Businesses, agencies need to work together to truly grasp social ROI

Proving Social Return on Investment (SROI) is one of the most contentious issues around.

An incredibly low percentage of businesses measure and give credit to social marketing efforts with regard to sales and conversions. Remarkably, an overwhelming majority of Chief Marketing Officers state that their companies do not measure SROI effectively or at all.

So, while social media is exploding, the majority of companies are still unable to give social media the full value it deserves within their corporate messaging, planning and budgeting cycles.

Why? Reasons could possibly be attributed to the following:

• Social attribution technology is still new; most brands or businesses are unaware and have limited knowledge of “Social Attribution”.
• Social media is hard to measure manually, so until now some brands simply did not measure at all. This scenario is changing as the tools become readily available to the market.
• Social technology changes rapidly and brands cannot keep up and find it easier to ignore it.
• Resources and skill; businesses and brands do not have the in-house resource or skill to extrapolate the insights.

There is technology out there to assist businesses and brands measure SROI, and as a business you need to decide whether you want to make that investment.

Before going ahead and making the technology investment, you need to decide on the “right” approach to measure SROI or even agree on your own definition of SROI. This will ultimately define the complexity of the solution you require for your organisation.

Before defining a strategy, the following questions need to be considered:

• Does your business or brand see SROI as a measurement of conversion rates or amplification (Likes, fans, re-tweets, clicks and shares)?
• What will the measures of success be?
• Are these measurements meaningful to a business or brand, and what will the targets be?
• Do they increase sales?
• What are you doing with your fans now that you have gained them?
• Which social platform are you gaining the most benefit from?

When you work closely with clients, it is possible to prove SROI. A good agency can successfully increase brands’ online sales after implementing social strategies suited to their organisations, and their products.

In order to prove SROI it is imperative for businesses and brands to partner with their agency. The agency requires a good understanding of the business, brands, marketing, digital and sales objectives and goals; a high level of transparency is a must. This includes the sharing of marketing calendars and monthly sales figures. Data analytics and integration, where possible, will go a long way in assisting to prove SROI.

In presenting the proof of social ROI it is imperative that you speak to your stakeholders in the language that they understand. Highlight impacts across the entire social media life-cycle, especially when social could be an initiation of the buying cycle or the catalyst to concluding a sale.

Image: Simon Cunningham via Flickr.