Ever feel like your social media just isn’t sticking? Or even worse, your social media isn’t generating the results and dollar bills you think it should? Do you know what you want your social media to be doing for you? We’re talking ROI here, which newsflash: is more than just follower count, reach, and overall engagement. It’s money!
Adorn your lab coats, people, it’s time to measure your social media results with a microscope.
Social media is another piece in your marketing engine and if you’re putting in the consistent effort over time, you better be getting results that pay, no really. But where do you start? How do you measure what’s working and what isn’t based on your overall goal for social media?
Enter: key performance indicators or KPIs.
What makes a particular metric a KPI, is its relationship to the campaign’s purpose, and its value in evaluating the campaign’s effectiveness through interactions over a period of time.
Time plays a key role in social media success and generating ROI; it’s a long-term game that needs to be played with patience.
Many small businesses and organizations don’t define KPIs beyond the awareness and interaction measurement levels into the depths of (dun…dun…dun…) influence and action — dolla, dolla, bills y’all.
So when you’re constructing your KPIs be sure those KPIs are focused on financial outcomes.
For example:
Objective: Increase the sales of the website development service
Target: 25 new clients from Facebook ads in Q3
KPI: Generate 25 new sales of website development service sold from Facebook ads in Q3
The points of measure for this KPI aim to show how your audience behaves with your content and offerings so you can continue to learn, grow and share with your audience things that matter to them most:
– Positive comments on the advertisement
– New likes of your Facebook content
– Net new click-through of links leading to your web development service
content from your Facebook ad traffic
– People who came to your website from Facebook ads that used
the promotional code to purchase your service
Can you spot the KPI metric from the list above that would represent a return on investment?
Did you know exactly which one? Read on.
Not sure? Read on. 😉
The difference between financial & non-financial outcomes
ROI is quite simple… it means return on investment, meaning the amount of dollars you make back from the initial investment. Hint: you want it to be more. And for social media marketers, this measurement is the overwhelming yet extremely necessary measurement for success of your social media marketing campaigns and content. So when thinking about your business goals and KPIs as demo’d in the examples above, it’s important to try and frame them around ROI being the pristine point of measure of success.
For example, financial outcomes are:
-
$1,000,000 in new sales or decreased cost per click from $3.00 to $1.20 by leveraging social media advertisements
-
Reduce customer service cost by 16% by ramping up my social media community management.
-
OR the point of measure for our KPI mentioned above: People who came to your website from Facebook ads that used the promotional code to purchase your
Where some social marketers get stuck is they focus on the non-financial outcomes instead of the income generating outcomes because it’s a lot easier to identify these metrics rather than following if dollars were generated from that social posting or ad. Sure, it’s awesome that your ad on Facebook generated 2,000 clicks, but did those clicks lead to any sales of the service or product?
If so, that’s ROI. You put money into the ad let’s say $1,000, and it generated about $12,500 in sales.
- Equation time: ROI = $12,500 – $1,000 / 1,000
- ROI = gain from investment – cost of investment/cost of investment
- This shows that for every dollar invested in the campaign, the company made $11.50 back, for an ROI of 1150%. BOOM!
- You might be saying OK, awesome I get ROI = dollars, but what about all those other metrics?
- These other metrics live on the different levels of online measurement as shown below and over time lead to ROI.
Measuring non-financial outcomes is not bad, in fact, it’s necessary especially when you’re getting started because you want to be able to learn from the behavior of your audience so when you go to present them with your high-value offer, they don’t think twice about showing you the money!
Some examples of non-financial outcomes are:
- New follower counts per month
- 400% increase in video downloads
- 10% increase in email subscriptions
Though all these metrics could potentially affect the bottom line later, they’re not generating any revenue directly. They serve as learning opportunities for marketers and CEOs alike to better understand how their ideal customer/client/user interacts with them on social media while simultaneously building rapport in the digital space. The knowledge gained from these metrics allow entrepreneurs to pivot their strategy to achieve the most reach and engagement to set the brand up for selling success.
To set yourself up for social media success, you should clearly identify your KPIs and how they play a larger role in your overall business goals, from there, determine where you’re at on the levels of online marketing. Are you a newbie just using social media as another channel to distribute your content? Perhaps you’ve been around for a little while and are building a quality and engaged audience who are starting to influence their friends and family to come and join your community. The next step should be having this audience take action that generates into ROI for you. Because real talk, ROI is going to be the only point of measure that CEOs like you care about. So, how can you start leveraging your audience to press the buy now button the next time it shows up in their newsfeed?
