New businesses are jumping onto the social media bandwagon everyday and more of them are moving away from the novelty of just having social media profiles and trying to figure out the ROI of this medium. Many people have tried to create formulas for measuring success with social media, but it is not an easy task.
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Many are creating and planning various social media strategies without considering their overall business objectives. To get the best out of your social media campaign, you have to use your social objectives together with your business objectives to understand the effectiveness of your campaign.
How do you use the two together to run a successful campaign? Here are a couple of tips that can help you with this.
Business objectives
What are your business objectives. This might sound obvious, but write them down. Find out what your CEO thinks is the main objective for your business. Is it sales? Is it for more brand recognition? Never just make an assumption with this step. Try to get a list of the business objectives from key business leaders in your company.
Can social media help?
If your main business objective is for more service sales and you are busy selling your services online, this step is quite easy. You can track the number of sales that came from social media channels with a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics. If you are not selling your services online and you don’t have a website, I suggest getting one will be the first step if you want to start a social media campaign.
Social media can help you generate brand awareness for your business and educate interested parties on the benefits of your services. Your website must be a “go to” hub of information for people who wants to find out more information about your services.
Measuring your social media and business objectives
Write down a summary of all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will be able to track the success against your business objectives. In the case of brand credibility, you can track things such as the conversions you get online or the number of unique visitors to your website.
Benchmarks
Before starting a social media marketing campaign, know the ins and outs of your business objectives. Get your sales figures, check to see your brand credibility among your targeted market and understand what your customers are asking online. If you set up these benchmarks ahead of time it will help you understand what impact your SMM campaign is achieving.
Create dedicated dashboards
To understand the overall effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign takes time. Create a dedicated dashboard with the KPIs you wrote down earlier and start to monitor these on a frequent basis. Look for potential correlations and trends between your social media marketing strategy and your overall business objectives. Did you have an increase in sales since you have increased the number of followers on your Twitter and Facebook profiles?
Unfortunately, there’s not a magic formula for calculating social media ROI. If you align your business objectives with your social media objectives, you are setting yourself up to be more successful in determining the effectiveness and overall reach of your campaign.
