3.4: The ROI of Your Mother (GaryVee said it, not me)
Digital marketing is a must for businesses in this era. It’s because around 60% of the world’s population is present on the internet. Your competitors are likely advertising on digital platforms and interacting with their target audience via social media. So, you may end up losing these precious prospective customers.
Social media has become a part of our lives. Whether you want to talk to friends or build business networks, social platforms are the way to go. With targeted social ads, you can effectively run campaigns to increase brand awareness, increase traffic to your official business website, convert visitors into customers, or engage the existing customer base. If you want to make the most of these platforms, you can’t ignore analytics.
Gary Vaynerchuk, commonly known as Gary Vee is the king of digital marketing. During a corporate meeting, he was enquired multiple times about the ROI of social media campaigns at his company. When the top executive manager kept asking the same question, he gave back with a question of his own: “What’s the ROI of your mother?”
While it may seem a personal attack to many, Gary Vee actually raised a great point. Being the marketing genius that he is, he highlighted the importance of context and efforts when it comes to social marketing.
He shared this memory in a 2011 event. At that time, not many tools were present to calculate the return on investment for social media campaigns. He implied that it’s not possible to measure the ROI of his mother, but it reflects in his achievements. If his mother didn’t encourage him to be his best and boost his self-esteem, he wouldn’t be able to reach where he is today. To be precise, it’s not easy to calculate the exact ROI of certain things, but it doesn’t mean those things aren’t valuable.
With time, businesses became more familiar with social marketing and a myriad of tools and metrics are now available to marketers. Therefore, he rephrased his earlier claims in 2015 and enlightened us with the fact that the ROI of social marketing can be measured and it’s important to keep track of these performance indicators.
ROI of a tool is directly proportional to the time and efforts you invest in mastering it. For instance, the ROI of you playing basketball may be zero or a few hundred dollars if you bet on games. But a game of basketball will have a much higher worth for LeBron James considering that he earns over $39 million per annum salary, excluding sponsorship deals and other income. It is only because he spent years learning the game and investing in improving his skills.
The same goes for social platforms. If you keep investing in social media marketing and build your brand online through aggressive organic and paid marketing, then the ROI will go up in the future.
Increasing the ROI of Social Marketing Campaigns
Social marketing works best when you create long-term goals instead of focusing on short-term benefits. Your marketing campaigns should align with the organization’s vision and promote a positive image. Moreover, you should also define clear objectives you intend to achieve with social marketing campaigns. This way, you can increase the monetary and non-monetary revenue earned against these efforts.
Time
Regardless of which business you start, it will take time for the business to become a success. You ought to build networks, create goodwill, expand the customer base, and improve cash flows. Social marketing is no different.
You need to spend a lot of time understanding the social world. Once you have set up business profiles on social platforms of your choice, you have to come up with the right content strategy. You need to learn who your ideal audience is and create content as per their interests. You also need to determine what your competitors are doing differently and learn from them.
Your social marketing efforts may not give much ROI during the initial days or even months. But if you come up with an effective plan, things will start getting better with time. So, keep exploring the world of social marketing and your brand will eventually grow online with time and efforts.
Money
It’s a prevalent myth that social media is free. Let me clear this misconception for you. Social platforms aren’t free for businesses or even individuals. You spend your precious time chatting with friends and scrolling the timeline when you could have spent it doing more important tasks. So, you pay the price in the form of time.
However, it’s important to remember that businesses shouldn’t only rely on organic social marketing for growth. Social media ads are extremely helpful in meeting goals. Not only are they relatively cost-effective as compared to traditional marketing channels, but they also offer better targeting options.
Businesses spend millions on social ads, but you can invest in these ads as per your budget. There are a myriad of targeting options available and you can reach the audience based on their gender, location, interests, devices, online activities, behaviors, demographics, and many more specific options.
Furthermore, you can also run marketing campaigns for the audience depending on their buyer’s journey stage:
- Awareness Stage – Brand Awareness and Reach
- Consideration Stage – Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, Messages
- Conversion Stage – Conversions, Catalogue Sales, Store foot Traffic
Analytics Tools for Social Media ROI
You can spend significant amounts of time and money in building social profiles and running comprehensive ad campaigns. But how would you know whether your efforts bring the desired results?
The best way to track your social ad campaigns is through analytics tools. You can find various tools and software that provide useful information. With the help of this data, you can optimize your social media strategy and meet predefined marketing goals.
So, here are some of the best analytics tools that may prove the right choice for you:
Hubspot Marketing Analytics
Hubspot Marketing Analytics dashboard offers a unique solution for your social marketing needs. It tracks the ROI of ad campaigns on any social platform, assists you with creating Calls-to-Action that drive results, guides you about the best SEO strategies, and lets you create attractive landing pages for lead generation.
Google Analytics
With Google leading the tech industry, it’s no surprise that their social media analytics tool is also one of the best options out there. It is compatible with Google partner platforms including YouTube. You can also integrate it with your business website to monitor website traffic. You can determine how much traffic each social platform directs towards your website and find out detailed information such as engagement, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.
Mention
Mention is an innovative tool through which you can find out how your brand is doing online. It informs you about discussions related to your brand and lets you know what your customers are saying about you. You can also use this tool to learn about your competitors and take appropriate actions to further improve your social presence.
Keyhole
If your social marketing strategy revolves around Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, then Keyhole may be the ultimate solution for you. Not only can you explore the performance of social campaigns, but also find out when your target audience is online and how they engage with social posts. You can also learn about reach, impressions, engagement, and conversion from individual posts as well as the entire ads campaign.
Aside from these standalone tools, you can also utilize analytics dashboard offered by different social platforms. They include Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, last but not the least YouTube Analytics.