Social Marketing Metrics to Prove ROI

Do you struggle to truly measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing? According to the 2015 State of Social Marketing Report, 60% of business share your struggle.

Understanding how social media fits into your marketing and how to provide ROI can be difficult at best. What are the key metrics at each stage of the inbound marketing and sales funnel you should be measuring to prove the return on your social media investment?

What Are Your Social Marketing Goals?

The place to start is with your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your social media marketing? Are you looking at long-term, ongoing marketing or are you focused on short-term campaign-type marketing with clear beginnings and endings? (Both are valid, you just need to distinguish between the two for goal setting and measurement purposes.)

Break down your goals by the inbound marketing & sales funnel and you’ll have a far easier time setting your key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your return on social media investment.

Top of Funnel Social Marketing Goals & Metrics

The top of the inbound marketing & sales funnel is all about traffic, awareness, and reach. How far is your message spreading? If your goals are to reach more people and gain more traffic, then you are at the top of the funnel. Your primary metric at this stage is reach.

Create your own user feedback survey

Reach: How many followers & fans do you have? How many people on each network see your social posts & tweets? (Note: those are two different numbers. Your reach can and should be far greater than just your follower base.)

Middle of Funnel Social Marketing Goals & Metrics

The middle of the inbound marketing & sales funnel centers around how your audience interacts with your brand in your social channels. When you want to see followers engage with your brand in your social channels, then your goals will be in the middle of the funnel. (Note: this is a far better goal than simply measuring reach. A truly effective social marketing plan should have significant focus on audience engagement.) Your primary metric at this stage is engagement.

Engagement. What are your users doing to interact with your brand? Are they sharing, repinning, and retweeting your content? Are they liking and favoriting your posts, pins, and tweets? Are they commenting on posts and tagging others in their comments? These are the metrics you need to measure to prove you’re reaching your middle of the funnel goals.

Bottom of Funnel Social Marketing Goals & Metrics

The bottom of the inbound marketing funnel is where sales are made. Most companies are not selling on social, although social commerce is on trend for one of the big changes in 2016. Even if you aren’t selling in social, there are ways you can encourage sales and track attribution from your social channels to sales. Users who actively engage in your social channels over time may very well be sales qualified leads. Users who make direct requests on your social channels are definitely sales qualified leads. Your content at this stage of the funnel should encourage sales. Testimonials, reviews, case studies – this is all content that users will consume at the bottom of the funnel. Your primary metric at the bottom of the funnel is social attribution.

Social Attribution. If you have an established sales funnel in your website content and layout, it can be fairly simple to measure social attribution. Knowing the last point(s) for users on your website before making a sale and then measuring how many of those came from social is a direct measurement of social ROI at the bottom of the funnel. It’s rarely that simple, though. At the very least, set up goals in your Google Analytics to measure conversions. Then track your social acquisition against those goal completions.

Retention Stage – Social Marketing Goals & Metrics

The retention / upsell / advocacy stage in the inbound marketing & sales funnel has several elements to it. When you’re looking to build your raving fan base or upsell your existing customers or even simply retain your existing customers, then your goals are squarely in the retention stage of the sales funnel. The measurements of success at the retention stage are an amalgamation of the metrics at the other sales funnel stages. Your primary metric at the retention stage is sentiment.

Sentiment. Similar to the middle of the funnel, how are users engaging (commenting, sharing, liking) with your brand online? You’re not just measuring the number of engagements, but rather the sentiment of those engagements. How do people FEEL about your brand. How many comments are positive? How many shares have favorable comments with them? When your brand is mentioned online is it in a positive, negative, or neutral tone? (You are monitoring your online brand mentions, right?)

Easy Steps to Start Measuring Your Social Marketing ROI

Determine your goals. You don’t need goals at every stage of the funnel. And certainly, depending on your overall business goals as well as the maturity of your social channels, some funnel stages will be more important than others. Be sure you set SMART goals.

Set your KPI’s. Exactly how will you measure success? If you set SMART goals, your key performance indicators will be obvious.

Get the boss on board. Make sure the people you report to understand your goals and measures of success. Whenever possible, tie your social media marketing efforts to the overall goals of the company.

Monitor. Monitor the performance of your channels against your goals and KPIs.

Rinse and Repeat. You met your goals! Your boss is so happy she increased your budget. Now, go do it again!