Evaluating Social media ROI

Under pressure to deliver tangible digital marketing measurements? It's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI and demonstrate results

The fundamental formula for calculating your digital marketing ROI is:

ROI = (Gains from investment - cost of investment)/(cost of investment) × 100%

As a marketer, one of your main worries is how to prove the effectiveness of your digital marketing activities. To prove it, your boss wants hard numbers - so it's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI. Let me tell you this though: there’s no exact method that will capture your digital marketing ROI perfectly. It’s just difficult to quantify some of the activities you engage in. Having said that, you can still have an approximate value of your digital marketing ROI. This gives you insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Apart from providing a figure to your boss, it helps you to adjust your marketing strategy to improve results. But to…

Unless you know where you currently stand, you won't know what to work on and what kind of improvements you’re making

There’s no doubt that social media is an important channel for marketing, especially with the increasing user base and rapidly evolving features. In fact, 73% of marketers in the State of Social survey said that social media marketing has been effective for their businesses. That said, some businesses may not get the desired results out of their social media marketing efforts - mainly because they’re making critical mistakes. [si_guide_block id="142889" title="Social media report template" description="Clearly show the ROI for your social media campaigns with our easy-to-use report template. It's ideal for internal use, or for presenting to a client you're working with."/] In this post, you’ll discover some of the best ways to improve the ROI of your social media marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look:

1. Use UTMs to…

Find the most effective ways to increase social ROI

So, you know that social media is a critical part of your customers’ lives. You’ve got a social media plan going, but you’re not seeing great results just yet. Perhaps you are still figuring out the best channels for reaching your target audience, or maybe you’re still learning about what content is most engaging. [si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 common social media marketing mistakes" description="Our actionable guide to avoiding common social media marketing mistakes to help you avoid the pitfalls that limit engagement with your target audience."/] If you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your social media operations and increase your ROI, here are the things you must pay attention to.

1. You can't improve what you don't measure

Virtually all businesses are using social media these days, but most companies aren’t getting a great ROI. A major reason why ROI for social…

Frameworks for measuring social media effectiveness

I am fortunate in that I get to spend a lot of time with clients on a daily basis and my current portfolio includes 86 agencies. One increasingly frequent topic of discussion at meetings is measurement, ROI and social media in particular. *For more guidance on social selling, check out our quick win, What is Social Selling and Why is it effective?, which includes detailed advice and activities on the B2B social selling platform LinkedIn. It will help you locate, connect and engage with mre if the right type of people and how to turn them into paying clients.* Amongst clients across varying sectors I see a lot of focus on owned channels, and I believe the potential of big data enabled by social media is often underutilized. What’s more, with in-house teams growing their own capabilities, agencies will need…

New research from the DMA shows that only 48% of marketers agree that social media gives them any return on investment.

A report from the DMA on social media's place in marketing reveals some very interesting trends, but not all of them are positive. Although the vast majority (77%) of marketers are using at least one social network to promote their brand, that doesn't necessarily mean they are getting the most out of social or generating significant ROI from it. The research asked some 111 marketers from a mix of large B2B and B2C companies questions regarding their use of social media. We have also just undertaken our own research in 2017 with a much larger sample size (609) and found a big divide in how marketers view the effectiveness of social media marketing.

Which channels are used most for marketing?

As a rule of thumb, marketers will generally gravitate to the channels…

Content marketing works, but measuring content marketing ROI is challenging

In the Smart Insights-Hubspot research into content marketing in Europe, 44.4% of marketing managers who responded to the survey, say they struggle to measure the return on their content marketing investment. [caption id="attachment_34135" align="aligncenter" width="550"] 44.4% of marketing managers struggle to measure content ROI[/caption] This inability to measure the ROI of content marketing confirms a need for more guidance on how to calculate the cost of content marketing and measure the return on investment. In this post I want to walk you through a simple but effective costing model, and show you how, by breaking out the component costs of content into labour, production and distribution, you can work out your content marketing cost, which provides the basis for evaluating your content marketing…

5 Questions to help set, manage and review your content marketing effectiveness

As we accept that our consumers are learning about, and navigating through, more and more information about our brand, organisation, industries or topic areas as they research online, we're needing to deploy more sophisticated strategies in order we can earn attention, and importantly trust. This is what sits behind the drive of content marketing's rise to the forefront of the digital marketing agenda. Content marketing is starting to mature, too. More and more reports, such as this from the Aberdeen Group, illustrate this, here too.

An easy start-point

Below is a simple matrix of ideas to help you set the KPIs or metrics based on what we've used on different projects. We're not saying "this is the way you must do it" or that you need to use all of these KPIs. Instead, we hope this is a useful framework…