Get Better Social Media ROI

Social media may be indispensable to your marketing campaign, but it’s a relatively new phenomenon and marketers are still learning how to track its effectiveness. It’s certainly one of the most efficient ways to increase brand awareness and improve customer service, however how do business owners know how much to invest if they can’t see consistently what they’re getting back?

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Being popular on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ doesn’t mean you’re going to instantly make lots and lots of money. Whilst acquiring likes, shares and followers may be a nice ego boost for the company, what the boss really wants to know is how his investment in social media is being converted into leads and revenue. 

For companies that rely on offline methods, such as the telephone, for the majority of their customer acquisition, there are a number of similar techniques marketers can use to track the reach of their social media campaigns. 

Call Tracking

Within industries that typically count on telephone conversions, call tracking can help marketers understand the role of the phone call in the customer journey. Connecting online and offline marketing efforts allows you to keep on top of social media ROI and can lead to a much more sophisticated campaign.

Bhavesh Vaghela, CMO of ResponseTap, outlines the benefits call tracking can have on a campaign: “By analysing the digital journey as a customer moves offline, brands can understand the role different channels play at different stages. For example, when buying a holiday, social typically plays a part later in the customer journey, whereas when purchasing a financial services product it is usually much earlier.” 

Understanding when your customers are engaging with you means you can time to perfection the three stages of the social media ROI cycle.

Custom Social Numbers

Linking unique custom numbers to each media platform is one unobtrusive way of tracking where calls are coming from. 

Walter Blake Knoblock is in charge of digital marketing at HostedNumbers.com, a company that provides virtual phone numbers, and he explains that, “by attaching a virtual phone number to each of your social campaigns/accounts (Twitter, Google+, Facebook ads, etc...) one can see which accounts are performing and which need to be either retooled or cut completely.”

 This technique makes something that was previously untraceable much more transparent; it therefore always pays to have a visible phone number on each of your social media channels. Understanding the effectiveness of each social media platform helps businesses to know where their fan base lies and thus the quickest way to reach their customers. 

Understand Your Channels

Knowing your audience is the key to getting them on the phone and Melissa Leiter, a social media consultant, provides a useful infographic for those wishing to know the best social media channels for their brand message.

For companies that rely on call conversions, Facebook and Google+ are perhaps the best channels. Facebook has the highest number of users and the largest opportunities for companies and by seeing your post reach using the Insights tool it becomes possible to understand the visit-to-lead conversion rate of your social media traffic.

Google+, although a smaller network, is a great way for connecting to niche groups. If you have a product or service that has multiple audiences, Google’s circles tool allows you to tailor your content to specific audiences. Companies that rely on telephone calls for conversions are often found in the insurance, travel, and hi tech sectors, whose customer bases are often looking for highly specific products and services.

Measuring success on social media has up until recently merely consisted of tracking the reach of posts and the traffic being generated. But in the past year marketers have begun to find ways of tracking leads, customers and conversions which are being generated off the back of each social campaign. Being able to connect online engagement with offline conversions is the ultimate step in understanding the ROI of social media.

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