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First off, you need to gain a solid perspective around your existing business’s social media marketing metrics, goals, and targets. It’s imperative that you don’t try to assign financial value to non-financial metrics. Although you may be looking for results in the form of dollar amounts, it’s crucial to recognize the benefits that social media has on your business even if you’re not seeing a monetary return on your efforts. Sales are definitely an important metric but, when they’re not immediately available, proxies should not be used to turn a non-financial result into a financial one.
In two of our previous posts, we spoke about how you need to engage in a broad perspective when it comes to using social media for your business. We spoke of the four-point perspective, which included the following views: financial, brand, risk management, and digital. It’s important to know that you can’t rely on using just one or two perspectives. All four must be considered because, otherwise, you can’t properly assess your social media marketing strategies without taking into account the long-term value that both the brand and risk management perspectives offer.
Originally, social media cropped up and was used as a method of personal networking. It was only a matter of time until businesses would see the potential to use it as a promotional tool. Now that social media marketing is well out of the experimentation phase and a valid method of mainstream marketing, we must also alter our view of the contributions it has on the business world.
We need to consider the way we view social media. Obviously, keeping track of (returning) fans and retweets of your posts is a good measurement of the outcome of using social media. But a true measurement will come from considering all of social media’s business outcomes.
With traditional marketing tools, many investments were not made to garner immediate financial results. Just like your strategies then, sometimes you need to make an investment to promote long-term brand health which will, in turn, encourage a growth in sales and your ROI. That’s the beauty of social media marketing—it has the ability to start off with short-term results and morph into something completely different that will support your business’s long-term health.
Not every social media route needs to deliver a financial outcome. Many companies invest in web design, branding redesigns, and social media in order to keep up with, or stay ahead of, the competition. It’s also a good practice to keep up with customer expectations, which is who you’re trying to reach after all.
Using social media to promote your business and increase your total sales is an effective part of a solid marketing strategy. However, don’t let short-term financial goals detract from the long-term benefits that social media can have for your small business. Be sure to keep both financial and non-financial benefits to your business at the forefront of your mind.
Financial
When measuring your financial results in conjunction with social media promotion, you’ll gain the most accurate results when you’re using direct response marketing or the enhancement of e-commerce sites that have a social aspect. By using social media in this fashion, you’re able to garner other financial benefits.
- First is the ability to measure the rate of response when you interject a “storefront” into a social outlet. An example would be communicating a new product or promotion on the news page of a website like Facebook.
- Second, you can measure the savings you incur from a decreased number of returns. If you sell a product, allow consumers to give feedback on items. This allows you to improve a product, which will then decrease your rate of returned merchandise.
- Third, you can measure the decrease of other business costs. To use a company example, Intel launched the Intel Channel Voice community, using a community platform by Jive, and saved their company $500,000 for each conference they didn’t have to hold at an actual location.
- And last, you can use additional web communities to measure your brand’s impact on consumers. Unfortunately, this technique could cost your business money to implement. However in some instances, such as creating a live community (or forum), to coincide with a brand can be more effective at driving sales than standard TV, web, or print ads.
Fortunately, you can use the same kind of consumer surveying on your social media profiles as you would on more conventional media. What you need to do is define your long-term brand health objectives and plan appropriate surveying to measure customer perception of your brand. Surveying can come in the form of sales, discounts, promotional or limited edition products or services, etc. The results you can gain from measures such as these will allow you to work on product/service development, price-pointing, and customer care among other brand building tools..
Risk Management
The Risk Management perspective, unfortunately, cannot give you definitive ROI results but can give you a good estimate. It’s not so much about creating positive company feedback as it is about reducing the potential for any future negative feedback. You can use this measurement in a few ways.
- One, by estimating the cost of any potential negative PR issues.
- Two, by predicting the possibility of these issues.
- And three, using these two estimates to figure out how to reduce costs that could be spent on repairing bad PR.
