‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) is a well-established method for determining how much profit or loss results after a financial investment. By assessing the return you could achieve from investing in marketing tools, you can make informed decisions when deciding how to allocate your marketing budget. It is easy to calculate and is widely applicable, with a percentage-based outcome estimated rather than the total sum of money.
This method is really useful when analysing your Social Media campaign outcomes, allowing you to also gauge a financial ROI rather than statistics focused on followers and engagement alone. Reviewing the return on all resources invested, including time, money and personnel, will provide invaluable insight into what works well and what needs improvement for future campaigns. Also, your social media campaigns should be guided by insight-driven marketing, allowing research and raw data to reflect what is best for your brand. The following six points highlight the best ways to improve your social media marketing ROI.
Set up the necessary tools
Set up the tools that you need to determine your ROI. Google Analytics is an effective tool for identifying areas of your website that need improvement, e.g. driving additional traffic to your contact page to increase enquiries. Google Tag Manager is also a useful tool for setting up UTM codes to easily track the success of each social post. These will help you better understand your website traffic, what is working, what attracts the most amount of clicks and identify opportunities to tweak your campaign next time.
Establish objectives
Establishing objectives before setting up a social media campaign is essential. Understanding what you want to achieve with the social post(s) will enable you to tailor the content better to where you are guiding your audience and what you want them to do next, ensuring a successful ROI for the time spent. Ultimately, the ROI of the social campaign will be hitting the targets and objectives set at the start of the campaign.
Understand your audience
Understanding your audience will also ensure you see credible ROI. Tailoring content to specific audience groups will maximise engagement potential as the content is valuable rather than sharing for the sake of hitting a scheduling target. In that case, you risk jeopardising an existing brand reputation, as audiences will only see the value or relevance of the content if it is targeted.
Keep up with trending topics
Plan to include a mixture of reactive and planned posts in your social schedule. By remaining up-to-date on trending topics and contributing a comment or opinion to capitalise on the current interest, you appear an engaged voice to your audience rather than only focused on your own brand.
Vary your styles of posts
Mix up the style of posts to retain audience interest. Understanding which mode of communication is best for your brand comes from insight driven marketing. For example, after reflecting on these insights, you might consider video footage, image carousels, polls and (more social media features), to provoke audience engagement and allow for longer viewing sessions on each post. If the aim is to drive traffic to the website, ensure there is a reason for the user to do so. Tease a video in a social snippet but host the full-length video on a webpage of your website to encourage users to navigate to your site and your overall goal – i.e. an enquiry. By including a Call to Action this encourages users to continue their journey with your brand and discover more content.
Repurpose content
Repurpose content to maximise its full potential and gain the most return on investment. After working on an initial piece of content, can you re-work it for various social media platforms, or re-work to be relevant to another audience group? Also remember to post over a period of tine rather than just once, not all your followers will see the post initially. Repurposing content is a way of reinforcing your messages and reaching new audiences, whilst also saving money and resources.
After following these tips and reassessing your strategies, your social media return on investment should improve. Always be mindful of your audience and keep up with relevant industry news to maximise your social media investment.
To find out more about how to increase your social media return on investment, get in touch with our team today.