Measuring your Social Media ROI – Small Business Marketing 101
This series includes:
Small Business Marketing 101
Step 1: Position and Plan
Step 2: Create an Identity
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 4: Measure your Digital Media ROI
Step 5: Measure your Social Media ROI
Marketing channels have drastically changed over the years, and social media has taken an unprecedented seat in majority of all marketing plans. However, measuring social media ROI has been an industry wide controversy and we have set-out to terminate the controversy. Below is a carefully addressed solution on measuring Social Media ROI and likely the last resource you will need to satisfy your objectives. Yes, our agency Creative Intellects innovated this methodology and has proven its track record through our various success stories.
Engagement in digital actions is important for any digital media-marketing program. However, it is far more important that we enable and empower our market to effortlessly share, adapt and evolve these marketing messages. This allows for us to measure the types of influences these messages create. By quantifying the true impact of digital and social actions, as well as moving beyond immediate impact, includes not only your ROI but also your return on influences.
What does all that jargon mean?
It’s simple. Media that is social is different from digital media. In fact, social media has completely different measurements and cannot be compared against digital ROI strategies. The objectives with social media are measuring the following: advocacy, loyalty, trust, and influence. These objectives measure sentiment, comments, feedback, mentions, and organic reach of a brand. These measurements must be utilized far differently.
Measuring Social Media ROI
Understand social media has many levels of user engagements which are translated into four steps.
1. Engagements
- A prospective user that visited your website
- A prospective user that visited your landing pages
- A prospective user that visited your web blog
2. Contribute
- A customer posted a review about your business
- A customer provided you with feedback on another website
- A customer commented about your product/service on a blog
3. Participate
- Followed you on Twitter
- Socially bookmarked your website and/or content
- Became a fan on your Facebook page
4. Create
- Re-tweeted on Twitter
- Wrote a review about your product/service on a personal blog
- Mentioned your product/service on his/her Facebook status
- Engaged in conversation with your product/service
Through Social Interactions Things Occur In Sequence
The return on investment within social media occurs once all the non-financial impacts are fulfilled as outlined above in the four steps. This means that the user goes through the four steps: engages, contributes, participates, and creates for your business. Each of the four translates into value for your organization, eventually facilitating the ‘Word of Mouth’ marketing. This encourages social networking amongst peers with relevant interests to engage, contribute, participate, and create. Talk about buzz marketing and financial impacts at its best. No wonder social media is an unprecedented marketing tool.
So talk to us! How is your social media strategy working for you? If we can help national brands with their marketing strategies, who says that our agency cannot help you? All you have to do is take notes, and if you really want to be a step ahead, make a small investment in our Internet Marketing eBook. Both of these tools and resources will serve as the perfect guide in establishing your brand.
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Measuring your Digital Media ROI – Small Business Marketing 101
This series includes:
Small Business Marketing 101
Step 1: Position and Plan
Step 2: Create an Identity
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 4: Measure your Digital Media ROI
Step 5: Measure your Social Media ROI
The Small Business Marketing series is a compilation of what most businesses should be doing to increase their visibility on the World Wide Web. We want to take the time to educate you, and empower you to increase your ROI. Now that we have covered the basics in Small Business Marketing we want to give you a macro view on how to measure your Digital Media ROI.
Before we begin, let’s go over the basics first. A digital media campaign is designed around the idea of building an awareness through various types of media channels. They can range between search marketing, public relations, social media, and online media. These mediums are generally specific in building traffic, increasing lead generation, as well as serving as a tool to monitor website performance analytics.
Keep in mind that you have to be patient, this does not occur overnight by any means. You have to understand the analytics by evaluating the types of visitors that approach your website, just the way you manage your brick and mortar facility. The right metrics are important when you want to see a solid return on investment. If this sounds like a lot of work, its not so bad once you get the basics down. In laymen’s terms, every aspect of your digital media strategy is measurable.
For example, let’s say that a visitor walks into your brick and mortar facility but is somewhat hesitant to make that purchase. We already know that he/she is likely to search on the World Wide Web for competing prices and service attributes. It’s a given. If this prospective customer were to visit your website he/she is likely to make a final decision based upon the quality of your website. Be sure that your website is positioned to obtain your target market, this is where proper design and marketing messages take priority.
Measuring ROI
In order to measure ROI in a digital media campaign, we must review the non-financial impacts first. Non-financial impacts are stages within your marketing campaign that include but are not limited to the following: the number of visitors, number of page views, time spent on website. In digital media the objectives are the following: increasing reach, awareness, coverage, and engagements across all verticals. Once visitors have engaged with the intended website and engagements occurs with the product/service – an ROI can be measured by the conversion rates. The higher your conversion rates the better your campaign is performing. This means that you have succeeded in obtaining successful website usability.
