Social media marketing presents a wealth of opportunities for businesses. According to Statista, the number of social media users is projected to cross 4.41 billion by 2025. Taking this opportunity, marketers are focusing on social media marketing to grow and promote their businesses.
Although businesses are using social media, a vast majority of them are struggling to generate significant ROI from it. Additionally, with more businesses being active on social media marketing, the competition has increased, making it more even more difficult to get a good return on investment.
Here we will guide you on how to unlock social media success with the best strategies to get maximum social ROI.
What is Social Media Marketing ROI?
Simply put, social media marketing ROI is the value you receive against your investment. It is used to track social media marketing performance.
The most common formula to calculate social ROI is:
Total gain / Investment x 100
For various organizations and marketing teams, investment towards social media marketing is not limited to paid campaigns and advertisements. So the parameters for calculating social ROI also vary.
What counts as a return on investment for your business is solely based on your organizational goals and objectives. Some of the common metrics used for calculating social ROI for marketing campaigns are:
Page visits
Sales
Audience engagement (likes, comments, and shares)
Brand awareness
New sign-ups
Followers
How to Improve Social Media Marketing ROI
If you want to increase social media ROI, you need to start by addressing the key parameters associated with it. Here we have discussed the essential steps to identifying key performance indicators and how to improve your social ROI.
1. Set Up Goals
The first step to SMM success is properly identifying business goals. This is one of the most important factors when you calculate social ROI. More importantly, the next steps that you take to improve social media marketing strategy are heavily dependent on it.
As a marketer, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve through your campaign.
Ask yourself about your primary aim of using social media. You can go social for a number of reasons, some of these are (but not limited to):
To improve engagement
To improve sales
To amplify traffic to your site
To create brand awareness
To increase the number of followers
To grow partnerships
Without a clear objective and aim, you will not be able to set social goals. And without goals you cannot set a proper path to follow.
The best approach to setting realistic social media marketing goals is by implementing the SMART method.
SMART stands for:
Specific: Let’s say, you want to get more Twitter followers.
Measurable: You should define a specific number that will help you measure your progress towards reaching your goal. For example, say you want to grow Twitter followers 2x.
Attainable: Be realistic and think whether it is really possible to grow Twitter followers 2x given the present circumstances.
Relevant: Your social media aim should be aligned to business objectives. How does increasing Twitter followers help your business?
Time-bound: For example, you want to increase Twitter followers 2x in three months.
2. Select the Right Platform
Choosing the right social networking site helps you find the right audience and create long-term relationships. Ideally, you should be active on more than one social channel to amplify your marketing efforts and reach more audiences. Presence on multiple social sites will also increase your organic reach.
There are two things to consider when you are selecting social media marketing platforms ― your business type and target audience.
What type of marketer are you? B2B, B2C, or both? The answer is important because it will tell you whether the site is fit for content promotion.
According to the latest research report by Statista, Facebook leads the way for both B2B and B2C marketing channels. The report also reveals that 80% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn. Instagram comes a close second as a preferred B2C marketing channel with 78% marketers using it.
So, if you have a product-based company that mainly focuses on B2B lead generation, LinkedIn is ideal. Likewise, for companies that are selling products and services to customers, Instagram is the best choice.
Secondly, you need to know on which social sites your target audience is active and how frequently they visit the site.
You can refer to the insights from the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center to understand the demographics of social media users. These data-driven insights can strengthen your SMM strategy by facilitating a targeted and relevant approach that enhances your chances for conversion.
Facebook and Youtube are two commonly used social sites among all age groups and genders.
Including Facebook and Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat are popular among 18 to 29-year-olds.
Interestingly, those between 18 to 24 are more likely to prefer Snapchat (73%) and Instagram (75%).
LinkedIn users are majorly college graduates (51%) and come from high-income households (49%).
51% of Facebook users visit the platform several times a day.
About 42% of Instagram users engage on the platform multiple times a day.
About 15% of users use Snapchat at least once a day with 46% using it more than once.
3. Content Creation and Distribution
Whether you are running organic social media marketing or paid campaigns, quality content can help you meet your business goals and get a good social ROI.
Social media marketing, SEO, content, and branding are an integral part of inbound marketing. And quite interestingly, respondents in the HubSpot State of Inbound report say that inbound marketing generates higher ROI over outbound marketing methods.
Before you create a content strategy, follow these best practices for a higher chance of success:
1. Conduct a Competitor Analysis
Deconstructing your competitor’s content can help you identify improvement areas. Identifying areas for improvement and determining the reason for their success will give you an edge over contenders.
To conduct competitor analysis, observe their social media content and check the following points:
Social channels where they maintain accounts
Topics and type of content
Quality of content
Target keywords
AdWords
Frequency of publishing
Engagement rate
With the availability of various tools, you can easily complete competitor analysis efficiently.
2. Boost SEO
According to the previously-cited HubSpot report, 61% of marketers prioritize improving SEO and growing their organic presence. They consider it as the most important element of their inbound marketing strategies.
Increase organic traffic to your social sites by using proper keywords in your posts. Find a good SEO tool or keyword generator where you can conduct thorough keyword research. Additionally, you should also write engaging titles and captions that will capture the audience’s attention while still making use of your target keywords.
According to Briggsby’s YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, optimizing YouTube channel description with at least 300 characters can boost ranking.
To generate a list of relevant keywords, you can use Google Keyword Planner, Keywordtool.io, or any other tool of your choice.
Google Keyword Planner intends to generate useful keywords that can help with better ad ranking and content visibility.
Keywordtool.io is a free SEO and PPC keyword research tool with an option to go premium. Enter a keyword and receive relevant results with keyword weightage.
3. Create Compelling and Quality Content
Investing in quality content is worth your time and effort. Whether you create text content, videos, images, infographics, or whitepapers, they should be of high quality.
If you are running paid campaigns on Facebook, you have more reasons to post relevant and quality content. Relevance Score in Facebook ads is an indicator of ad performance based on feedback collected from the target audience.
Metrics used for measuring Relevance Score are appropriateness, quality, and engagement rate. A good Relevance Score helps to lower costs and boost reach.
To post relevant and quality content you can take help from Google Trends and BuzzSumo.
Google Trends fetches you the trending topics and measures audience interest on those topics across regions.
BuzzSumo is a great tool for content research and monitor.ing BuzzSumo gets you results on most shared social topics and helps you with generating content idea
4. Measure the ROI
You cannot improve your social ROI if you don’t measure it. Interestingly, tracking ROI has remained a top priority as well as a challenge for professional marketers for years.
According to Statista, 34% of marketers found themselves unable to measure the ROI for social media activities.
Measuring ROI is important because:
It shows the overall impact of social media on your business
It helps to understand whether the current social media marketing plan is effective
Shows clear-cut outcome of your social campaign
Makes it easy to learn more about your customer behavior
Helps to identify which resources and plans were able to yield the best results
Identifies which plans failed to generate the desired outcome so you can shift tactics in your next campaign
In The End...
To develop a strong social media marketing strategy, you don’t need complex ideas. You just need to set practical business goals and identify key performance indicators. Once you have the data ready, select the most suitable marketing platform that allows you more flexibility.
Lastly, use appropriate tools to learn audience behavior and measure your performance. Once you adopt a systematic approach as discussed here, you will see significant improvement in your social media marketing ROI.
