Measuring your social media ROI
As a marketing agency, we of course do everything we can to keep on top of the latest trends and make sure our finger is on the pulse.
Reading the latest industry news is part of our daily routine and our content champion at the moment is most definitely Hootsuite. Just this morning in fact, we downloaded its guide to ‘The ROI of Social Media’ and it was too good not to share…
We are extremely passionate about the power of social media here at CAKE and constantly tell our clients why they need to have a presence on Instagram, Twitter etc. The first question that’s usually fired back at us is, “but how do we measure the success of social media?” We get this, as a business, if you are investing valuable resources (time and money) in something, you want to see a positive return on investment.
The trouble is, social media isn’t like traditional marketing channels in terms of measuring its success; quantifying its value isn’t straightforward. According to The CMO Survey, although spending on social media has increased 234 percent within marketing budgets over the last seven years, only 20 percent of marketers say they are able to quantitatively prove its impact. So understandably, it’s taken a while for businesses to get to grips with it and understand its worth.
The key thing to remember and this is something we reiterate to our clients frequently – the ROI of social media is different for every single organisation. Ultimately, it is defined by objectives in some of the following categories: business conversations, brand awareness or perception, customer experience and security and risk mitigation.
In its guide, Hootsuite explains how no matter what makes up your definition for the ROI of social media, you need a framework to measure it, and that should include:
1. An understanding of your investment in social
2. Objectives that connect to larger business outcomes
3. Benchmarks that set the bar for success
4. Goals that specify how and when you’ll achieve success
5. Metrics that measure whether you’re achieving those goals
6. Analysis of numbers into actionable insights
You can download Hootsuite’s full guide here and we’d highly recommend it. If we can support you with your social media in any way, from strategy to the day-to-day management, give us a shout!