Your Guide to Social Media ROI

We’re under more pressure than ever to prove our marketing efforts are worthwhile, and with every action (and every pound) being scrutinized, our KPI’s are all about ROI - Return of Investment.

With stakeholders getting even more granular on media spend, you need to have a way of showing off - I mean, presenting, how your hard work has paid off.- and for a lot of marketers new to social, that’s a mystery compared to traditional media.

However, even ROI models for traditional media aren't as concrete as marketers would like to believe. Sure, you can make estimates based off TV viewing numbers, OOH foot traffic, and magazine subscriptions, but how accurate can they be when according to WARC, 27% of adverts play to an empty room, and only 12% of supposedly ‘viewable’ ads are actually noticed by consumers?

Luckily, social gives you a whole host of real-time metrics for you to track and analyse - but this abundance of information can seem overwhelming at first, particularly when people in your team have different ideas of goals on social - and how to achieve them.

The Many Returns of Social Media Marketing

Unlike traditional media, social media doesn’t return against investment in just one single way.

The reality of social media is that it spans customer services, advertising, marketing, and public relations.  It's like a Contact Centre, managing customer communications - in fact, our research found that 40% of the UK prefers to contact brands via social media. It of course falls into advertising and marketing, promoting your brand or product. And it also covers PR, protecting and promoting your brand’s reputation.

Each of these areas have their own intrinsic challenges when it comes to measurement. 

Social media measurement can be more challenging as it stretches across all three.

Determining Value

For brands with an ecommerce presence, attributing sales can be easier thanks to tracking links and in-app purchases. But not every brand has an online shop, and not every campaign or post will have a trackable link - but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a comprehensive ROI model.

In order to do this, you need to determine the value of your metrics. 

Most value is ‘soft’, measured in likes, comments, shares and views. Though you can’t always track a sale from social, it doesn’t mean these metrics don’t have meaning - we’re impacting awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

So instead, we have to assume the value of each relevant soft metric in relation to your brand and it’s campaign goals. For example, for an awareness campaign, assigning a value to views and impressions would be a good starting point in developing your model.

Understanding Your Efforts

Developing a bespoke ROI model for your brand not only helps you to better understand how you’re performing on social, but also can help you inform your social strategy along the way, providing a wealth of actionable insights on what content is working best for your audience and campaign goals.

Knowing how to use the right metrics takes the mystery out of ROI and attribution, giving you a data-driven, easily explainable way to track, present, and reap the benefits of your marketing efforts.