Social media ROI and how to improve it
According to Sprout Social, 55% of consumers learn about brands through social media. These platforms are a powerful tool for business promotion. However, success requires hard work and patience. In addition, the ROI of social media is not always clearly measurable.
Social platforms play a huge role in consumers’ lives. They also help businesses communicate with their audience and manage their reputation. Social media lets you follow customers through the sales funnel and track their behaviour and sentiment. Despite the benefits, many managers are reluctant to invest in this type of advertising. This is mainly due to the difficulty of measuring the approach’s effectiveness. While sales momentum is an understandable indicator, the importance of increasing brand awareness cannot be demonstrated with numbers.
Difficulty in assessing profitability
In any business’s life cycle, there comes a time when it is necessary to increase efforts in a particular direction. Social media marketing is no exception and requires regular investment. However, it is often challenging for the team to communicate the need for increased investment to senior management. In fact, using traditional methods, SMM efforts are difficult to evaluate in most cases. In this case, focusing on the business’s strategic objectives is essential.
Branding and reputation management are at the heart of social media promotion. This approach allows you to create a community of like-minded people, increasing loyalty and recognition. While these factors don’t always lead to an immediate increase in sales, they can make a massive difference in the long term. That is why it is significant for management to start by assessing the brand as a whole.
Consumers’ perceptions of the brand influence return on investment. They will prefer a company they have heard of, even without using its services. And given the power of social platforms, a company’s presence on them is essential.
How to communicate information to management
To assess the brand’s position in the online space, you should conduct an audit of social channels and their content. It is important to pay attention to the audience’s attitude towards the company compared to competitors. At the same time, it is necessary to consider the business sphere’s peculiarities as they affect consumer behaviour. The next step is aligning the SMM strategy with the company’s goals and mission. Based on this, the specialist forms his advertising vision on the platform. As a result, it is possible to see how social media can help achieve key business objectives.
It is necessary to properly communicate the feasibility of investing in social media to the management team. To do this, it is crucial to focus on several areas, including:
- increasing the visibility of the SMM team’s work to managers making investment decisions;
- demonstrating performance metrics used to assess the performance of the SMM team;
- linking analytical tools to demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy;
- creating a system for collecting data and mapping it against objectives.
You need to make the case for each of these and ensure that the executive understands its importance. This is vital because a positive brand reputation can attract new customers and retain existing ones, ultimately impacting ROI.
