Businesses who can’t get anything out of social media term it as time-sink. Yes, there are still people out there who don’t know how to use social media to their advantage. This happens when they consume several hours without getting any results. One reason is that they don’t have any metrics to follow and or a goal other than selling their product. 

Most of us are aware that several brands are absolutely killing it when it comes to social media platforms. Through paid and organic campaigns, any company can improve their social media ROI. To calculate the ROI by revenue, there is a simple formula. Profit/total investment * 100 will give you the amount. Improving that amount and making sure you are using all your resources to the optimum to measure the ROI of your social media marketing efforts is a totally different ball game. 

One of the best benefits of measuring social media marketing ROI is that it helps you to build and refine your social marketing strategy. You can know how to shift your resources and tactics to make it more effective. 

Measuring Social Media ROI 

Take a look at the example below and think about why it is an excellent way to use social media to your advantage. 

Johnsonville Sausages use their social media platforms to gain insights into what kinds of new products to develop. A customer asked them to remove the limited-edition tag from a product to make it available round the year. Johnsville responded positively as this is a blessing in disguise for any company, a customer giving ideas about a change in the product that can reap dividends.  

The following are the top 5 tips and tricks that can help businesses figure out social media ROI and improve it. 

1. Define Clear Social Media Objectives

Not many businesses are eager to use social media to make their business reach zenith. Thinking about the following will help businesses in setting objectives and goals.

• Business conversations 
• Brand Awareness 
• Customer experience and loyalty 

Think about all your social audiences, or else you will be missing out on value while calculating your ROI. 

2. Set SMART Goals

After establishing clear objectives, your next target must be setting goals. So, what’s the difference here? Objectives define where you want to go while goals lead you to that place and offer you clues about how and when you will reach there. 

Think about business conversions and brand awareness. How you can achieve, this is what goals are all about. If you have offered your sales team the leads through social media, it must be your goal to get more sign-ups for your email and finally make the sale within a month. This is how it works and setting SMART goals will work wonders for you. 

SMART here connotes to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Each of the goals must follow all the aspects mentioned above for making all the matters simple to comprehend. It will give you the best support so that you can easily guess which factor to take care of.

3. Track the Right Performance Metrics

Social media metrics are important to gauge periodically, but you must know exactly what to look for and how. Likes and comments are very much part of the metrics, and you can use them to check how your social media platforms are working and measure yourselves against competitors. But these are not the metrics that can work for you in the long-term.

The metrics to prove ROI for your business include, but are not limited to, audience engagement leads generated, reach, revenue generated, and site traffic. You can use a UTM builder to generate UTM tracking codes to gather social media campaign attribution data in your analytics tool.

Important Questions to Ask

Check the behavior of the target audience after exposure to the campaign, are the metrics aligned with your objective, and does it help you measure and take important marketing and strategic decisions. The answer to all of the above-mentioned questions will give you a reason to craft a campaign and make necessary changes to it.

Measure your return over a period based on your sales cycle. LinkedIn research found that 775 of the digital marketers measured the results within the first month of a campaign. But Oracle Data Cloud found that only 47% of a campaign’s value is realized in the initial four weeks.

4. Calculate How Much You Spend on Social Media

Calculate your cost so that you can make better strategies or move to a new platform. Initially, Small businesses should use free social networks than paying a hefty amount for a premium version of social media management platforms.

Budget for Social Ads Spend

You can reduce your cost by using free online graphic designing tools where you can easily create Instagram ads and Facebook posts within minutes for free

Content Creation

Think about the cost of content creation too. Do you have in-house writers and editors, or do you outsource all the work? Check the total number of posts and writers hired for them. For in-house writers, calculate the hours it took for each writer and the time for editors too.

Time Spent by Social Media Team

Meetings, posting content, and promoting are all part of the effort from the social media team. Calculate the ROI of each campaign and how much time your team spends on social media every month/quarter/year.

Other expenses

Are you planning to capture leads from social media platforms? If so, then you need to design a set of landing pages to make things happen. Do you want to incorporate social media giveaways or marketing incentives? If the answer is “yes”, then you need to decide what kind of gifts those would involve. Please let us know what you think. Are you planning to buy a compiled email list of your leads? Or are you planning to capture them from social media platforms? If choosing the latter,then you need to design a set of landing pages to make things happen. Do you want to incorporate social media giveaways or marketing incentives? If the answer is “yes”, then you need to decide what kind of gifts those would involve. Please let us know what you think.

5. Create the ROI Report

Just 60% of digital marketers regularly share their ROI results, according to LinkedIn research.

Reporting your ROI is a positive aspect for businesses as you can display your successful strategy to the whole world. You can use a template or show it in plain and simple language. Proudly show everyone what you have achieved.

Speaking with reference to the business objectives and defining them at the start of the ROI report. Be clear about what you can and can’t relate to ROI measurement.

6. Challenges for Social Marketers

If you are struggling to cope up with the pressure of social ROI, it is normal. Social marketers have to face scenarios where they must work out the ROI as it translates directly into hard cash. If a business is not getting anything out of its social media presence, then there is no point in spending thousands of dollars on this.

Surely ROI is the biggest challenge for social marketers. So, what they have to face, apart from ROI, as their number one challenge. See the chart below.

Over to you

A sound marketing strategy can only be devised after knowing the ROI for your social media. Also, measuring ROI is for the sake of efficiency and accountability for any business. Please offer your feedback on what you think of social ROI and what you think can be added to this blog to make it better.

For any questions too, please use the comments section below.

Meta: Want to know what social ROI can do for your business? Know everything about how to measure it and use it wisely for ultimate success for any online campaign.