Neoco

Social Media is the digital generation’s advertising outlet of choice, boasting minimised overheads and maximum reach. In a world of smart-phones and increased WI-FI capabilities the term “continuous partial attention” describes the way users rarely logout of social media accounts. Continuously plugged in, this stream of data increases chances for engagement and opportunities to see (OTS) in ways that traditional above the line advertising could but dream. As a result, social media is a valuable tool for not only shouting your message to the world but sitting back and listening to what the world has to say about you.

Return on investment can often be interchanged with “return on influence” as increasingly the influence of a brand’s social media presence will directly impact on the success of its marketing goals. Whether it’s building brand awareness, increasing sales, footfall, launching a new product, building consumer relationships or developing customer insight, a social media strategy should be decided upon before you launch into the ether.

Unlike the simple days of online banner advertising and the “clear” metrics of CPC and CPM, there is no industry standard set of transferable metrics that can be used to measure social media activity. Whether that’s return on investment or return on influence remains to be seen but the following pointers will stand you in good stead for understanding where you want to be and how you’re going to get there:

“Social media” itself refers to a number of different sites, platforms and tools. Considering businesses and individuals utilise each platform in varying ways to achieve different goals and individual platforms suit various different types of content, you start to get a picture of where the problems lie. This means that by understanding your customers’ motivations for accessing the brand on social networks and therefore your business’s reasons for social engagement – whether it’s to learn more about a product, satisfy a curiosity or celebrate good service – you can cater far better for their needs.

The key fact here is to remember that social ROI is not always measured in £/$/€, but also customer behaviours known as consumer investments. Often intangible it is this trust factor and relationship management that is at the crux of social media for businesses and that will have dramatic impact on your ROI.

Realising the difference between marketing goals; “where do you want to get to?” and marketing objectives; “what measurements will indicate these goals have been attained?”, is fundamental. How will you know when these goals have been met? What steps will you take to meet them? Once you have defined these points, ROI becomes a lot simpler.

Marketing objectives drives the use of social media metrics, but metrics change by platform application and involve two categories of hard facts and soft feelings; you must combine the two to track ROI effectively. This handy table indicates what factors to measure depending on your business’ own marketing objectives.

Social media can be split into the three buzzword categories below. By selecting 2 KPIs from each, you’ll begin to get a feel of what content customers are sharing, what works, what doesn’t and ways you can improve your reach and therefore realise objectives. Measuring these 2 KPIs monthly, weekly and daily will highlight trends in your output to tailor your future marketing efforts accordingly.

Setting up designated landing pages or using trackable URLs, monitors customer’s behaviour to and from your site, shedding light on further consumer behaviours you can create opportunities from.

It is also important to measure how the success of your campaign may generate savings in other areas – for example if you have an active community answering customer questions, this may reduce the costs of customer support. Starbucks’s MyStarbucksIdea.com is a prime example, acting as a customer feedback portal with a captive and thoroughly engaged audience. Allowing Starbucks customers to have their voices heard it doubles up as crowdsourcing platform with consumers testing and suggesting products and experience ideas. This generated 70,000 ideas in its first year alone.

American electronics retailer Best Buy used Twitter to provide support and recommendations, build advocacy and engage its audience in its Twelpforce campaign. Leveraging the power of social by offering a service to those seeking impartial advice, customers could tweet the Best Buy help force with their queries. Reducing complaints by 20%, the resulting technological responses and advice were posted in an online wiki to assist the Best Buy digital community.

Last year Domino’s Pizza credited its 29% increase in pre-tax profits (equating to nearly £16 million) directly to its social media initiatives and promotions on the location-based Foursquare platform. CEO Chris Moore attributed the surge in online sales making up 32.7% of all orders, as proof that social media marketing campaigns really do deliver.

The main Domino’s Facebook page now has in excess of 3.2 million likes, up from 36,000 this time last year, including a Superfans program and affiliate marketing schemes to prove the pizza delivery company is ahead of the social media game. Moore concludes, “all of these web-based activities offer a dual benefit of driving pizza sales online and building customer loyalty.”

Achieving ROI through social is not just for super brands like Domino’s and Starbucks, Neoco recently delivered over £350,000 (USD $572,000) of purely social and digital sales within the first two weeks of launch for new partwork magazine “Baked & Delicious”. Reaching an audience of over 1m people by engaging influential bakers via Facebook and blogger outreach, the true power of social was amplified to create buzz and awareness around the “Baked & Delicious” product launch.

With your goal and marketing strategy defined, your metrics chosen, your budget set and your testing completed you will be far ahead of the 47% of companies Econsultancy polled towards the end of 2010 who said they were “not able to measure” their campaigns.

Tags  monitoring social media roi social media Social Media Influence social media ROI