Whenever you start a marketing campaign, it is essential to track your progress and make sure it is working effectively.
Measuring your return on investment (ROI) is one of the traditional ways in which marketers find out whether a specific campaign is getting the results it should, but what happens when traditional ways of measuring ROI don’t work?
Social media marketing can be a time consuming yet essential activity for any business. But how do you measure the results? As social media marketing does not often translate directly into sales, determining whether your approach is working and how much time it is worth, can be a bit of a challenge. Here are some techniques you can use to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
Have your profits increased overall?
Although it is not always possible to tell what sales can be directly attributed to social media, if sales have increased since you started a social media campaign, there is a chance that at least some part of that is due to social media.
Have you received valuable information?
Getting feedback from your customers via social media can save you time and money over getting feedback through other means such as focus groups and surveys. Receiving information about what your customers want and how you can improve your products can be worth a lot in terms of your reputation, and helping you better meet your customers’ needs in the future.
Has your brand’s reputation improved?
Social media gives you a great way to measure your customers’ attitudes towards your brand. By monitoring what people are saying about your business, you can get an idea of whether your reputation is improving, or declining. An improvement in your brand reputation among your customers is a good sign that your social media marketing is hitting the right spot.
Have you been able to decrease your costs?
Sometimes social media marketing is easier to measure in terms of how much money it has saved your business rather than how much it has earned. Some areas where social media marketing can save you money include allowing you to reduce your marketing costs on other forms of less effective advertising, and giving you feedback and access to data from your customers, which you would previously have had to pay for.
Although measuring the return on your social media marketing is not an exact science, you can get a basic idea of how it’s working by looking at the effect it has on your business as a whole.
Social media marketing is about building relationships, rather than directly increasing sales, and the impact of positive relationships and increased customer engagement on your business is likely to be extremely significant, even without specific measurable data.
