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How to Measure ROI On Your Paid Social Media Marketing Strategy

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Are you a business looking to increase your presence on social media or revamp your existing accounts?

You need to create a social media marketing plan that includes advertising and measures your return on investment (ROI).

If you aren't getting any ROI from your marketing, why keep doing it?

Social media marketing is using techniques like digital ads to promote a product or service, typically by driving online users to a website.

Keep reading if you need tips on developing your social media marketing strategy. We'll discuss how to set goals, measure your performance, and calculate ROI.

Defining Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Before you start running social ads, do you know your target audience? This is important because platforms like Facebook allow you to finely tune ad demographics.

Are they male or female? How old are they? What's their income? How much education have they completed? What are their interests? Who else do they follow on social media?

Next, you'll want to decide on objectives. Let's look at Facebook ad objectives as an example:

  1. Brand Awareness: Get people to learn more about your business
  2. Reach: Spread messaging to more of your target audience
  3. Traffic: Drive people from social media to your website
  4. Engagement: Increase interactions (likes, shares, or comments)
  5. App Installs: Send people to download your business app
  6. Video Views: Get more people to watch your videos
  7. Lead Generation: Collect leads online through email sign-ups
  8. Messages: Communicate with new or current customers on Messenger
  9. Conversions: Encourage people to buy a product or perform an action
  10. Catalog Sales: Showcase your e-commerce store
  11. Store Traffic: Promote physical traffic to your store

As you can see, there is a lot to choose from. Some are directly related to revenue (conversions or catalog sales) while others educate the public about your business (brand awareness or engagement).

Don't discount awareness campaigns. The followers you gain now could be your next customer in the future! Sustaining positive word-of-mouth is also very important for all businesses.

Understanding Key Performance Indicators

As a successful entrepreneur or business owner, you understand the importance of setting goals. They help keep you on track.

Based on your target audience and objective, you need to set key performance indicators (KPI). These are metrics you will track throughout your campaigns.

There are two kinds of metrics in social media marketing: vanity and meaningful. The first type is measured as likes, shares, or comments, while the second is tied to how much money you make.

It's a good idea to include a bit of both.

For example, maybe track engagement to monitor how the public feels about your business, traffic to see how many people are visiting your website from social media, and conversions to find out if your ads are leading to sales.

Let's consider tracking traffic. You'll have to look at click-through rates (CTR). You can find this rate by dividing your total number of clicks by total impression and multiplying that by 100.

Here's an example: 110 clicks / 10,000 views X 100 = 1.1%

Congratulations! If these numbers were real, you'd have a good Facebook CTR. Right now it's good to be around 1%.

How to Calculate Your Social Media ROI

Let's discuss the bottom line: return on investment. As a business owner, you want to see results. The best way to do that is by calculating your ROI.

Make sure you're including all expenditures when crunching the numbers. This includes any money spent on social media managers, graphic designers, third-party software, high-speed internet, and more.

Imagine you are running ads for app downloads. To determine your cost per conversion you will multiply your app's cost per click (CPC) by the total number of clicks per person.

Here's an example: $2 per click for the app X 3 clicks to convert = $6 per conversion.

Does that match up with your budget? If your budget was $6,000, you should've received 1,000 downloads.

No matter what type of social media objectives you chose, you will be able to calculate ROI. It's simply a matter of finding the right analytics on the back end.

There are several programs you can download that will calculate ROI for you. They can also help you determine a customer's lifetime value.

To get the most out of your ad spends on Facebook make sure you aren't bidding too low. And double-check each ad to ensure your high-quality images are optimized and your text is compelling. Less is often more.

Ideas for Evaluating Your Social Media Marketing

Now comes a big step. It's time for you to take all of your data and evaluate how your social media marketing is doing.

We aren't going to lie, many factors go into an ad campaign's effectiveness. The good news is you have a ton of information from your Facebook or Instagram page.

One reason your ad failed could've been the design or copy. For whatever reason, it didn't resonate with people.

You can correct this by A/B testing all of your ads, running each for a limited amount of time to determine which works best. When you find the better version, put more money behind it.

It's possible you had the ads running the wrong time of day or it wasn't properly hitting your target audience. In some cases, you may even find that a different platform is better for your type of product.

Measure everything and think deeply about why you aren't getting the results you want.

Want to Hire Social Media Professionals?

The truth is no one can execute a social media marketing strategy better than a professional agency. It takes a lot of experience and knowledge to get it right.

Drive Social Media is a full-service digital agency that helps you make decisions about strategy based on the most up-to-date information on social media. We also enjoy educating our clients along the way.

The best part of hiring an agency like us is we'll provide you with the ROI you're looking for. And we only focus on KPIs that earn you money.

Visit our blog to learn more about the changing social media landscape. Contact us today to discuss growing your business!