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As a social media marketing agency, we are often asked by prospective clients, “How do I accurately measure the ROI and results of my social media efforts?”
It’s a great question.
With so many platform analytics and metrics available today, it can get confusing to determine what KPIs matter most and how to track them properly.
In this comprehensive guide, our social media experts will teach you step-by-step how to quantify the ROI and optimize the performance of your brand’s social media strategy.
Let’s get started!
Set Goals and Define Your Objective Metrics
The first step our social media marketing agency takes with any client is defining goals and expected outcomes from social media activities. Examples could include:
Increase website traffic by 25%
Grow email list sign-ups by 10%
Boost brand awareness and impressions
Reduce customer acquisition costs
Drive online and in-store sales
Based on these goals, we then select 4-5 key performance indicators (KPIs) that will determine success. Common social media metrics we track include:
Reach and impressions
Engagement rate
Link clicks, post reactions, shares
Website visitors from social
Email list sign-ups
Online and offline sales
With the end goals and success metrics agreed upon upfront, we can better focus tracking efforts.
Pro Tip: Limit KPIs to 4-5 measurable metrics directly tied to business goals. Avoid “vanity metrics” like follower count that don’t have a clear impact.
Implement Proper Tracking and Attribution
This next step is crucial. Our social media marketing agency ensures proper tracking is implemented on your website, landing pages, and social accounts so that we can accurately monitor visitor behavior and attribute metrics to the right campaigns.
For example, we use UTMs, unique links, and social platform pixels to see which posts send traffic to your site. For sales, we track special coupon codes and links to match up revenue.
Proper attribution helps identify the ROI on both organic and paid social activities across multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. It shows the full impact social has on the bottom line.
Pro Tip: Use audience sharing features on platforms like Facebook to create custom audiences and retarget them for optimization.
Monitor Key Platform Analytics and Insights
Each social network provides an array of built-in analytics and metrics – you just need to know which data points help track progress towards your defined KPIs.
As a social media marketing agency, we dig into the key reporting dashboards for:
Facebook Ads Manager and Facebook Analytics
Instagram Insights
Twitter Analytics
TikTok Analytics and Ads Manager
YouTube Analytics
LinkedIn Metrics and Page Insights
We pull weekly or monthly reporting on metrics tied to campaign objectives like reach, engagement, website visits, and conversions. For owned social content, we assess performance by post and asset type.
Combine this data with Google Analytics and sales data to calculate true ROI.
Pro Tip: Schedule regular reporting cadences and use filters to segment data for more insights.
Conduct Competitor Benchmarking and Analysis
Our agency analysts regularly monitor competitor social media activities across our clients’ markets to identify benchmarks and best practices.
We examine competitor content performance, community growth, engagement levels, ad spend, etc. This competitive intelligence informs our recommendations on everything from platform mix to optimal posting strategies.
Pro Tip: Use social media management tools like Hootsuite to streamline tracking competitors at scale. Monitor companies beyond your direct competitors too.
Leverage Social Listening for Market Insights
Social listening allows our agency to complement platform analytics with real-time qualitative data on relevant brand mentions, shifts in audience interests, feedback on products, and discussions around industry news.
Our team actively tracks keywords and phrases across public social conversations. We use tools like Awario, Sprout Social, and Brandwatch.
These consumer insights paired with performance metrics paint a complete picture of social efforts. We apply learnings to improve messaging, content creation, and audience targeting.
Pro Tip: Incorporate social listening into customer service workflows to monitor feedback and react quickly.
Continuously Analyze and Optimize Content
Our social media experts diligently analyze the performance of each piece of content to determine what posts and types of creative resonate best with your target audience.
We compare metrics like engagements, clicks, shares, comments, and traffic driven for top performers vs. bottom performers. These learnings allow us to replicate what works and refine what doesn’t.
Pro Tip: Use creation and management tools like Hootsuite to quickly gauge content performance right from your dashboard.
Review and Refresh Reports Regularly
It’s essential not to just look at initial campaign or benchmark reporting and forget about it. Our analysts are diligent about reviewing data regularly and sharing insights with your team.
We recommend clients schedule time every quarter to:
Re-evaluate metrics against goals
Discuss new opportunities or challenges presented by the data
Optimize strategy based on latest performance
Pro Tip: Automate reports to be emailed weekly or monthly. Use annotations to capture key takeaways over time.
Now that you have the tools to accurately monitor, measure, and maximize social media performance, you can confidently show the revenue impact and ROI generated by your efforts.
Do you need a professional to manage and report your social media marketing efforts? If so, you have a complimentary 30 minute consulting session available here!
https://calendly.com/vawmedia30/discovery
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