Great marketing is a mix between creativity and analytics. You can’t know whether you are making smart decisions and using the correct strategies you worked so hard to create without measuring your performance.
This is true for traditional marketing, and it is definitely true for social media marketing.
We get asked all the time: Is ROI important for social media and how do I measure it?
Chances are you are already using social media as a marketing strategy for your business. You may not have a full-time employee working on posts 24/7 but you probably tweet images of your company’s products and engage with your audience.
Good Job! You know that in order to reach your audience social media is where to be.
The problem is that not all social media marketing is equal and not every strategy will fit for your company and provide you a return on your investment. Therefore, you need to track your progress, have clear goals up front and continually monitor your results.
Without this you are just guessing. We like to call this the post and hope. And no one wants the job of trying to find a needle in the haystack.
So which metrics do you track?
Before we tell you which metric is important you must first know your goals. These will drive your strategy, platform, content and what you are hoping to get back for your effort.
Your goals could include:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Growing your brand online
- Increasing your engagement
- Increasing your followers
- Finding leads
- Closing business
And you may have other goals not mentioned above. It is KEY that you figure out what they are so you can assess if your efforts are paying off.
Once you have established your goals you will want to hone in on the metrics that you will track.
1. Social Media Followers – Many marketers dismiss the number of followers based on the fact it seems like a vanity metric. The number of followers is important when you are creating valuable content that you want the masses to see and engage with you on. You will quickly find out the platform that is the most beneficial to your business and spend time growing your fans.
2. Social Media Mentions – Your company will want to begin tracking brand awareness by who is talking about you online. Mentions will include how engaged your users are with your content, the best days and times to share content on social media and what they are saying about your product or service. It is also especially important if you are launching a new product.
3. Top Influencers – We talk about influencer marketing a lot. We know that influencer marketing can help you grow your audience quickly. Monitor the influence of the people talking about you online. There are a ton of good social media listening tools online that can help you rank and score your influencers.
4. Social Platforms that are the most engaging for your industry - This next metric is a little more complex, but that’s not a reason to shy away. We want to prove that social media marketing leads to engagement. But we’re not talking here about likes and retweets – we’re talking about engagement on your website, which is very valuable. If your goals for social media include driving traffic to your website, then of course you should track this. But, beyond simple traffic, it’s valuable to see what those social users are doing once they arrive on your site. Are they engaging with your content, or leaving straight away?
5. Revenue from Social Channels – This is by far the most important metric that your top-level executives will be watching. When you draw a straight line from your social media marketing strategy to the bank, you can guarantee someone will notice. Google Analytics lets you set website goals for each conversion point. From this, you can add a dollar value to each conversion. If you know the source of each conversion you can easily calculate the revenue generated by each source.
You spend a lot of time putting together a social media marketing strategy and executing on it - make sure you have a way to track your successes. StrategyNest can help you reach your digital marketing goals, contact us today.