HOW TO ESTIMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Many times, it’s hard to figure out if your social media is having an impact. Is your social media moving your business forward, or is a lot of content flying off into cyberspace?

It can be hard to tell what your social media ROI can be, so now Forbes has listed some ways you can find out.

How to Estimate Your ROI

Now, first of all, you might be wondering what the heck is ROI? It may look like the name of an Asian delicacy, but ROI is an acronym for return on investment.

As Forbes explains, 44% of businesses can’t figure out what their return on investment is with their social media. “28% of marketing agencies say they’re struggling with quantifying social media marketing impact, 55% claim they can measure it somewhat, and only 17% say they can provide accurate data on this…”

This is a common problem among businesses, so how do you prevent yourself from flying blind?

Measuring Your Social Media Worth

In estimating the worth of your social media content, you need to factor in the following: “Think of the amount of time, human resources and money you invest in a social media marketing campaign.” Then figure out what you’re getting back from sales, subscribers, traffic, downloads, and the visibility of your brand. All of those factors together will determine your ROI number.

Other ways you can determine your ROI value is through CLV or your customer lifetime value. (Don’t you love these acronyms?) This means “the average profit you net from one customer over a span of X years.” You can also check out your CLV x conversion rate, or how much each hit is worth to your business, along with the average purchase that results from your ads.

Tracking Social Media ROI 

As one businessman explains, “It takes a lot of effort to create a social media presence that benefits your business. To make things even more confusing, popularity on some platform does not necessarily translate into profit. That’s why tracking ROI is so important in business. It indicates whether or not you are getting the results you want from your efforts.”

As this report tells us, it’s essential to set up what you want to achieve with your social media. Forbes suggests listing what your social media goals are. Do you want to increase purchases? Do you want to increase followers? Do you want to generate leads? Once you have your goals established, you have to track them and measure your progress.

Also, don’t forget that ROI doesn’t always refer to money. You can see how strong your ROI in social media in other ways, like how much traffic you’re generating.

This story recommends Google Analytics to track your social media ROI. “This free tool will help you track traffic to landing pages, bounces, click through rates, conversions, video views and more.” Other sites can set up analytic dashboards as well, so you can measure the impact of your social media.

Once you clearly define your goals and start tracking your social media campaign’s progress, tracking, it should be clear what your ROI is. As this article stated earlier, nearly 50% of businesses can’t figure out how to measure their social media ROI. These tips should give you a strong head start.