Digital
The Digital perspective is meant to complement the others. There are a couple of ways to measure productivity in outlets such as blogs, websites, forums, and social networking sites. One is to focus on making sure your website, Facebook and/or Twitter page, and blog are optimized for the web (SEO). Another is to track traffic to the outlets mentioned in the beginning of this section. Consumers are connecting with brands on a number of levels and the number of outlets they’re using is increasing every day. Measuring traffic with all of your online profiles will allow you to see which avenue is drawing the most attention. Even though it’s difficult to connect business value to non-financial measures such as visitors, clicks, retweets, and fans, they are among the most effective ways to estimate your financial ROI. By itself, digital metrics are an unsuccessful way at measuring company value but when used with the other three perspectives they can become very relevant and useful.
In the end, it’s important to know you can’t rely on just one or two perspectives to measure your ROI. All four go hand-in-hand to give you a more accurate understanding of what strategies are working for your business and which ones aren’t.
Stay tuned for the final part of “What is Your REAL ROI of Social Media?”
As a small business owner engaging in Social Media Marketing (SMM), you want to measure its impact through a broad range of metrics that include both directly and indirect bottom line results. Social media allows for a wide range of marketing advantages due to its interactivity, targeted search engagement factors among others and because of this, a broad perspective should be taken when trying to decipher the true value delivered by social media outlets, metrics, and other monitoring tools.
- Align your measurements to all of your business’s objectives and not just its sales. Focusing on and multiple of objectives and strategies may focus less on your ROI, or Return on Investment, but will strengthen the outcome of your Return on Objectives. Doing so indicates a successful achievement of broad-based objectives rather than just counting dollars, which in turn will allow you to count on those dollars later.
- Enhance the development of your strategies. Having a broad perspective doesn’t just define measurement used after the launch of a strategic social media marketing plan; it helps in the development of new promotional ideas for your business. Setting specific long term and short term goals allows you to build a strong foundation for marketing measures. This makes it easier to approve or reject strategies as you’re developing them, saving both time and money.
- Build widespread agreement. Gaining a common understanding on metrics and targets allows you, as the small business owner, to take into account the needs of your clients and those that are invested in your business. This can also enhance your strategic development by ensuring all collaborating teams are all striving towards the same goals.
- Avoid short-term monetary gains at the expense of long-term brand health. You must not forget to test the results of other marketing strategies as opposed to those that are merely financially oriented. If you’re frequently offering promotions through social media avenues, you may see more (inexpensive) sales coming in but you need to take an account of the overall situation. Becoming a brand that is constantly offering promotions can be demeaning for your business’s presence—you become one associated with discounts rather than one associated with a strong affinity.
Essentially, you want to monitor the effects of your Social Media Marketing across a four-point perspective. Doing so allows you to balance the short term and long term marketing goals with the directly indirect bottom line outcomes. The four perspectives are:
1. Financial
2. Digital
3. Brand
4. Risk Management
Stay tuned for Part 3 of “What is Your REAL ROI of Social Media?” where we will do a breakdown of these four perspectives for your social media assessment.
Part 1: The Pitfalls of Assigning Financial Value to Non-Financial Metrics
Small businesses are using social media more and more as part of their marketing strategy, but while social media marketing can bring an increase in bottom line, the effects on your small business can be much more substantial than your ROI (return on investment) alone.
For instance, engaging in Social Media Marketing can help you foster business growth, brand awareness, and a strong client base—all very sound implementations to augment your ROI. Many of the benefits of social media marketing cannot be easily measured in dollars and cents.
However, business owners are using substitutions to assign financial value to non-financial metrics such as fans, followers, retweets, comments, and reviews. Relying on these points as hard data carries four very significant risks, which are covered below, to your business.
Small businesses are using social media more and more as part of their marketing strategy, but while social media marketing can bring an increase in bottom line, the effects on your small business can be much more substantial than your ROI (return on investment) alone.
For instance, engaging in Social Media Marketing can help you foster business growth, brand awareness, and a strong client base—all very sound implementations to augment your ROI. Many of the benefits of social media marketing cannot be easily measured in dollars and cents.
However, business owners are using substitutions to assign financial value to non-financial metrics such as fans, followers, retweets, comments, and reviews. Relying on these points as hard data carries four very significant risks, which are covered below, to your business.
