Measuring ROI

Are you in charge of your brands social media? If so it is imperative that you measure your Return on Investment. From measuring customer satisfaction to establishing brand loyalty, ROI should be the driving force of all your campaigns.

Whether customer interaction is through a store visit or through an online website, all responses can be measured. The real problem becomes what to measure.

SkillPath Seminars outline 4 important metrics that should be measured:

1. Conversion Rates
2. Leads Generated
3. Increased Site Traffic/Number of New Customers
4. Brand Awareness/Perception

Choosing which factors to measure is not hard. You should already have a campaign strategy laid out before any posts or media is distributed to your customers. Review your plan and ask yourself ‘What am I trying to accomplish?’. From here you are able to address what you want to measure. For example, if your goal is to raise awareness for your companies involvement in the community, you would want to measure Brand Awareness/Perception.

Whichever factor you choose as your most critical, these easy steps will help you to optimize your ROI.

1. Mingle

Engage with your audiences through social media platforms. Find which platform is best suited for your company and use that as your stage to attract your audience.

2. Observe

Keep and eye on your media conversations. A technique which I find helpful is by constantly monitoring Google Analytics or whatever measurement software you use. Whenever I make a post to Twitter or submit a blog, I will have Google Analytics open on my tablet to see exactly how many people are engaging.

3. Analyze

You can analyze your ROI using free measurement tools such as Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics. These tools allow you to sort Website traffic by referring site. This will help you realize what platform is better targeted to your brand.

4. Report

The report will measure your success. You will need to correlate your social media metrics to your Key Performance Indicators such as revenue, orders, leads, referrals etc.

5. Target

Based on the information you gather from measuring your ROI, you will be able to target which messages, platforms and influencers have the biggest impact on your business.

Once you picked which factor to measure and applied the steps above to increase your ROI, the next step is to determine if all your hard work was successful.  The first thing that you would want to measure is your audience. Are you reaching your proposed target audience in regards to prospects, customer leads and influencers? The second thing to measure is your interactions. These can be tracked as views, shares, ‘likes’, and comments. Check and see if your engagement has increased. Third, check to see if your brand perception has changed as a result of your marketing campaign.

Fourth, you should calculate the expenses in terms of marketing executions.  How long did it take you to create your marketing campaign in terms of creativity, technologies and salaries? The last thing that should be measured at the end of your marketing campaign is your sales. Tracking sales related to your specific marketing campaign will allow you see if your campaign motivated the sales of a service or product.

Now that you have the knowledge to measure ROI. Here are a few metrics that you can track and measure:

✓Social Bookmarks

✓Ratings

✓Web Traffic

✓Viral Video Activity

✓Membership Increase

✓Bounce Rate

✓Page Views

✓Downloads/Uploads

✓Engagement Activity

✓Comments

✓Mentions

✓Leads Generated

 REFERENCES
Spiller, Lisa, Martin Baier, and Lisa Spiller. Contemporary Direct & Interactive Marketing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.
The Social Media Marketing Conference. SkillPath Seminars, Mission, KS.

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