Conversion Rates & Why They Drop
Conversion rates drop for two primary reasons.
1. Website traffic is not targeted to the intended product/service. If you are selling fish tank equipment and a prospective user who is searching to purchase exotic fish, is not likely to remain on your site for too long. Takes extra measures to target prospective visitors for your intended product/service.
2. Website usability and the ability for the user to find the solution they intend is also another reason for poor website conversions. Usability is very important and design strategy plays a key component when it comes to conversion rates. Be sure to measure your shopping cart abandonment rate.
Stay tuned as we are going to be giving you Step 5 of this series in Small Business Marketing 101. If we can help national brands with their marketing strategies, who says that our agency cannot help you? All you have to do is take notes, and if you really want to be a step ahead, make a small investment in our Internet Marketing eBook. Both of these tools and resources will serve as the perfect guide in establishing your brand.
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Spread The Word Through Internet Marketing – Small Business Marketing 101
This series includes:
Small Business Marketing 101
Step 1: Position and Plan
Step 2: Create an Identity
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 5: Measure your Social Media ROI
Our small business marketing series has informed you about understanding and positioning your brand to your core target market. We followed up with an in-depth understanding of your branding efforts, and the most critical points to take into consideration.
Let’s start with the basics. Internet marketing is also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing, and/or e-marketing. It is the general promotion of products and/or services on the Internet. It is a broad term that encompasses more than just Internet based marketing. It also includes both e-mail marketing methods and wireless media (mobile marketing, etc).
You have to start with a blue-print of your business. This is likely going to take time, so please allow yourself at least 45 minutes (given that you have all the data on hand, otherwise this will take longer) to formulate a direction for your business. Let’s get started!
There are several ways for you to market your business. As you read through the list, do not be concerned with the fact that you may not have an understanding of it. Simply, consider it as an avenue of strategy. Should you feel this may create an impact for your business, go deeper into your understanding. Without further a-do here is the list of Internet marketing avenues:
Search Marketing
Search engine marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that promotes a brands website by increasing visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of the following: paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.
This can be done through various avenues such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Each one of these will allow for marketability on the top search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.
Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to our clients: Search Marketing, is basically bidding on a position for rankings, and depending on the advertisements click-through rate, you will be awarded higher rankings for lower bids. It is a science, and a part of this concept is a gamble. We have heard many stories of organizations that have used up much of their funds as they were either misguided or did not take careful measures to avoid such matters. Start with a small ancillary budget, and learn to utilize the tools that are the most effective, and only move forward once you have fully tested your campaign.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines through “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. An Internet marketing strategy carefully crafts SEO as an essential component to any successful traffic generation program.
To give you insight, SEO involves two basic components. The first is on-page optimization (40%) which is keyword relevance within the HTML and body content. These elements include, Title Tags, Alt tags within images, Headlines, paragraphs, and meta data. The second is the off-page optimization (60%), which is the process of achieving back-links with anchor text pointing to your domain. Through both of these processes, SEO can help you to naturally increase organic search listings on major search engines.
Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to clients: SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be far more effective, depending on the brands goals. This includes paid search advertising, which has its own version of SEO called ATO (Ad Text Optimization). A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic, that is achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising, to web pages. It may also involve the use of the following: paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade your audience, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their success, and improving a website’s conversion rate. SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.
Social Media
Social media optimization, or SMO, is a form of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. Social media provides features that allow you to syndicate content, including, RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user ratings and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Promotional activities through social media include: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating within discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles. SMO’s primary focus is to drive traffic from sources other than search engines, while also improving your natural search rankings.
Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably because it is coming from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is can be defined as the use of any mobile medium where communication of a message occurs. This can be syndicated through numerous avenues such as: text message marketing, mobile applications, mobile enabled websites, and mobile applications embedded with advertising (to name a few).
These various types of mediums, allow for advertisers to achieve unique engagements with their select market based on specialized interests. For example, a game that incorporates car racing may have suitable advertisers within the automotive industry and/or other psycho-graphics associated products/services. Mobile marketing is changing at a very rapid pace, which means that brands can communicate with their market quickly, and that is far more effective than e-mail marketing.
With the aforementioned, Internet Marketing is a crucial science of finely crafted strategy that utilizes each medium in a creative and meaningful form. These verticals: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Online Media, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing are mere examples to help you to get onto the right track of understanding what is suitable for your brand. Be sure to utilize each platform in a cohesive manner and decide where your efforts should be placed.
Stay tuned as we are going to be giving you Step 4 of this series in Small Business Marketing 101. If we can help national brands with their marketing strategies, who says that our agency cannot help you? All you have to do is take notes, and if you really want to be a step ahead, make a small investment in our eBook. Both of these tools and resources will serve as the perfect guide in establishing your mark.
Happy Marketing!
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