- An inability to measure your business’s true value. The success of your social media marketing strategy doesn’t end with the number of followers you have. It’s what you do with those followers that create value for your business. Having thousands of “fans” that rarely, or never, revisit your company profile page does you absolutely no good. You’re much better off having a handful of dedicated followers that frequent your page and share brand information with family and friends. Remember, this isn’t a type of marketing that falls into the “bigger response is better” category. Small scale engagement with a few hundred contacts can have a larger effect on building your brand and trust factor than having 6,000 followers you never engage with.
- Hindering your business’s bottom line objectives. If you construct an online marketing strategy and you implement that strategy through an outlet such as Facebook or Twitter, but you only count the number of followers and retweets as a result of that strategy, you may not be achieving your original objective, which should be to build your online brand awareness. Much more important than fans, followers, and retweets is the consumer’s ability to recall your brand.
- Calculating incorrect values for social efforts. Meaning? An example of this ROI boo-boo would be trying to attribute a monetary value to traffic from a social networking outlet by using totals from your pay-per-click advertising through Google AdWords. Unless the values from the social outlets and the pay-per-click advertising deliver equal values, your calculations will be off. (Take note: the totals from two different forms of advertising will rarely—read “never”—be equal.)
- Ignoring the
results of channels that DO deliver results. The world of marketing is rapidly changing. It’s not the same form of marketing you remember from five years ago and much less from ten years ago. We’re constantly integrating offline, online and social strategies in an effort to build a brand. Because we’re mixing so many forms and taking advantage of the low costs and easy accessibility, it would be unfair to attribute value to the outlet that is your “final blow.” Merely participating in social media marketing should not be used as a sole measurement to your ROI. Rather, how you use social outlets to your advantage should determine the financial value it has to your business.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of “What is Your REAL ROI of Social Media!”
Do you tweet? If not – does SOMEONE in your office hit twitter to share news and tips with followers? If not, you should. With a projected 26 Million users by the end of 2010 (15.5 % of adult internet users), chances are, your target market is joining the twitter age.
Twitter has currently reached over 20 billion tweets and the company stated earlier this year that they’re seeing more than 50 million tweets per day. This is a clear indication that activity levels on the site are continuously rising.
Below are five ways you can use Twitter to your business’s advantage:
1. Use Twitter Search- Using Twitter’s search option allows you to listen for your name, the names of your competitor’s, and words that relate to your industry. In order to grow, you need to be open to listening. Find out about the interests, needs, and desires of your target market. Talk to them about it. Showing potential clients you’re human can turn them into actual clients.
2. Ask Questions- Twitter is a great resource for market research. Talk about your business, your product, and/or your service in a useful way. Give advice, post bit.ly links to blog entries, and promote yourself by promoting others. All of these things are great for getting opinions and constructive criticism.
3. Conduct Market Research- This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the above. Twitter gives your critics a forum but you can use this to your advantage. Use their critiques as a way of studying what your market is looking for. Turn a negative into a positive by using your findings to direct people’s attention to the good things you’re doing or where you’re making improvements.
4. Build Community- Commenting on others’ tweets and retweeting what others have posted is a really great way to build a community. Like the first point, it shows you’re human and that you care about the needs of your clients. Try to participate in commenting and retweeting where it makes sense though. Just like any other content you post, it should serve a clear purpose.
5. Develop Your Business- Stay tuned in to new trends and improvements in your industry. Twitter is a great means to developing your business by listening to the desires of your target market. Using the four previous points allows you to do this, as well.
No time to research Twitter let alone send out multiple tweets, retweets and direct messages a day? Give us a shout – we can help.
Twitter has currently reached over 20 billion tweets and the company stated earlier this year that they’re seeing more than 50 million tweets per day. This is a clear indication that activity levels on the site are continuously rising.
