7 power steps to achieving social media marketing ROI
Social Media Agency in Mumbai METRICS
The first step is to ensure that your company is ready for a social media marketing campaign. If you exist as a brand, then someone out there is already talking about you. So ensure that you too are part of the conversation prism.
By that rule, every brand needs a social media marketing campaign, but that does not ensure that every brand is ready for the same. So here are some quick check lists to make sure, you, as an organization or a brand or a business are ready for a digital marketing and social media campaign:
- Is your brand ready to go online (Invest in both, time and resources) for the same
- Do you have content that would add value for your end users or are you ready to invest in quality content for your prospects and customers or are you only here to promote yourself?
- Would you be willing to spend some time (few hours) every month on a detailed social media analysis report and re-work based on the feedback
Once you are through with step 1, we can go to step 2 which is, understanding ROI.
Step 2: ROI
ROI is the return on investment.
ROI for a brand / business / organization can mean different things.
When you define your ROI, you not only need to mention what you want to measure, but also need to have a parameter that defines it very clearly. For eg. Increase in Sales is not a ROI parameter. Rather, increase in sales by 15% in this quarter would be a much more specific ROI deliverable.
Have clearly defined ROI goals. Once you have established the goals, plan a social media marketing strategy based on these goals. For eg. if increase in 20% lead conversions during a period of three months is your ROI, then your social strategy should revolve around ideas, process, tools that boost the lead conversion process specifically. Also, measure the lead conversions, customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime customer value (LCV) etc. too.
Step 3
Get a social media calendar in place.
These will define the platforms that you will use, the frequency and timing when you will post across social profiles etc during the period of ‘pre-defined’ social media ROI campaign.
Once your social media marketing calendar is in place, share this with your sales and marketing team (both in-house and external agency if hired) and make sure that everyone is on the same page.
This part is utmost crucial. Many times, if you are hiring a third party agency to run your social media campaigns, it so happens that your in-house marketing team has a strategy and goal target of their own. These two will clash and in turn only affect your marketing campaign strategy and not in a positive way. Remember, as a brand, your teams need to work as one, not compete with each other in the market.
At any given point of time, the step 3 should be completely in sync with your social media agency and or your in-house marketing team at all times.
Step 4: Paid and Organic:
Integrate a campaign that clearly measures using “coined” and “specific” campaign keywords. Both, paid advertising and organic reach are equally important while planning and running your social media marketing campaign.
For eg the hashtags that you use, the keywords that are used need to be uniform throughout your marketing collateral too. For eg. if you brochure is running a hashtag for an offer code, ensure that your online ads and or your offline ads run either the same or very uniquely different codes depending on whether you would like to track them all as one campaign, or bifurcate each specifically to clearly measure which keyword or hashtag has delivered what type of results across which online and or offline platform over a period of time.
Integrating google adwords, facebook ads, twitter ads, LinkedIn ads etc towards your ROI can be a wonderful way to empower your online digital marketing strategy. Here again, give enough and well needed attention to organic and SEO based marketing strategies too. They go a long way in adding value for your marketing campaign.
Step 5:
Use tools like google analytics or in-house process and tools to give you specific and very precise results in terms of tracking your website urls, your site lead enquiries, most used hashtags, mentions, search keywords, traffic across specific pages on your site, most downloaded or used or consumed content on your site etc. Constantly measure and keep tracking the same.
Step 6:
As important as it is to listen to your competitors and your customers voice online, it is equally important today to ensure to listen to your own brands tone and voice too from time to time.
This would help and guide you to even understand aspects like, ‘to which message or words or links’ have the customers or consumers or prospects responded the most. Which content and or topic appeals to the most etc and this in turn will help you and guide you in planning your content marketing style in the same manner.
Step 7:
Once you have clearly defined ROI, social media calendar and content, well planned and balanced organic and paid advertising ratio, appropriate tools to measure the right metrics and finally when you have listened to your customers, competitors and your own brands voice, it’s then time to evaluate with the feedback, responses, comments and re-work on the strategies and implement the plan of action again.
The Idea is simple:
Define, Plan, Design, Collaborate, Implement, Measure and keep improvising!
A successful social media marketing campaign is the one that has:
- Flexibility to modify, alter the campaigns as and when needed
- Clearly defined metrics and the tools that measure the same
- Rich content that truly adds value for your end users
- Balance among different social platforms based on not your preferences, but based on where your end users are engaging. Social media is not about websites or tools. It was, is and will always be about people. People buy from people they trust. Humanize your brand.
- Connects and creates a platform wherein your offline customers and online customers can interact with the brand as one. There should be consistency and uniformity in your brand conversations and strategies throughout the campaign period.
- Has an instant gratification plan for your brand ambassadors online
- ROI needs to be not only clearly and specifically defined but also achievable. Be realistic. Measure and keep improvising throughout.
Be Well
Ananth V
Popular Links and Posts this week:
- Empowering Shopping with multimodality, omni-channel approach for omniscent consumers
- Social media marketing workshop
- Social media digital marketing LIVE Chat with Ananth V
- Social Media Marketing BOOK you have been waiting for
