If you're carrying out any form of social media marketing, you need to track your results to determine the success of your campaigns.
Measuring ROI provides proof of whether your marketing efforts are working or not, and based on this data, you can change your marketing strategies to maximize ROI and achieve the desired goal.
Follow these three steps to align your social media marketing to your business goals.
1. Set Your Marketing Goals
There are different ways in which you can measure ROI. For example, you can measure contest entries, revenue, clicks, lead generation, customer acquisition, etc. However, to track and measure ROI, you need to determine the end goals of your campaigns.
Apart from impacting your revenue, social media marketing can help to improve brand awareness and facilitate customer service. Determine the goals you would like to track for your various campaigns. For example, you can track leads, customers, traffic, and conversion rates.
Each of the goals needs to be drilled down to specific actions that visitors would take. For example, conversions goals can include video views, social interactions, PDF downloads, newsletter signups, link clicks, filled-out contact forms, online purchases and more.
2. Identify the Social Media Platforms
Your social media goals should help you determine the right channels to use. Depending on your industry or product, your audience may prefer various platforms to others. For example, most audiences interested in fashion are more active on Instagram than on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Your audience will help you know the right platforms to spend time on. The size of the audience and the time they spend in particular platforms can give you an insight about the content you should produce. Your competitors can also give you an idea of where you can reach your target audience.
Establish your brand on the social media platforms through which you would like to engage with your audience. Apart from this, come up with a social media content strategy. The strategy should outline the voice you would like to use, type of content that will be shared and other rules of engagement.
3. Track & Report Your Campaigns
Finally, it's crucial to track you campaigns and tweak them for the best performance. You should track every campaign you launch, the activities done, the cost of ads, time spent, etc. You can use different tools to track the campaigns; from free ones like Google Analytics to paid ones like Socialbakers.
After tracking the campaigns, report the results. Reporting is crucial whether you are doing it for a supervisor or yourself. Determine a time frame within which you should report your results. This can be weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annually.
Go through the reports to determine the results generated from the various platforms. Also, check your social media marketing activities to determine what can be done to improve the results you're getting.