It’s difficult to measure the ROI of social media marketing. Sometimes we’ll invest a lot of time posting pictures and updates only to receive just a few likes and maybe a comment. When this happens, you may feel like you’re wasting a lot of money without receiving an adequate return-on-investment. Much of this is due to the fact that we really don’t understand how the social media marketing process can really help our business in the long-term.

The Evolution of Social Media

In the beginning, there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive a high ROI from social media marketing. Unless someone buys your products or services and tells you they found you via social media, it’s tricky to nail down the exact ROI. However, with there being thousands of monthly users on social media today, this isn’t an aspect of your marketing that you can afford to ignore.

Studies have shown that the number of people who actively engage with social media today has doubled since 2010. Many people prefer social media over traditional news outlets, because of the interaction they can have here. They see this as a direct line to your business, unlike what they’d receive if they were to dial a toll-free number and be moved throughout your company in hopes of receiving the information they need.

How Social Media Benefits Your Brand

Social media is also a great place for customers to share their feedback regarding their experiences with your company. If they really like you, they may even be willing to go as far as to share your content on their own page, so you can reach a whole new audience who may not have ever heard of you before. This is yet another type of word-of-mouth advertising – a conversation you should actively engage in.

Customers appreciate having easy access to the businesses they use on a regular basis, but what they like even more is when the business actively engages with them. This is because it shows that you care about them. Now you can involve them in future business decisions, offer them exclusive benefits, and help your customers be personally involved with your business. Doing so will encourage them to develop a strong relationship with you, which will result in brand loyalty. This affects your customer lifetime value (CLV) – the net worth, or dollar value, of one customer to your business over time. The more loyal your customers are, the more profit you’ll gain from them. Just imagine how much your business’ ROI will increase with several loyal customers.

How to Attach a ROI to Your Social Media Marketing

There are four actions you must understand so you can attach a hard number to your social media growth efforts. These include:

• Clearly defined goals that consist of things you can attach a number to (e.g. contact form submissions, purchases, downloads of a whitepaper or eBook), not likes, comments and shares.
• Insight metrics to measure your campaign’s success. While ultimately you want to increase your profits, not receiving an immediate ROI doesn’t mean your marketing failed.
• Information about your target demographic can come from built-in social media metrics. With this information you’ll be able to get to know your audience more intimately, so you can truly cater to them.
• Goal tracking via Google Analytics will help you understand your reach, post engagement, increases or decreases in followers, and other factors that will help you figure out what content strategies are successful and which ones aren’t. This will also give you the exact number of conversions for any specific objective that you want to track.

Setting up Your Social Media Campaign

The most important part of social media marketing that you should remember, is that social media provides intangible benefits that are impossible to get from traditional marketing. You can build your brand, earn strong links from reputable sources, and interact directly with your customers (which is an invaluable tool you should take advantage of). This isn’t something that’s going to change any time soon, but it will continue to influence drastic changes in the way we conduct our digital marketing today. The sooner you realize how important it is to utilize the appropriate social media channels for your business, the sooner you’ll start reaping this marketing’s endless benefits.