I’m finally getting around to watching the recordings from Social Media Marketing World 2014 #SMMW14 and these notes came from the presentation by Nichole KellyNichole Kelly

Nicole starts out by saying social media used to be all about the “relationship” but CEOs aren’t buying that anymore.

 “Whether we like it or not, what CEOs are telling us is clear cut:
they don’t trust traditional marketers,
they don’t expect much from them.
CEOs have to deliver shareholder value.
Period.
So they want no-nonsense ROI Marketers,
they want business performance,
they want results.”
– Jerome Fontaine, Fournaise’s global CEO and chief tracker

Figure out what is working and stop doing what isn’t!

We are letting our data go into a black hole that we aren’t measuring.Social Media black hole

Social Media is a very high funnel activity-you get to buyers quickly and build a relationship with them.

Direct Response – online advertising is more easily attributed to sales.

You need to “Measure through the funnel”-NURTURING between Social media and Direct Response-nurturing your fans and followers to understand them better until they reach the point where they are interested in the product.

Social Media is akin to “crunches” exercise where we isolate certain muscles: we need to isolate Social Media users so we can compare them to people who have never touched Social.

Building a better measurement system

Google Analytics is a great way to measure but the problem with Google Analytics is that it’s a “last touch” measurement system.  Only the last referring click gets the credit for the “sale”.  Social media might have had an early hand in connecting the people to you but it doesn’t get the right credit.

She illustrated an audit they did for a client and found that the perfect solution for them was a combination of tools to do their tracking (she stressed that this may not be the right system for you)  Here are the tools she mentioned:

  • Google Analytics
  • trks.it – a link shortening tracker great for getting information on 3rd party links you share (now you know who is clicking on the links to
  • Marketo – automating the marketing messages
  • Salesforce – helps get to sales data

By measuring your ROI in this way you can go into your Customer Relationship Manager software (CRM) and pull reports on revenue, retention, and cost, etc. for social leads and clients and then doing the same for non-social clients and leads and comparing the two, you are now looking at ROI in a whole new way.

How do we measure social media ROI?

You have to audit all of the systems that social touches

Within Social Media:
Look at our controllable touch points and the number one thing you can control is how you use links.  Make them trackable!

On your Website:
Make it easy for people to do business with you.
Optimize your site for conversion

Web Analytics:
The real key to better numbers and understanding your ROI
You need to be using Google Analytics regularly

Marketing Automation:
You need to automate your marketing so that you are tagging people and then nurturing them further with additional messages.

CRM:
-Marketing can push leads into CRM with data
-We can control the data that is pushed to CRM

The Quick Fix

Track your links!  Don’t ever share a link without some type of tracking again.  Use the free tool Google URL Builder
-source=channel promoted in (do them separately!)
-medium=content type (status update, ad, e-mail message)
-campaign=content title (make this meaningful for reports)

Google URL Builder

In the end it comes down to 3 things:
-An increase in sales volume
-An increase in revenue
-A decrease in cost
If you do not achieve ONE of these things—You’re doing something wrong! Change your strategy!

Easy metrics:
-Cost per impression
-Cost per click
-Cost per engagement
-Cost per conversion
-Cost per acquisition

CRM Metrics (available with tools):
-ROI
-Total revenue influenced
-Average revenue by channel
-Average revenue by content type
-comparison metrics using a control groupHow to measure social media
-conversion rate
-retention rate
-time to close

 

Nichole’s sites:

http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/about/nichole-kelly/

And I love Nichole’s book, How to Measure Social Media!

 

DIY Social Media ROI Measurement

One of the things I thought Nicole’s talk did focus on was more of the techniques you can use if you are using some more expensive software such as Marketo, Hubspot, or Salesforce.  While these tools are extremely affordable for some businesses and an absolute must if you are doing a large amount of online sales each month, they may be out of range for the solo-preneur or the very small business.

So I wanted to highlight some of the ways you can measure your ROI without spending a lot of money.

  • Have a coupon code that you use just on one social platform. For example use F20 for 20% off that you only share with Facebook people, L20 would be 20% off that is only shared on LinkedIn and so on.
  • Send traffic from social sites to one web signup page and watch the optins to your offer.
  • Have a different e-mail list for people who sign up to your freebie offer from social sites.  If you are using an e-mail provider like MailChimp, Aweber, iContact or Constant Contact, it’s not hard to segment and separate your optins so that you can tell where people originally signed up.  Then when you get a sale, you can find out which list that person was on.
  • Ask people when they make a purchase how they found you.
  • Have Google Analytics track your traffic from entry to purchase.  Use tools like Google Goals or Google Assisted Conversions to help you track.

I recently did a presentation for FrontRange B2B on Social Media ROI and you can see the slides that talk about those options here:

Hope that is some helpful additional content to Nicole’s presentation.

How about you, how are you tracking your return on investment for social media? Do you feel like social media is working for you? Tell me in the comments below!