Using social media for marketing your business does more than improve site traffic. It provides a valuable venue that can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.
But be honest! Is your social media marketing getting you the desired return on your investment? Are you getting the expected returns from your social media campaigns?
If not, here's a list of social media marketing best practices that you can implement to increase ROI from social. However, before jumping right to the tactics, let us have a better understanding of why is it essential to know the ROI of your social media campaigns?
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Why social media ROI matters?
If in case you're running a social media campaign without assessing the results you want to achieve, you really don't know where you're heading.
Social ROI matters because it gives you a fair idea of where you stand, what's your destination, and in which direction you should be moving if you want your marketing campaign to be a success.
Else, you might as well be throwing all that money, time, and effort down a bottomless well without seeing much in return beyond a few vanity metrics.
With that, let's dive into the meat of how businesses can maximize Social Media ROI.
Related: What is Social Media ROI?
How to maximize your Social Media ROI?
The only sane approach to maximize ROI from social is by utilizing the four-step cycle -- Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA).
It is a simple framework that allows you to implement change, solve problems, and continuously improve your social media ROI.
Plan
First, you need to identify the opportunities that you want to take advantage of and plan what needs to be done. Here you need to be sure that you answered some primary concerns:
- What is it that we want to achieve?
- Who our target audience is?
- What are the best social media platforms available?
Answers to these questions will help you get a clear picture of what is required to execute your social media strategy, and where your time, manpower and money will go.
Step 1: Define the purpose of social media for your brand
Start by identifying what business goals social media can help you achieve. When we think about generating "ROI" for a business using social media, our business goals often default around money. For instance, attracting more leads and prospects to increase revenue.
Yet it is not at all necessary that these business goals alone will help you generate ROI.
Improving customer service,
Building a loyal community,
Empowering advocates can also be a few good to have business goals!
Keep in mind, first, you can easily tie acts of advocacy and building community directly to revenue through things like:
- Referrals and References
- Influence from advocate-generated content
- Cross-sell and upsell opportunities
Second, by paying attention to customer concerns via social could help you retain your customers.
In this sense, the above-listed goals can also provide a massive ROI with just a little bit of effort.
Step 2: Determine which social media platforms your ideal customers are using
Social media is an excellent resource for brands to connect with thousands of potential customers. The challenge is finding and focusing on the key platforms to maintain your social media presence that bears fruit (revenue) for your business.
Choose the wrong social network, and you could end up wasting your valuable resources with little to no gain. Choose too many networks, and you'll spread yourself and your team too thin to be effective.
The solution here is simple – make sure you only invest in the right social media networks for your business. How?
- The initial step is to recognize precisely who you're trying to target with your social media marketing efforts.
- The next step is to match your customer personas with the appropriate social media sites. There's no point investing in a social media network that does not have your ideal customers.
Doing this could help you narrow down your list and ensure you're focusing your resources where you'll get the greatest value for your money.
Do
After you have identified the opportunities (goals, target audience, and suitable social media platforms), it is time to take action. At this stage, you will apply everything that will help you generate ROI through social media.
Step 3: Deliver content consistently
Throwing up a blog and a picture once in a while on social media would not lead to long term growth and sales. You have to post both consistently and frequently for an effective brand promotion and lead generation on social media, while still providing value in your posts. Discover where your business can offer some value, come up with a schedule, and stick to it. Also website designing also plays a vital role in enhancing the social media ROI.
Write content. Always keep the targeted buyer in mind when sharing content. Blogs, newsletters, webinars, and white papers can be used as an effective way to target and connect with prospective customers.
Curate content. Since it's not in every case simple to think of crisp and fresh content, you should curate some. Discover relevant news, videos, articles, images, infographics, interviews, and more that you can share with your audience.
Related: How to Curate Content to Achieve Brand Loyalty
Recycle past content. Past content, particularly content that your fans enjoyed, should be repurposed whenever possible, because you're continually gaining new fans who never saw the original piece. In case you're short on content, grab some of your "greatest hits" material and repost.
Step 4: Woo Influencers
Collaboration with influencers on social media has emerged as a powerful way to drive high ROI. Businesses that comprehend the capability of effective influencer collaborations are getting noteworthy returns. Some of them gained an earned media value of up to $18 for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing. Why?
Because humans trust humans. People love to follow and trust people who are famous, successful, and authentic at the same time. Thus, companies are now more interested in teaming up with influencers than anyone else, to slice through the noise and to make a lasting impact on the target audience.
A few tips:
- Ensure that the influencer is an expert from the same industry or niche as your brand.
