience reach, audience engagement, site traffic, leads generated, sign-ups and conversions.
4. Know-How Much You Are Spending on Social Media
Before blindly investing in social media, it is worth to determine the scope of your investment and know whether you’re getting a good return. Majorly there are three things that you need to measure your return against Social Media:
Cost of Tools and Performance: While most tools are free to use but do you pay for a premium version to access the additional features of the social media platform. If yes, then, it is worth to evaluate whether it is justified to invest that much amount in premium versions or not.
Fairly Allocation of the Budget: The easiest things to track is the cost of each ad. While all the cost has been recorded in the platform’s dashboard, though, you can easily manage each campaign and measure ROI from a single platform.
Content Creation: From meetings to creating and promoting content, to running ads- include the cost of every minute that your team is spending on social media. Calculate how much time your business spends on social media every month or year to know whether they are paying off your efforts or not.
5. Use Social Media ROI Tools
To evaluate the ROI on your social media, it is worth to know about the right tools that drive you right results:
Social ROI Calculator: It is a free tool that helps you calculate your return. From knowing total facebook visits from campaign, landing page conversion rate to close rate, you can evaluate everything.
Google Analytics: Track website traffic, conversions and sign-ups from social media campaigns with this tool.
Facebook Pixel: It is a piece of code for your website that allows you to track conversions from Facebook ads including everything from leads to sales.
