Whenever your business starts a new marketing plan or initiative, how do you know if it is working? How can you tell whether or not your investment is worthwhile? One of the most important stats to know is return on investment, or ROI. This figure gives you an idea of whether or not the money and time you are investing are paying off. Most importantly, without an ROI set ahead of time, it can be impossible to know if you are succeeding. After all, without a measure of success, how do you know what success looks like? At Gauge Digital Media, we work with businesses just like yours to help design effective social media marketing plans and measure your social media ROI.
Understanding Social Media ROI
Unfortunately, deciding to measure your social media ROI is much easier than actually figuring out how to properly measure it. Every social media platform offers different kinds of analytics. Some platforms will show general engagement but not where the traffic came from. Other platforms will show you when links are clicked but not what demographics of people are clicking them. Further complicating things, the sales funnel is a complete process. Someone might follow you on Facebook for a year before actually deciding to make a purchase, and it might be an Instagram ad that pushes them into finally purchasing. In that case, you’ll see that Instagram forwarded them to make the purchase but it’s easy to forget or not realize that there was a great deal of effort expended on another platform beforehand. This is why it is so critical to work with professionals like the team at Gauge Digital Media to measure your social media ROI as accurately as popular.
Track Data
First, when you measure your social media ROI you need to determine what data you want to start tracking and create an easy way to track it. Some platforms make this easy by providing you with a data dashboard or analytics on your individual posts. Other social media platforms don’t offer this, so you might need a spreadsheet or other method to track things like likes, saves and shares. We can help you determine the best way to track data so that it’s easy to see where you’re growing and succeeding and where you might be struggling and in need of adjustment.
Quality Over Quantity
Some businesses start tracking their analytics on social media platforms and become obsessed with getting the most likes or increasing engagement. While these can be good things that feed into sales, they can also force you to focus on quantity over quality. The most critical goal of every company in their social media initiatives is getting sales or new customers, and sometimes getting the most engagement does not mean getting the most new sales. Instead of focusing on posting the most or spending the most on advertisements, you should focus on quality posts that are targeted precisely to your audience. When you measure your social media ROI, you should also keep quality over quantity in mind.
Use the Right Tools
As we mentioned above, some social media platforms and websites offer you tools that can help you to see how successful your content is. Some of the examples that we work with every day include:
- Facebook Pixel: This unique tool offers you a wealth of information about your target audience and people who interact with your ads. You can see traffic, attribution and get accurate conversion data for paid ads.
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics offers a tremendous amount of insight into how your target audience interacts with your content. While Google isn’t necessarily social media, behaviors on your website give you a great deal of ideas that can then be repurposed for your social campaigns.
We can help you to establish benchmarks that help when interpreting this data and allow you to contextualize it further.
Report It the Right Way
Finally, when you measure your social media ROI you should make sure that you report it correctly so that everyone in your business understands what they are seeing and what it means. Some of the best things to keep in mind when you are creating your social media ROI report include:
- Analyze each social media platform separately to see how you are doing and then compare them to each other. What platforms are going the best? What platforms don’t seem to have many members of your target audience? How could you improve your numbers on the under-performing platforms?
- Align the metrics that you get when you measure your social media ROI with your company’s objectives. How are they helping you meet your marketing goal?
- Many sure that when you analyze data you are looking at a long enough period of time for it to be meaningful. If you are only examining a couple of days or even a couple of weeks, it can be challenging to see if you are actually making meaningful marketing material or just having luck or a downturn for a short period of time.
- Identify the portions of your social media strategy that did get your intended results and which ones fell short. Can the ones that fell short be saved or should they be replaced instead?
- Show how the data that you received was actionable so that you know what changes you will make and what platforms you should further invest time and money into.
We Are Here to Help You Optimize Your Social Media Profiles and More
Working with a professional digital marketing company is the best way to make the most of your website and all that Facebook Pixel, LinkedIn ads, Google Analytics and other digital advertising platforms have to offer. To learn more about the best digital marketing strategies for your company and reach a bigger audience than ever before, work with Gauge Digital Media. For a quote or to schedule a call, contact us at 443-201-7709.