- Always give creative freedom to your influencer and encourage them to come up with innovative and creative campaign ideas for your brand.
- Give your products to influencer and always ask them to share their honest and genuine feedback.
- When organizing any giveaway and contest, make sure to mention the participation criteria very clearly to your followers.
- Don't collaborate with an influencer whose personality is not in sync with your brand identity and values.
Related: How to Find Key Influencers in Your Niche Using Social Media
Step 5: Engage your audience
For social media marketing to be successful and to accelerate the process of lead generation, you have to engage with your audience.
Keep in mind, without engagement, there is no lead generation!
The ideal way we've found to produce or get more leads on Social Media is by indulging into direct discussions or conversations with your target audience, and by sending them a direct message.
However, social media engagement can drain a great deal of time out of your day and particularly as an entrepreneur; you can't stand to forfeit whenever. So how do you save time during social media engagement? How do you automate social media interactions to save time?
Well, Statusbrew have a solution for this. It helps you save time during social media engagement in the following way:
Save time with Statusbrew's engage feature
How do you know if your current customers or prospects are talking about you on social media?
If they tagged or mentioned you in their posts or sent you a direct message, you could check your notifications. If they didn't, i.e., if they did not use '@' to mention you, you could search on each social media platform or social networks every time you want to find out.
Sounds tedious? Well, it is tedious to be done manually. Here's a better way, use Statusbrew's 'Engage' feature. It can help you two ways to locate the brand relevant conversations and further making it easy to engage users for lead generation:
Inbox- Statusbrew's social inbox help you monitor and revert to the conversations around your brand in real-time. It brings all the incoming brand conversations into one place and saves you time from juggling between the tabs!
The best part is Statusbrew integrates 'Slack'! With this integration, you can bring in your teams to collaborate in brand monitoring right from their workspace. This integration pushes all the brand DMs, Comments and Mentions right into Slack channels and makes it easier for teams to revert in real-time.
Listening - With the listening feature, you can give a momentary glance at the untagged mentions and discover who all are talking about your brand on Twitter! For instance, this is an untagged mention of Domino's Pizza:
Listening feature allows you to collaborate with your team, get live updates of all the industry-related conversations to reply to them instantly.
Check
This is probably the most crucial stage of the PDCA cycle. If you want to avoid recurring mistakes and improve continuously, you need to pay enough attention to this phase.
Here, you need to measure your social media KPIs and see if your initial plan worked. Moreover, measuring your results will help your team to identify problematic parts of the current process and eliminate them in the future.
Step 6: Measure your social media ROI
So you have your action plan in place -- you have worked enough on creating content, wooing influencers, and engaging with your audience -- now is the time to track your activities and the outcomes they produce!
Take a look at your social dashboards to understand your performance.
For instance, which types of content are your top performers? At what times would you say you are getting the most engagement?
The more information you have available, the simpler it is to maximize your reach and get a better ROI for your efforts.
Tools such as Statusbrew are invaluable for mining your data to figure out these data points that go beyond the likes, comments, and shares on your social media posts. Not exclusively would you be able to get a look at all your social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, and LinkedIn in one place, but you can use features like tags to group together all the messages in a given campaign to thoroughly compare performance. This can empower you to pinpoint what is and isn't connecting with your audience so you can adjust your campaign planning accordingly.
Found it interesting? We'd love to have you try Statusbrew for your brand or even for your personal use. Just head on to Statusbrew and start a free 7 day trial.
Act
Previously, you developed, applied, and checked your plan. Now, you need to act. Collect your metrics and compare the results with your business goals to determine what's working, and what's not. If everything appears to be perfect and your team managed to achieve the original goals, you can proceed and apply your initial plan. Otherwise, don't be hesitant to change your activities, or even move away from the platform entirely.
Once you have made the changes, test them, then test them again. It's indispensable to recognize what is or isn't working.
Keep in mind that it can, without much of a stretch take from 6 months to 1 year to build a successful social media marketing strategy that help you generate the desired ROI.
The website design also plays a vital role in maxmizing the social media ROI.
Infographic
Here's a detailed infographic on how to maximize ROI through social media marketing efforts.
Citation Policy: Please feel free to use the infographics in this blog in any commercial or non-commercial capacity. If you use the infographics, we require a reference back to Statusbrew Blog.
Stay with it! Focus on these tips and your company will be stunned at the amount of followers you will garner, the website traffic you will boost, and the new leads you will enjoy. Maximized ROI for your efforts is just the beginning of the results that companies can reap when they do social media marketing right.
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