How Much Is That Like There In The Window?
How Much Is That Like There In The Window?
6 Steps to Better Social Media Campaign ROI
In our last blog article - How Much ROI Should Social Media ROI If Social Media Could ROI? - we considered what a reasonable expectation of return on investment (ROI) from social media is, from the point of view of a small business trying to build and grow their on-line social media community.
To quickly re-cap, we essentially concluded the expectation of a ROI on social media can be like the expectation of winning the lottery. Don't play the game expecting to win, play to be in the game.
Of course you shouldn't leave it all to chance.
Review and analyse the effectiveness of your activities to determine those that generate the most engagement and adapt your strategy to suit.
Counting the number of Likes and Re-tweets each post you publish receives will most likely only result in heartburn and ulcers, but that doesn't mean expecting a ROI for certain social media activities is insane, in fact it's very rational, especially when expectations are framed within the context of the following.
So, let's look at our 6 Steps to Better Social Media Campaign ROI:
Step #1: Set a Goal - What is the primary aim of the campaign? Are you aiming to increase your eStore sales during a promotion? Are you trying to collect new business leads?
Step #2: Define a conversion - What action or result will count as a 'hit'? Following the two examples above, a conversion may be a completed sale, or submission of a Contact Us form.
Step #3: Differentiate & Measure Conversions - If the goals you have set are similar to goals you have for your website, which they likely will be, you need to determine how you will differentiate conversions generated through your social media channels against conversions that were not generated through social media.
In the case of sales, it may be by counting the number of sales that used a particular promotional code that you only publish on your social media channels, or in the case of submitting a form, you may track submissions through a dedicated form or via a shared link that contains a variable. Depending on your analytics tools, you may be able to track visits to your website (or a particular page) that originated from social media websites that end with a completed sale or form submission.
Note: The iASP™ platform features a highly functional affiliate and referral tracking system that automatically tracks the source of visits, enquiries and sales.
Step #4: Calculate your return - How much was each conversion worth?
There are two methods you can use to determine this:
- Using data: Calculate the average total of the orders you received during the campaign (as per your tracking analytics). Or you can calculate the average lifetime value of the leads that you received over the campaign.
- Use a guesstimate: If you don't have enough historical data to help you, make an educated guess. For example, how much would you estimate to earn from your new customers? How much would you estimate customers spent?
Step #5: Calculate your investment - How much you spent on the campaign?
Your investment costs will be the total of things like:
- How much it cost to plan, execute and manage the campaign.
- How much it cost for graphic design.
- How much it costs for the analytics tools you are using.
- How much you paid to boost/promote/advertise your posts.
Step #6: Crunch the numbers - Now it's time to calculate
your return on investment using the simple formula:
ROI = (Return - Investment) / Investment.
Summary:
Don't be disheartened by the results of any individual campaign, the key is to test and measure and evolve an approach that over time connects and engages with your audience.
Remember that social media can be very hit and miss. In our experience content generates engagement both above and below expectations.
The element that many people seem to overlook in social media analysis is mood and emotion. It changes from time to time in humans, and mood is very difficult to measure because it can be affected very quickly and very easily by factors so far removed that not even those affected couldn't tell they were being affected. For example, my football team just lost, so now I'm not in the mood to read a post I normally would.
The key to success is adaptation and experimentation.
Review your campaigns, try to identify why they did or didn't perform. Keep trying something different and comparing the results.
Resources:
How you ever calculated the ROI of a social media campaign you ran? How did you go? Let's discuss on our iASP Central Facebook Page, or Get in Touch.
