How Marketers Should Measure Social Media ROI

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by Lindsey Francy Mar 22, 2023 News
How Marketers Should Measure Social Media ROI

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It isn't "dark social" if you can't figure out how to make money from your social media posts.

Agorapulse has spent more than a decade helping companies organize their social inboxes, publish content, define trends and collect data Its clients have been looking for ways to prove that their work on organic social media earns them money.

Delta Galil's Brayola lingerie brand received a lot of intent based questions from consumers on social media during the Pandemic. What size does this come in? What is your policy regarding returns? Where do you send your goods? After attaching codes to the Brayola URLs in her social media responses, she began to track where consumers were coming from and what they were buying.

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Agorapulse CMO Darryl Prail, left, and founder/CEO Emeric Eroult espouse the virtues of “tracking what can be tracked” in social media marketing.Agorapulse

Brayola paid more than $2,500 in labor costs due to the time it took to build and add all of those codes. The data that came back showed that her work on social media brought in almost $5,000.

Adams told Agorapulse that links from marketing email, social media ads and affiliate programs should be tracked in the same way as links from social media. When marketers don't track their work on social media, they leave some of their teams' value on the table, and few marketing tech firms are currently helping them do so. It was a lost opportunity for everyone involved.

Emeric Ernoult said that social media shouldn't be treated differently. The marketing industry has been negatively impacted by the fact that we have looked at social media as just a branding play and have not accepted it as a business- generation play.

Arriving early

There were many companies at the Business to Business Marketing Exchange that offered ways to break through noise and streamline their business. Agorapulse's chief marketing officer gave a presentation to a small group of marketers about the dismal return on investment in social media marketing.

Most CMOs view social media the same way they view communications, which is to issue a press release and forget about it.

Of the more than 10 million social media posts Agorapulse has handled for clients, 34% contained a link to a website. There were nearly 3.4 million links. While marketers could know who was visiting sites, what those visitors intentions were and which of them was most likely to buy a product, they weren't able to use that information to send out links to social media.

Ernoult and Agorapulse see room for improvement, despite the fact that it is impossible to track everything on social media. Rhonda Geidt, former head of marketing for b-to-b manufacturer and Agorapulse partner Shapeways, saw revenue increase 12% from increased social media marketing and credits tracking for the change. She was able to see which linked posts worked and which didn't for her company's CEO.

Ernoult said that Agorapulse link tracking for links on social media posts and in bios was one of the things they brought to the table. Artificial intelligence could allow for the detection of website purchases immediately following social media link posts. By pattern matching, you aren't able to resolve the entire dark social equation, but you can at least begin to build visibility into it.

Next steps

A year ago, Agorapulse launched its social media return on investment. It did a survey of 300 social media marketers. 98% of people think it's important to measure the business impact of social media. What's the reason? The tools are too complex and expensive. There was a lack of buy in. It's time constraints.

Social media is the top channel for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers according to a report. Less than 1% of marketing spending is spent on social media. A majority of social marketers feel that their career progression is negatively impacted by the lack of social media measurement. They aren't an important part of the business plan.

Praill and his Agorapulse colleagues realize that concern isn't enough to make marketers track social media and tie it to revenue. Praill said that atty economy where banks are collapsing and chief financial officers are getting stingier has made people interested in social media tracking. Praill said that marketers no longer consider tying social media to revenue novel or ideal because of the added pressure of tracking social media's effects on sales. It will be seen as essential by the CMOs.

CMOs are only now waking up and realizing that they need to do this because of the convergence of events shaping their world. They want to know how they can use social media as a channel because they know that it is the gasoline in their engine for everything they do.