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Many business owners (yes, you are a business owner) continue to struggle with how to measure ROI for social media. As you develop your social media marketing plan, take the time to determine what you want to know.
Your plan should be able to identify all of your target audiences, the key influencers for those audiences, and your effectiveness in reaching them. You should be able to track the conversion rate of prospects to clients, the response percentage to your marketing messages, and who is responding to your messaging.
However you choose to measure social media, it is imperative that you have a success metric in mind before you begin. Without some sort of benchmark, determining your ROI is impossible.
Here are 7 steps to master the measurement of social media ROI:
1. Establish clear marketing goals for your product or brand, and then identify social measurements that directly support those objectives.
2. Organize your measurements and metrics in a logical framework.
3. Take a long-term outlook with social media interactions and measurements. It's a commitment, not a campaign.
4. If hard ROI metrics are difficult to track directly, consider a range of softer metrics that can be linked back to desired business outcomes.
5. Determine a dollar value for clients who choose to opt in and engage with your brand via social networks.
6. In your ROI calculations, don't overlook the value of cost savings that can result from ongoing social listening and tracking.
7. Build the technological capabilities to measure your customers' complete digital footprint-in real time.
One of the hardest ones for most attorneys to grasp is #3 - it's a commitment, not a campaign. Building a social media presence takes time. You can't expect to throw up a few blogs and have prospects knocking down your doors. Create content that is relevant to your targeted prospect, keep pumping it out there, and they will come.
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