Social media is not about just sales, it’s also about awareness. With so many metrics, we often get confused as from where we should start.
It has been almost a decade since the inception of Facebook, but still we get social media ROI wrong. Majority of marketers think that ROI is a metric, but actually, it is not.
According to a survey conducted by Demand Metrics, it has been observed that 70% of the organizations in the study are clueless about the ROI.
For getting good returns on your “investments”, you need to have a solid content strategy which would enable more interactions to happen thereby leading to more buzz around your brand, which in the end would provoke people to check out your product/service.
ROI (in financial terms) is basically net profit divided by costs. But, when we talk about social media ROI, the dynamics change. And, social media is the most measurable marketing component of your entire marketing strategy.
How should brands proceed?
First and foremost, it is highly critical to post relevant and meaningful content on the social profiles thereby pushing engagement level with the audience.
Here are a few pointers which would give you a clear picture about Social Media ROI
ROI doesn’t mean Sales
Let’s take an example of an e-commerce website whose ultimate goal is to get people from the social media channels to their online store; in short, they want to track the conversion rate.
The strategy changes when they do not get enough conversions and hence they reduce their social media budget. Is that the right approach?
No, I guess. Social media tells you a lot about your customers – What they like, What they dislike, which would in turn help any brand(irrespective of its industry) to gather insights about their audience and hence optimize their offerings thereby making their products/services more relevant which would definitely end up in sales.
Thinking Social Media ROI is related only to direct sales will be a blunder as social media channels gives you a lot more than just sales.
Social Media ROI is not measurable
Who says so? You can easily use a social media analytics tool to find out the sentiment opinion towards your brands, keep a check on the influencers who are talking about your brand and promptly engage with them, you can also know the what type of content works for you best (Image, text, video), you can also assess how your content strategy is doing as compared to your competitors.
As, we have already said that social media ROI is not only about sales, it has many dimensions attached to it.
Brands should always keep in mind that ROI actually changes into Return on Interactions on social media and then the interactions leads to conversions and insightful data about audience which is the real juice, the real return.
There’s no one-size fits all approach for measuring social media ROI. When it comes to measuring returns on social media investments, things become more complex. There can’t be any standardized model as one brand might focus on a particular metric while for other that metric is of no use. The complexity further increases, as social media is a two-way communication source where billions of people, who are talking to each other in their own way and that too in different time zones, and that too in real time.
“As a marketer, what do you think? Do your clients still ask for social media ROI? What are your experiences on the same?”