The concept of ROI may seem overwhelming to truly figure out, especially when it comes to social media. Luckily, you’re not alone. However, determining a social media ROI is essential for the upward growth and progress of any business. Social media courses will give you real-world experience with defining, tracking and analyzing important metrics that give insight into a social media account’s progress.
Overall, social media ROI displays the amount of value generated by any investments made in social networking. This can often include time and resources spent creating content, budgets created for paid ads, and more. Continue reading to discover how to use monetary and non-monetary metrics to help you accurately measure your social media ROI.
1. Quantify Your Social Media Metrics for ROI Calculations
Quantifying social media metrics is an important part of attaining a true ROI value. While likes, retweets, and shares don’t necessarily provide a specific dollar amount of return to the business, they are still essential to growth on each channel.
To help you do this, there are a few helpful tools you can become familiar with. For full breakdowns on page traffic, attribution, and conversion data for any paid ads on Facebook, you’ll want to utilize Facebook Pixel. Google Analytics is essential to understand how you’re performing on search engines. Finally, ads benchmarks will give you further insight into how much fluctuation is happening day by day with return on investment from Facebook ads.
2. Define Objectives that Connect to Business Goals
If you don’t define what goals you’re tracking, then all of the data you could pull from various social media platforms won’t be of much value to you. Getting specific with what exactly you’re trying to achieve and which metrics contribute to those goals will help you on your path to determining the ROI. For example, if a business goal is to get more newsletter signups, then the metric to track will be found on Google Analytics under website actions. From there, you can begin to track data regularly.
3. Track ROI Down the Marketing Funnel
You can further categorize important social media metrics that contribute to ROI after your social media advertising course by looking at which metrics relate to each stage in the marketing funnel. For example, progress toward a goal of maximizing engagement can be measured by looking at the total reach in relation to how many users engaged with the content. Taking a look to see which metrics relate to each stage in the buyer’s journey can help you determine where you are succeeding and where you need to adjust your strategy. Once you’ve tied each metric to a goal, you can begin detailed tracking to determine the value it provides to your company and how it affects the ROI.
4. Keep Records of Metrics After Social Media Courses
Taking a look at the tracked data is helpful, but keeping records of these reports is essential for long-term success. There is a lot of experimenting involved with social media when it comes to figuring out exactly which ads, content, and platforms work the best for your business. Tracking what works in getting you closer to your goals is key for success on the job after your social media courses.
5. Create a Report that Outlines Each Impacted Variable
Once you have defined your business goals and which metrics relate to them, tracked your progress, and recorded enough data, you can estimate your ROI. It can be helpful to measure ROI over the length of your sales cycle, which is usually 3 months or more.
Based on the data that you have, you can assign an approximate monetary value to each metric. For example, you can use data such as the average online sale to determine how valuable website visits are to your business.
Once you’ve assigned a monetary value to each metric, you can calculate ROI. The ROI is the result of the estimated profit divided by the investment in social media efforts multiplied by 100. The profit is all of the assigned values you determined based on data, and the investment includes any resources spent on social media, such as employee time for content creation, ad budgets, publishing content, etc. With the right tools, a little patience, and enough experience, you can begin to paint a picture of the return value that social media is providing your business.
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