The days of saying brand awareness and loyalty are the only results of social media activity are over. Like any other part of your marketing, there needs to be quantifiable success to determine the value of social media.
This isn't to say you should abandon social media. Far from it. Instead, your company's social media team should be asked to demonstrate ROI-just like any other part of marketing.
The difference between five years ago and today is that counting clicks, shares and followers aren't the only ways to show results. Instead, you have to know how social media is generating leads and if those leads are turning into customers.
So what should you ask to ensure you are generating revenue through these channels? Here are three important questions:
How Are We Currently Demonstrating ROI?
In the early days of social media, I was delivering details on retweets, comments and follower counts. Often times, mining and reporting customer activity and sentiment was also part of determining success of all marketing and PR efforts. These elements are still important, but most B2B companies don't need this reported on a regular basis.
Social media ROI can instead be determined by demonstrating social media visit-to-lead and lead-to-customer rates. This generally requires two things:
- CRM software (like Salesforce)
- Marketing software with social integration that communicates with your CRM software (like HubSpot)
When you have these two pieces in place, you can close the loop on social media activity.
Why is this important? Social media leads tend to have a higher visit-to-lead rate than other web leads. (The difference between social media and other channels is indeed the brand awareness and loyalty, so engagement is generally higher.) In researching our social media success across industries, I've seen social media visit-to-lead rates up to 300 percent higher than the average visit-to-lead rates of one to two percent.
Take a look:
Because social media leads retain a 100 percent higher lead-to-customer rate than outbound marketing activities, social networks can be lucrative channels. Unfortunately, the value of your company's activity remains unquantified until you can see those numbers in front of you.
How Can We Make Social Media More Efficient?
There's a myth that social media can take up a lot of time. Unless you're a big B2C brand or you have a customer support Twitter account, there's no reason to monitor social media every minute of every day. That would be like paying an employee to stare at the telephone and wait for it to ring.
Social media is primarily a broadcast tool. For B2B marketers, and depending on the scope of your social media accounts, your team can schedule updates to go out throughout the day using a tool like BufferApp, Hootsuite or HubSpot's Social Media App. Even Facebook has built-in scheduling features on Business Pages. With scheduling, it's easy to maintain social media accounts on the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+) in an hour a day.
The less time a person spends on managing the social media accounts, the more time they have to create blog posts, whitepapers and eBooks. This content is the fuel behind all social media lead generation activity. Which brings us to the final question:
How is Social Media Integrated with Other Digital Marketing Efforts?
Ultimately social media is used to deliver information, ideas and messages to customers and potential customers. But that isn't limited to a single tweet or status update. Your marketing team should concentrate on developing content that can be shared on social media. This includes:
- Blog Posts
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Videos
- Infographics
When a visitor fills out a form on your website to access your content, the data you capture can be used to build stronger profiles for prospects and customers alike. This is so important that CMO.com named this form of social media maturity as the third biggest marketing trend in 2013. Plus, the rise of social advertising as a necessity for brands of all sizes means you need content to fuel those activities, as well.
In the end, the way you answer the above questions today will determine how you and your team plan and implement a social media strategy tomorrow. But chances are the ever increasing pressure to prove ROI for all of your marketing efforts will be applied to social media sooner rather than later.
photo credit: JefferyTurner