Social Media Marketing and Return on Investment - ITechnical World

No business wants to invest in something that doesn't convert well. The connection between Social Media Marketing and ROI has been widely discussed. A recent IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) study shows that businesses' return on social media investment can reach 334%. Here are our best tips for calculating ROI on Social Media Marketing!

Measuring media investments is very important and is no longer an option. You need to prove how your content marketing efforts support your business goals.

Social media marketing has evolved from a marketing experience to a core business strategy. In addition, social media has become a very valuable channel that competes for budget and resources with other channels. That's why measuring your Social Media return on investment has become mandatory. You need to prove the value added by the work done.

The beauty of digital marketing efforts is that everything is measurable. When you measure everything, you can learn not only conversion, but also which activities provide the highest conversion and how you can improve the results over time.

The Internet Advertising Bureau ( IAB ) recently conducted a study on ROI on Social Media Marketing for brands. They concluded that social media campaigns deliver 3.34 times (334%) more ROI. In addition, 80% of the target audience to whom the campaign was applied was more inclined to buy the control group's campaign brand that was not shown or recommended this brand to others .

The Power of Social Media

ROI in Social Media Marketing has by now been one of the most common topics on blogs and discussion boards. As companies learn more about social media marketing; Naturally, they will want the potential rewards of developing the advertising and public relations strategies they have in place.

Another priority point mentioned in the relevant conversations is the problems with accurate measurement. One of the pros of social media is that everything is measurable, but the difficult part is determining which activities or combinations lead to sales.

You can learn more about Social Media activity planning here: How to Make a Social Media Marketing Plan?

Branding vs. Selling

Many people think that creating Social Media profiles and blogging will support branding campaigns so that effective results will only increase brand awareness . Others focus on online conversions and pay attention to where the contact points that enable conversion are located. From a sales or marketing perspective, it's very difficult to find out how these intangibles lead to sales if you don't have the right measurement tools.

The biggest problem is summarized by Jason Falls, founder of Social Media Explorer: “The problem with trying to discover ROI in Social Media Marketing is trying to give numerical values ​​​​versus human interactions and dialogues that are not measurable . It is more effective to see other network members as residential areas rather than as a mass.”

What is the Return on Investment in Social Media Marketing?

Return on Investment in Social Media Marketing can be defined as the efficiency measurement of your Social Media investments, business target issues.

So if you know the variables, the math is easy. The difficulty we explained above is that social media is difficult to measure because it is intangible. The investment part of the equation should be easy to estimate, but to calculate return on investment, one must give a value for net profit as well as investment. The financial outcome is the pinnacle of any investment, so social media net profit should be included as a numerical outcome in the equation.

Anyone who has tried social media marketing knows that it is easy to measure social engagement (likes, comments, shares), reach and clicks from your website. Likewise, you can measure the results of a campaign from the number of newsletter sign-ups, downloads, lead generation and conversions on the e-commerce site. So what is the value of branding and how can your social media campaign help the entire sales process?

You will find the answer to this by analyzing your campaign. If there is an increase in your income while all your other activities continue the same, you can attribute this to your social media activities. As your analysis or analysis tools improve, you will be able to measure your social media net profit in the long term.

Just as you take your media budget into account when evaluating your social media investments, you should also include labor, software, development and agencies. In some cases you may need to focus on just your delta cost or all of these costs.

You can learn more about the true cost of Social Media marketing in this article: The Cost of Social Media Marketing to Businesses

Why is Calculating Return on Investment Important?

As we explained at the beginning, no business invests in something that cannot achieve conversion. In many companies, there are often multiple projects competing for budget. If you want to be taken seriously or have your social media investments green-lit, it's crucial to be able to document the transformation.

Easy to say; But what really matters is being able to prove it. Nothing will help convince your partners more than showing you social media ROI accounts.

And there are many reasons like this:

• Adding your social media value to all your business goals.
• Social media campaigns and determining your strategy
• You will be able to compare the value involved compared to your investment.
• Analytics shows you where your social media budget is most effective, which activities generate the lowest ROI, and what you should and shouldn't be doing.
• It allows you to close the gaps in the delivery of your main message in your content production.
  