Below are five ways you can use Twitter to your business’s advantage:
1. Use Twitter Search- Using Twitter’s search option allows you to listen for your name, the names of your competitor’s, and words that relate to your industry. In order to grow, you need to be open to listening. Find out about the interests, needs, and desires of your target market. Talk to them about it. Showing potential clients you’re human can turn them into actual clients.
2. Ask Questions- Twitter is a great resource for market research. Talk about your business, your product, and/or your service in a useful way. Give advice, post bit.ly links to blog entries, and promote yourself by promoting others. All of these things are great for getting opinions and constructive criticism.
3. Conduct Market Research- This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the above. Twitter gives your critics a forum but you can use this to your advantage. Use their critiques as a way of studying what your market is looking for. Turn a negative into a positive by using your findings to direct people’s attention to the good things you’re doing or where you’re making improvements.
4. Build Community- Commenting on others’ tweets and retweeting what others have posted is a really great way to build a community. Like the first point, it shows you’re human and that you care about the needs of your clients. Try to participate in commenting and retweeting where it makes sense though. Just like any other content you post, it should serve a clear purpose.
5. Develop Your Business- Stay tuned in to new trends and improvements in your industry. Twitter is a great means to developing your business by listening to the desires of your target market. Using the four previous points allows you to do this, as well.
No time to research Twitter let alone send out multiple tweets, retweets and direct messages a day? Give us a shout – we can help.
What does this mean for your small business’s marketing plan? The stats are there and you would be hard pressed to deny that social media is more than just a fad. Its here to stay and can be beneficial to growing your online brand—not to mention at much more reasonable costs.
The average cost for a print marketing plan can run you up to 30-50% of your total sales. To remain in front of your target audience, you’ll need to market more than once a year and in more than one publication. By the time your fiscal year is up, you could easily be spending tens of thousands of dollars. It’s estimated that companies in the U.S. spend up to $400 billion dollars a year on a print advertising.
Why not use social media and other web marketing tools to your advantage? For a fraction of the cost, you can market yourself online, through means of social media networking sites, AND do it more frequently. Which means you’ll be where your clients are, and essentially your sales are, all of the time.
WriteMinded, LLC works with your business’s needs and builds customizable plans to keep you in front of your target market at a fraction of the cost of print marketing. We’re aware of the growing power of web marketing tools and how use them effectively and efficiently to your business’s advantage.
Your growth is monitored through monthly metrics within the various outlets in your SMM network and we focus your web marketing strategy only on what you need and what is beneficial to your business and, ultimately, your sales. Talk to a marketing consultant today to set up a plan that works for your budget and your business marketing goals.
Still skeptical about using avenues like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to propel your business? Some business owners are still under the impression that social media is a fad that’s going to cease to exist; that sites like Facebook and Twitter are for kids looking to grow their list of friends, sort of like a popularity contest.
Others think it’s just a plain old waste of time. But think of it this way: Social media is an extension to what folks have always been doing—connecting, learning, expressing, sharing, and interacting with others. Technology may have advanced and maybe the medium isn’t the same as what you’re used to, but our need and desire to connect with others on a personal level is still the same.
If it doesn’t excite you to know that you can connect and build a relationship with someone halfway across the world from you, with the click of a mouse, I don’t know what will! As quoted by ReadWriteWeb, “Social media is bringing back humanity to all digital life. We are no longer users, consumers, shoppers. We are people again.”
Social Media site users are not anonymous and they’re not faceless names or Internet drones. They’re people with opinions and wants and needs and now, they’re your potential client.
So why use social media and a social media marketing consultant like WriteMinded, LLC? Marketing your business and how you do it is vital to your success. Social media tools and outlets are continuously changing and, if you’re working with clients to make sales or provide services, you’ll be hard pressed for time to keep up with the latest trends and implement them into your marketing campaign.
With small and mid-sized business owners investing more in web marketing than ever before – the time is now to get in board to compete effectively in this market!
Using the full-service web marketing management of WriteMinded, LLC means your consultant is well versed in online marketing and up-to-date with current trends and will give you the ability to leverage the web to market your business successfully. Your plan is completely customized to your goals, target audience, and budget.
