4 Key Marketing Metrics for Social Media That Will Prove ROI

By Gaurav Belani

If I would ever question you if your business is actually getting something out of social media marketing and presence, your mind may get a little boggled!

I know, this is one baffling question and can leave you stunned for a minute. But let’s agree, social media marketing has become one of the most crucial factors for businesses. It could help the brands improve their engagement with the audience and improve the ROI.

And when we are talking about the social media marketing essentials, how can we not talk about the marketing metrics of the domain? 

Moving without measuring the marketing metrics could be one big mistake a business could ever make while engaging with the audience. At this point, it is important to understand that your social media campaign and marketing strategies need a proper evaluation of their performance. In return, it would impact the profit positively and it would be easier for your marketing efforts to provide you with proficient results.

Thus, measuring the marketing metrics can help the company to strengthen its revenue bottom line. This indirectly helps the business marketers gain insights into data-driven strategies for smarter decision-making boosting ROI simultaneously.

In this quick blog post, I am going to help you explore some key social media marketing metrics that could boost your business’s social media ROI, an abbreviated term for return on investment.

What Is Meant by Social Media ROI and Why Does It Matter? 

ROI stands for return on investment and upon combining it with social media, it means the return on investment that you receive from your social media expenses and activities. 

Be it the Linkedin marketing strategy or the Instagram growth hacks, social media tactics may vary from business to business. Basically, this social media ROI is absolute or say an average measure of the entire social media action that could add value to the business. In order to get the business on a successful pace; one has to put in his time, money, resources, and efforts. And obviously, he would expect a great return for the business.

Let me share a simple formula with you to calculate the ROI for social media. 

Social media ROI = (Value achieved - investment made) / investment made  X 100

If the ROI is greater than zero, then it means your investments are making some of your business money and are not going in vain. But if the ROI gets to the point where it becomes negative then it means you lost your money!

All in all, social media ROI has become one of the most crucial components for the business and should not be neglected if a business wants to grow and expand its revenue.

How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business? - Some Key Metrics

Generally, the calculation of the social media ROI depends on the objectives of the company. It further includes brand awareness, revenue, and customer satisfaction. At the initial stage, the business would be using the starting value to calculate its ROI. Keep in mind, metrics are not avoidable at all; however, it could be a daunting task to quantify the ROI.

But as I said, measuring the social media marketing metrics is essentially important. The reason behind this measurement is to demonstrate the value of your social media marketing efforts. In this way, you can also prove that the marketing strategies of your business are quite effective and can deliver the desired results. You can take the help of a Social media management tool as well to track the performance of your social media campaigns.

The measurement of these metrics also helps in the identification of the areas that are greatly successful for the marketing strategies, indirectly doubling your revenue. Moreover, once the ROI is measured, it would be easier to back up the budget for the social media strategies in the future.

Let’s now dive deep into the key marketing metrics that could improve the ROI and could boost your future business earnings. I have broken these metrics into different subheadings so it would be easier for you to understand which metric could work best for you. Check them out. 

• Reach

Talking about the most important marketing metrics of social media – Reach. Do you have a proper understanding of the concept when we talk about reach on business profiles and posts? Have you measured how far your content has reached as per viewership objective? Not yet? If not then now might be the right time to measure reaches!

It is highly necessary for social media marketers to ask themselves whether their content reached the targeted audience rightly or not. The metric of reach indicates a variety of things – from the traveling of your posts to the number of views on your posts, reach helps you to track down the performance of your business profile in terms of reaching an audience.

Reach metric help you analyze the potential size of your audience and can predict the range of your conversion. However, this metric could simply misguide you as well by hiding a lot of key information. For instance, the reach metric on Instagram only indicates Instagram engagement with the number of people who viewed your post.

• Engagement

The social media engagement metric is always in a long-distance relationship with the marketers. How? Let’s break it down. A relationship asks for time and dedication and so does the engagement metric. A marketer needs to be highly attentive and has to ensure that the brand’s posts and awareness are getting the deserved limelight.

With the help of engagement metrics, the number of likes, shares, and comments can be measured easily, and you can receive updates about your social platforms. I personally believe engagement should always be the top focus area for businesses and marketers must plan out their strategies in its shown path. Since the engagement metric shows growth and progress quickly, marketers can eventually plan for the future.

Understand the concept in this way. Your business profile on Instagram has got a huge following but the engagement rate with such a broad following is too low, it is definitely negative and shows that your content has not been resonating well among the targeted audience. Remember, reaching millions of uninterested followers means nothing!

• Leads 

Another most important marketing metric for social media is the tracking of sales generation. It is a significant challenge for social media marketers to identify how their content is generating sales for their business. One can surely rave about how many likes or shares his posts achieve but in the end, only sales matter!

I believe, every marketer should question himself how many social media followers of his business profile ended up buying something from a certain business? Incorporating sales enablement tools into your strategy would greatly help in analyzing the results yielded by your social media campaigns and different promotional activities. And in order to proceed on a positive relationship with the audience, you need to define your prospects well.

Around 71-80% of the buyers end up making their buying decision based on social media. This is truly enormous, and tracking the leads has now become an essential element. Since businesses are constantly getting digital, now might be the right time to consider the key marketing metrics to measure growth and revenue.

• Conversions

Last in the list of key social media marketing metrics stand conversion rate and customer retention. Customer conversions are way too critical to the success of marketers and ask for some smarter moves. However, implementing a lot of strategies without measuring their results could go wrong.

None of the strategies of a business would be completed without the measurement of the acquired number of customers. And here, the best way to track the leads that you converted from social media is via using UTM parameters in the link that you are promoting. In this way, you would be able to organize and witness which of your social media posts are resulting in the best lead conversion rates.

By the way, UTM parameters are personalized tags that are added in a URL and when the link is clicked, these tags are relayed back to the analytics platform and get tracked eventually. At this point, a brand and its social media marketer needs to have an eagle eye on their targeted audience and their interests.

Final Takeaway

Social media marketing has become a backbone for the fundamental online presence of a business in the digital world. In a nutshell, the above-mentioned key marketing metrics can help the brands to prove their ROI. Reach, engagement, conversion, and leads serve the estimated number to the marketer and can provide him with predictive analysis.

In this way, the predictive analysis provided by these marketing metrics could help the marketer in designing a fundamental and effective social media marketing plan. Ensure to plan out your strategy and tactics for brand awareness smartly. Incorporating the aforementioned marketing metrics would help the digital brands to focus on their growth revenue more than ever before and they could improve their ROI in less time.

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