Comments. Love. Likes. Shares. Retweets. These are ways that customers engage with your brand online. The more you get these kinds of engagement, the more your brand gets noticed by your customers, and hence more revenue for your business.
When done correctly, social media can give your company or startup the marketing muscle that would give you a competitive advantage.
You don’t just pump money into social media simply because it works.
There are some things that you must first understand. To pull off social media marketing effectively and expect a higher ROI (Return on Investment), you need to ask yourself a few questions.
These questions would help you evaluate your goals and help you craft a successful strategy to promote brand awareness.
It’ll also prevent you from spending too much money on aspects of social media that’ll do nothing for your business goals.
Let’s dive in.
#1. What are your expectations and goals
Before you invest in social media campaigns, you need to be clear on what exactly your expectations are.
Many marketers make the mistake of setting high expectations for social media ROI and end up setting themselves up for failure.
Social media can indeed increase your company’s visibility and create a huge buzz around your business, but it can’t take the lead in your marketing efforts.
To drive marketing success, you need to view social media as barely a tool in your marketing toolkit.
Having these points in mind, it’s time to set the right goal for your social media efforts. Do you want to promote brand awareness, engage with your community, distribute your content, or generate leads?
Knowing exactly what you want to achieve would influence the kind of things you post on your social media page.
For instance, let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness. Since the average person spends about two hours a day on social media, it makes it the best place to reach a wide audience and spread the news about your brand.
I’ll explain how you can measure brand awareness in the next point.
#2. How would you measure your ROI?
It makes sense to want to find out how to measure social media ROI. Sure, you already have a lot of things going on in your business, so you need to justify your efforts. There are so many ways to measure social media ROI. There’s data, there’s analytics, and many more metrics you can measure. I’ll just talk about one or two.
First on the list is your number of social followers. How many followers do you have, whether on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook?
The more followers you have, the more people are seeing your brand. These followers spread the news about your brand through likes, shares, comments, et cetera.
The great thing about social shares is that whenever your followers share or like your content, it is seen by their followers as well.
Hence, more brand awareness for you. It’s very easy to track these kinds of engagements. If you have a business profile set up, either on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, there are analytical dashboards or insight tabs that’ll help you track all these.
There’s another way to measure ROI. Customer reviews are one way that you can gauge how your customers feel about your brand.
Remember, people share their opinions on social media. What are they saying about your brand on social?
Taking time to read your reviews would help you know what to do to improve your business.
You can also measure your engagement rate to see if your efforts are getting noticed. To calculate the engagement rate, divide your number of likes by your number of followers, then multiply that by 100%.
On Instagram, an engagement rate between 3.5%-6% is considered a high engagement rate. Whenever you post something online, just do the math to see if you’re getting somewhere with your efforts.
#3. What would success mean for you?
After a few months, the results of your social media campaigns would determine whether you were successful or not.
Based on your business objectives, what do you want to see to make your social efforts worthwhile? Is it new customers, higher or more social followers, or email signup? Thankfully, Google Analytics would help you see how you’re doing with the goals you set up from the beginning.
You can track everything that’s happening online about your business on Google Analytics. You only have to set the right goals.
And in the end, it’ll help you know how far you are.
No matter what analytics would tell you, without clear and proper goals and expectations, the data would be of no use to your business.
Bottom Line
Social media is a valuable means of engaging with your customers and taking them through the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.
However, it’s not something that should replace your entire marketing efforts.
No matter what you do, SEO and email are your best bet when it comes to triggering purchases and closing sales.