The staff at WriteMinded is always researching new and existing social media marketing sites and tools and assessing their success to see how, and if, they will work for your business. And what would be the point of going through all of this trouble if we weren’t sure it was working for you and your business?
WriteMinded provides each of our web marketing clients the analytics and other metrics monitoring tools to evaluate the performance of their marketing plan, assess where and how to tweak where necessary, and gauge the all-important return on investment, ROI.
WriteMinded, LLC provides the targeted web marketing plan you need to open the doors to new prospects so you can focus on selling for your business, not re-introducing it. Contact us today!
Others think it’s just a plain old waste of time. But think of it this way: Social media is an extension to what folks have always been doing—connecting, learning, expressing, sharing, and interacting with others. Technology may have advanced and maybe the medium isn’t the same as what you’re used to, but our need and desire to connect with others on a personal level is still the same.
If it doesn’t excite you to know that you can connect and build a relationship with someone halfway across the world from you, with the click of a mouse, I don’t know what will! As quoted by ReadWriteWeb, “Social media is bringing back humanity to all digital life. We are no longer users, consumers, shoppers. We are people again.”
Social Media site users are not anonymous and they’re not faceless names or Internet drones. They’re people with opinions and wants and needs and now, they’re your potential client.
So why use social media and a social media marketing consultant like WriteMinded, LLC? Marketing your business and how you do it is vital to your success. Social media tools and outlets are continuously changing and, if you’re working with clients to make sales or provide services, you’ll be hard pressed for time to keep up with the latest trends and implement them into your marketing campaign.
With small and mid-sized business owners investing more in web marketing than ever before – the time is now to get in board to compete effectively in this market!
Using the full-service web marketing management of WriteMinded, LLC means your consultant is well versed in online marketing and up-to-date with current trends and will give you the ability to leverage the web to market your business successfully. Your plan is completely customized to your goals, target audience, and budget.
The staff at WriteMinded is always researching new and existing social media marketing sites and tools and assessing their success to see how, and if, they will work for your business. And what would be the point of going through all of this trouble if we weren’t sure it was working for you and your business?
WriteMinded provides each of our web marketing clients the analytics and other metrics monitoring tools to evaluate the performance of their marketing plan, assess where and how to tweak where necessary, and gauge the all-important return on investment, ROI.
WriteMinded, LLC provides the targeted web marketing plan you need to open the doors to new prospects so you can focus on selling for your business, not re-introducing it. Contact us today!
Direct News came out with a report the other day stating that small businesses, in both the U.S. and the UK, have upped their spending on online marketing for the second quarter of 2010. WebVisible, an online company that offers advertising software to small business owners, have numbers for online marketing they’d like you to consider.
- U.S. spending went up by a whopping 159% compared to this same time period last year.
- Cost-per-click through search engines like Google and Bing went up 5.4% and 3.7%, respectively.
- Over in the UK, 6 in 10 firms are planning to spend more on SEO over the course of the next year and 52% of small businesses will be investing in paid search.
With every report that is released by the innumerable media news sites, it is obvious that the numbers in spending and usage have been increasing—always confirming how important business web marketing is today.
Despite the obcvious increase in usage of these marketing tools, there are still some serious misconceptions of the realistic expectations that should be applied to an online marketing campaign. To recap some previous points from one of our blogs, AAA for business web marketing, as a refresher when thinking about the criteria that will make up your potential web marketing plan:
1. Acknowledge- Stay ahead of the game, or at the very least keep up, with current online marketing trends, software/tools, ideas, theories, and practices.
2. Adjust- Be flexible and tweak your marketing plan to fit your (or your clients’) needs. It’s good to go in with a strong marketing plan but know that you will need to adjust it from time to time to effectively serve your goals.
3. Adapt- This point is kind of a combination of the first two but still equally important to keep in mind. Your marketing plan has to fulfill your specified marketing goals, therefore, it isimperative to understand your (or your client's) target market and apply the most current marketing tools and sites to meet that market as they become available.
Just like old school advertising, you need to put some serious thought into your online marketing campaign—you need to have a clear strategy, measurable goals and a plan aof action in case there is need to make changes once the plan is underway.
