How do you determine the success of your social media marketing? If you’re like many business owners, you focus on likes, shares, and comments. Although that gives you a realistic insight into how people react to your content, what does it mean in dollars and cents? The ultimate goal of marketing is to make your business money. Shouldn’t you be able to show the amount of money you’re getting in return for your investment on social media? We believe the answer is, yes! Here’s how to use your social media analytics to learn more about what your efforts mean to your business’s bottom line.
A Note About Audience Segments
Before we dive into how to analyze your data to determine the ROI of your social media marketing, let’s talk about audience segments.Segmenting your audience by social network, demographics, or any other category shows you who’s buying and who isn’t. It’s perhaps one of the best ways to gauge whether you’re targeting the right group or if you need to shift your message elsewhere. Using your analytics dashboard, segment your audience into the groups that matter to your business. Then you can dive into analyzing the data.
- Track Reach
Facebook page likes and Twitter followers don’t tell the whole story. Even if you have 10,000 followers, your posts might only be seen by 100 people. Reach works as your baseline to give you a more accurate glimpse into your social media efforts. This is also one of the easiest bits of data to track. Reach is defined by how many people see your post. It does not require any type of engagement on the part of your fans or followers.
- Compare Reach and Clicks
One of the best ways to tell how much money your social media efforts are making you is to gauge how many people click out of a social network to your website. This can be to a blog post, sales page, or to your home page. Comparing the number of people who saw your post with the number of clicks you received shows you the level of interest in each audience segment.
- Was there a specific blog post that gave you a higher volume of clicks? Write more on that topic.
- Was there a specific offer that people clicked over to learn more about? Give more of that type of deal.
Analyzing clicks shows you where people’s interest lies so that you can make more out of your efforts.
- Track Conversion Rates
Conversions! This is where the real money making figures come forward. You know how many people are clicking to your website, but how many of those people are actually opening their wallets and making a purchase? That’s the number that’ll help you gauge how much your social media is making you.
Wrapping Up
Social media marketing ROI isn’t easy to define. Many marketers struggle to show the value in this marketing channel. Using an analytics tool, track what happens on your customer’s journey. Where did you lose people from the newsfeed to your shopping cart? With defined segments, and detailed analytics such as reach, clicks, and interactions, you can determine how effective your social media efforts are. Ready to give it a shot? Check out your simplified social media dashboard to get an inside glimpse into your successes.