Is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Effective? Here’s How You’ll Know

With more than 50 million businesses owning a Facebook Business Page and 94 percent of B2B organizations relying on LinkedIn for content marketing and distribution, it is clear that social media is continuing to grow.

With so many new businesses breaking into Social Media, it is no wonder they can often times feel overwhelmed and find it hard to determine the impact it is having for their business.

Let’s review some key steps to building a social media strategy that results in definite ROI.

Social Media ROI Definition

ROI is getting a return. Obvious, right?

But when it comes down to how to calculate social media ROI, it isn’t just the result of revenue minus expenses.

ROI is value received in return of an investment.

• Customer lifetime value: Transactions —  sales
• Customer referral value: Referrals — leads, traffic
• Customer influence value: Word of mouth — branding, reach
• Customer knowledge value: Information — market research

You might be interested to know that engagement is the social media metric most important to respondents of Search Engine Journal’s 2017 state of digital survey.

If it is, then it’s time to set your Social Media goals.

How to Determine Social Media ROI

You need to know where your audience is most active and the platform they are using. You need to evaluate your internal resources and Then understand the investment of time and energy for quality updates.

Once you have your setup, then you determine what is the ROI — understanding your goal and what you’re getting out of it. Then you can understand the return. Here are a few tips to help you figure it out:

1. Know your social media goal.

What’s your reason for jumping on social media. Is it realistic?

From driving leads, sales, and traffic to automating or scaling customer service to information gathering, a social media campaign may make a lot of sense.

There are many different goals that will influence how you utilize social media as a whole, such as:

By the way, obtaining information from your current or potential customers is a commonly overlooked goal. And I urge you not to forget the value of data.

2. Align your social media activity to your resources.

For this step, you should absolutely look inward.

Better ROI might come from not having to hire a new person for Facebook.

Developing your social media strategy is more than throwing a body on an initiative and hoping it comes out well.

3. Reality check the social channel.

Snapchat’s growth has become stagnant, down to around 2 percent quarter to quarter, as of Q1 2018. With Instagram growing to become one of the most popular social networks worldwide, it seems only a matter of time before they replace Snapchat all together.

Facebook Pages are becoming less visible. A recent Facebook News Feed algorithm update reduces the chances for Facebook Page content to be seen as much in the organic News Feed. Depending on how things progress, traffic from Facebook could continue to dwindle.

Obviously, developing a strategy for a platform in its sunset days doesn’t make sense for ROI.

At the end of the day, you’ve started with a clear goal in sight and designed a campaign that matched your goal to your audience to a channel and your resources.

You put tracking in place and assigned a value to your metric. With the performance data rolling in and everything in front of you, you can ask the question: Did this campaign show ROI?

Say, for example, your goal was traffic and your campaign ran on Facebook. You posted content combining statistics and great images. As a result you got a 2-3 times increase in website page views over the lifetime of the campaign. That’s a campaign that demonstrated ROI.

Source: Inc.