Utilizing a skilled web marketing consultant will save you time in the build and execution of your web marketing plan and allow that consultant to pinpoint what’s working with your current marketing plan and what’s not.
Through proper management, a web marketing service provider will use the most current tools to assess your existing plan and custom-build a strategy that will make your marketing campaign work for you and your business, with your ROI in mind.
With advancements in social media every week, there are five social media trends to keep an eye on:
1. Profile Location Options- Your location on the web, by means of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, is important but, when it comes to social media marketing, so is your literal location. Social media sites are now allowing you the option to show your location. For example, Twitter now allows your location to be posted with tweets and Google Latitude allows you update your location, as well.
2. Group Buying- Sites like Groupon and Living Social allow users to band together to obtain deals and discounts within specific cities. The main component with these sites is location and it allows your company to reach new customers by offering the opportunity for a discount.
3. Mobile Ads- Google has recently acquired AdMob and Apple has an advertising platform called iAd. Both programs allow businesses to improve their mobile ad delivery and allow consumers to purchase products or services from you. Mobile ads are a new outlet for reaching customers in addition to your website, blog, or Twitter profile.
4. Mobile Payments- Among the most recent advances in mobile payments, Paypal has come up with Mobile Express for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, Square has a dongle that attaches to the iPhone for instant credit card processing, and Visa is also making headway into the world of contactless payments. This is a great option to use in conjunction with mobile ads.
5. Corporate Social Media Policy- This is a little less technical than the above four but is equally important. Your policy doesn’t have to be a large document, however, there should be guidelines in place for social media use for a corporation and/or business.
• You need to specify a clear idea of your company’s message and how to communicate it effectively.
• In your policy, you should list the following: guidelines about branding standards (logos you use for your business should be carried over to your social media accounts),
• If there are terms you want associated with your brand, you should have a mention of that and, likewise, if there are terms you don’t want your brand associated with, they should be made clear, and you should also set expectations for professional behavior.
Always remember – Social Media is a part of your overall web marketi
ng plan, and as such, needs to be given the proper consideration and terms to obtain the best results.When you're rady to implement a SMM plan into your web marketing, contact us for a free web marketing evaluation. We'll build the web marketing plan that will get the BUZZ going about your business while utilizing the most effective tools in SMM.
The average web surfer is spending about 10 seconds on your website. Not a lot, I know. Your business website needs to be cohesive and user-friendly to ensure you’re prompting your guests to stay longer. The longer your potential clients stay, the more information they get about your service or product, and this turns those potential clients into actual clients. You need to consider what differentiates your website from your competition. What are you using to stand apart from the rest of the professionals in your industry?
Before you slap your business name, contact information, and short bio onto a website and open up for business, there are a few steps you need to take.
You should do extensive research to find your target market. Finding them is not good enough though; you need to learn about your potential clients and get to a point where you know them. Using your findings will make it much easier to tailor your website to your client base. Knowing their behaviors will allow you to customize your site, as well.
You should have a plan for what you want your site to accomplish. Do you want to attract new clientele? Are you looking to inform your current client base about your current and upcoming services? Once you have a plan and a goal, you should design your website around achieving this goal by speaking effectively to you target market.
You should also keep it at the forefront of your mind that yes, content is king, but your design and layout are just as important; there should be a nice balance between empty space, images, and content.
Once you’ve done your research, created a plan and goal for your site, and worked on your site design and content, it’s high time to get your site up and running. This is your chance to test your website and find out what is working for you and what isn’t. Use analytic tools to find out how many hits your site is getting and what your web ranking is. Metrics monitoring also comes into play at this point.
You want to track the overall success of your website but you should also be paying attention to finer details. Track link clicks and pay special attention to your key links (request a quote, contact for more information, etc.). If your important links are being ignored, it’s a surefire sign that you need to tweak your information. Play around with link location—use your metric reports to your advantage to figure out what’s working for you and where you can make improvements. Using the above tips will not only generate repeat visitors but will give your business the opportunity to grow and bring on more sales.