  
  
  
  
  

Planning Your Social Media Goals

In order to fully measure your Social Media Marketing transformation, you should set goals that match your business's goals. You should know which key values ​​you need to measure.

If your main goal is to increase online orders on your e-commerce site, you may still want to keep track of many other factors that will generate leads, increase traffic to your website, and increase your earnings. In order to accurately measure the effects of Social Media Marketing, you should make sure to separate the returns from other traffic sources (search engines, e-mail, etc.).

You should also be able to filter the organic traffic that came without your campaign . This way you can set a historical baseline and appropriate targets for improvement. Here are examples of typical Social Media measurement criteria:

• Reach (how many people saw your ad)
• Traffic to your website
• customer acquisition
• Registration and conversions
• Profit earned

You can learn more about Social Media Marketing planning in this article: Improve Your Digital Strategy in 5 Steps

Make sure your website is ready

Make sure your website is ready before starting your campaign. Are the correct analytics code, pixels, tags and cookies loaded? Is the landing page you prepared for your campaign working properly? Does it work well on mobile devices? Is the loading time on mobile less than 3 seconds?

It is vital to make sure that your website performance is working well. Remember, when you use social media marketing, you attract 75% to 80% of mobile users to your site. Traffic from search engines still comes from desktop rather than mobile for now.

To get maximum return, your campaign should lead to a landing page specifically designed for it. You can learn more about landing pages in this article:  How to Create Impressive Landing Pages.

Your website speed is also very important. A recent study by KissMetrics shows that 40% of mobile users immediately exit the site when it takes more than 3 seconds to load . This means that if your website is slow, you are throwing away 40% of your marketing budget. What a loss!

You can learn more about the marketing benefits of a fast website in this article: Your Website Speed ​​May Be Losing You Money

Analyzing Your Performance

Now we're ready for the fun part, but first we need to decide on adding analysis tools that will measure the success of your campaign. All social media networks offer insights that can help you about the overall progress of your campaign, such as its communication with your audience, reach, likes, follows, comments, shares and clicks. It also shows your cost per click!

You can get your biggest analysis data from your website. And there are great tools you can use for this. Here are some tools you might consider:

Google Analytics is essential and free to use: Google Analytics can give you a lot of valuable information, including conversion and social media tracking. You have a tremendous set of options and details, which is more than enough for many companies.

HubSpot Marketing: HubSpot offers a marketing software service that anyone looking to use social media for marketing should check out. The CRM solution is free. But the good features are in paid marketing software. This includes an easy-to-use interface for all analysis data.

Hootsuite Analysis: Hootsuite offers great software that will make the life of the social media marketer easier. The simple version is free. And by paying a little fee, you can get very nice analysis features.

There are also many other great tools you can use such as Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAS, MailChimp.

Let the Fun Begin!

Now everything is in place to calculate ROI on Social Media Marketing. You're ready to get started! You should constantly monitor your analysis and monitor whether you are meeting your goals. Constantly means checking it for an hour at the beginning of the campaign and then at least once a day until your campaign ends.

Constantly test until you find a strategy that works for you. Our own research shows that by changing simple elements in a campaign, results can be three times better. (Effective Landing page, visual, ad copy, calls to action, etc.)

You should be able to constantly measure your social media marketing activities. This way, you'll never have trouble proving the value of your marketing campaigns again. Additionally, if you wish, Cloudnames can manage it for you.

What do we do at Cloudnames?

Cloudnames is a digital agency that can help you with everything you need to be the best online. We can manage your digital strategy, website, social media accounts, digital marketing efforts, sales and marketing automation and all such complex technical details on your behalf, and help you achieve effective growth that increases your income.

We take over the management of your website and ensure its security and updates at regular intervals. However, we can manage all the digital marketing efforts you need, such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, etc.

Other articles that might interest you

• How to Reduce Facebook Ad Spending?
• Achieve Higher Conversion Than Your Competitors
• Social Media vs Traditional Media

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