If the ROI formula is more easily identifiable for activities related to traditional marketing and based on the measurement of the final turnover, for activities carried out through social media it is not always a mathematical formula based on quantitative data . In factit is sometimes necessary to use random parameters and it could also easily happen that social media are not the last referrer (the last stop) in a path that leads to "conversion", that is, the last click necessary to undertake or conclude an action (therefore easily measurable) is not made on social media, but could constitute one of the moments of a dynamic decision-making process, in which multiple stimuli intervene and, consequently, not necessarily linear.
Therefore, companies, already at the design stage of a social media marketing campaign, must plan what objectives to achieve, define the metrics to monitor to measure the results and establish the ROI formula.
The objectives that a company can set out to achieve are of various nature: they range from the acquisition of new customers, to lead generation, to increasing turnover, to facilitating customer service, etc. There can also be conversion objectives, that is, actions that you would like visitors to do, such as online purchases, newsletter subscriptions, PDF downloads, social interaction, video viewing, etc.
Once the objective that you intend to achieve hong kong telegram phone number list been identified, whatever it may be, the company will have to define which metrics to introduce into its ROI calculation formula to measure the results of the social media marketing activity .
We can distinguish 3 types of metrics , based on the source from which the data must be extracted:
parameters available directly on the social media involved in the digital marketing plan;
parameters taken from the website/blog , when the planning of various digital activities is aimed at generating traffic to the company's website or blog;
data arising from sources of different nature : for example, think of brand awareness or brand repositioning, to measure which the company will have to carry out market research before and after the social media marketing activity, to calculate the deviation generated by the activity, or, if the objective was to acquire customers or generate interest in your product/service, you could use quantitative parameters such as requests for information, appointments or requests for quotes.
If the goal is to generate traffic to the website, the company could use the following parameters taken from the company website or blog to calculate the ROI:
Traffic generated : monitoring and controlling traffic generated by “referral” sources and identifiable through Google Analytics, allows you to measure how many visitors flow to the site from social media; an increase in traffic originating from these channels will be an excellent indicator of the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign
Lead : the analysis of traffic generated by social channels allows the company to measure how many of these visitors then turned into contacts
Customers : continuing along this line in calculating ROI, we can measure how many leads (visitors who landed on our site from social channels) have become customers. The measurement of real customers is an indicator of how the resources invested in social media marketing have a rather high intrinsic value
Conversion rate : if the company wanted to make a comparison of the traffic generated by the different social channels included in the digital marketing plan, to verify which one is able to generate the greatest number of leads, it would be necessary to use the percentage value, which allows to evaluate the quality of a specific social media compared to the other channels.
The company also has other parameters to use to create its own ROI formula and drawn from each social media :
Penetration : corresponds to the number of Followers on Twitter, Fans on Facebook, Group members on LinkedIn acquired and attributable to the campaign carried out on social media. The higher their number, the greater the pool potentially exposed to our content, the greater the number of possible shares and, therefore, the ROI. The company must take care of and monitor the number of its followers on the various Social Media, to verify its progress: if the graph suffers a stop or a contraction, it would be necessary to immediately remodel its social media marketing strategy;
Interaction : In calculating social media ROI, the company can make use of a series of metrics based on interaction, which can be distinguished into:
