20 Stats That Explain Why Marketers Still Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI [Data] When it comes to social media, many marketers are still figuring things out as they go. This is especially true in terms of justifying their investment of time and money into social media marketing efforts. But LinkedIn launched 9 years ago. We've had 8 years to get to know Facebook, and 6 to wrap our heads around Twitter. So why are so many of us still struggling to report on the value of social media ? For quite a few reasons, it turns out. We've compiled data from a handful of different recent studies to break apart this question and zero-in on the key challenges social media marketers are struggling overcome. 5) 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing. 6) 96% measure number of fans and followers, 89% measure traffic, 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice, and 51% track sentiment. What These Stats Say About the Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI Reason #1: Lack of an Integrated System.
Quantifying the ROI of Social Media Product Promotion. Kevin Tate | October 16, 2012 | 1 Comment inShare19 How can you prove the success across your product engagement strategy? As brands' social commerce efforts have evolved over the course of 2012, the focus has shifted largely from pure social transactions toward social product discovery and engagement.
Approaching social engagement with a product-centric lens, with a concerted focus on product content and product experiences to address social customers "higher in the funnel" has proven exceedingly successful - much more so than asking someone to pull out their credit card in Facebook. While transactions are inherently measurable, how can you prove the success across your product engagement strategy? After all, even if commerce metrics don't capture the full value of a social marketing program, you can easily project ROI when someone says: "We sold $200,000 through the social campaign! " But how do you calculate the ROI of social product engagement with metrics like these? Discovery. Social Media ROI: How To Define a Strategic Plan. As marketers are tasked with the challenge of doing less with more, there's an increasing demand to quantify the value of social media.
Here's a guide to mapping a social media strategy with meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that align to business objectives for tangible measurement! Following the Social Media Strategy Funnel Quantifying the value of social media can be a daunting task. Unclear objectives and numerous metrics add confusion. It's time to ground your social media initiatives with a strategic plan that makes measurement clear and easy. Start by following the social media strategy funnel. "80 percent of marketers incorrectly begin with tactics instead of goals. " Like most marketers, you probably began using social media because it was new and fun. Confess already. Stop the madness! Mapping a Social Media Strategic Plan Start social media planning like any other strategic plan. Note: Red circles depicted on the chart above denote the step number below. Next Steps... 4 Critical Metrics You Won’t Find in Google Analytics.
Why You're Struggling to Measure the Value of Social Media. In a recent report, Adobe examined the oft-discussed issue of how exactly to quantify the value of social media. What they found was that when it comes to measuring the ROI of social media, most marketers are using all the wrong tools. In fact, the vast majority of marketers included in their study of 225 companies relied exclusively on last-click attribution to measure the success of their social efforts. Last-click (aka last-touch) attribution is the form of tracking that most analytics tools like Google Analytics employ. It’s called last-click attribution because conversions are measured based on the most recent channel that brought a visitor in before they converted.
The problem with measuring social media through last-click attribution is that social channels tend to engage people at the top of the sales funnel rather than right before they buy. Is social media working to bring in customers? What You’ll Need: First-Touch Analytics What are my best channels? Social Marketing vs. Marketing Automation. By Chuck Schaeffer There an interesting two-fold growth occurrence occurring in the marketing software sector—with marketing automation systems and social marketing automation showing increased traction (along separate but converging tracks)—and both representing the highest growth technologies within the CRM software industry.
Gartner just reported that the marketing automation software industry reached $2.8 billion in 2011, about a quarter of the reported CRM software industry total of $11.9 billion. The analyst firm also forecasts that the marketing automation software industry will see double digit year over year growth for at least the next three years. Marketing automation clearly represents the highest growth sector among the CRM software tenants which also include sales and service. But don't confuse marketing automation software with social marketing automation. Marketing Automation Software Marketing automation software is primarily used to acquire and nurture leads. Share: 9 Ways to Measure Your Brand's Social Media Health. Jacqueline Zenn is the Director of Social Media Strategy at SociaLogic, a social media marketing firm. Prior to joining SociaLogic, she worked at several leading interactive agencies creating and executing digital strategies.
Follow her @jazspin. Thanks to the variety of social media marketing tools available today, there is a nearly endless stream of data available to marketers. That could make it tough to determine what metrics actually matter for your campaign or brand and why. Here are nine key performance indicators and explanations for why they might matter to your brand. 1. Share of Voice: The number of mentions of your brand versus competing brands on the social web. Why You Should Care: Your Share of Voice can be a good indicator of the consumer awareness of your brand as compared to your competitive set. 2. Why You Should Care: If this number isn’t growing, your campaign probably isn’t working. 3. 4. 5.
Why You Should Care: Although P.T. 6. 7. 8. 9. A Simple Guide to Measuring Facebook Ad ROI. It's a topic that is running rampant around the web. How do you measure ROI from Facebook? Is anyone (besides Fortune 500 brands with multi-million dollar budgets) generating ROI from Facebook? And if so, how? The difficulty with establishing ROI on Facebook has typically been tracking, but luckily, Facebook recently made a bunch of updates to help marketers tackle this problem. And while Facebook is heading in the right direction, SMB marketers (and all marketers) need more, and they need it now. So what’s the best way to track Facebook ROI? You're about to find out. In order to determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend, you first need to be able to properly track your Facebook connections.
SpendClicksConnectionsCost per click But even with this data that Facebook provides, you still need a tracking solution that tells you your cost per connection. Now that you have that cost per connection data, it's time to start promoting your offers! 4 Unique Approaches for Measuring Social Media ROI. Krista Neher | February 15, 2012 | 2 Comments inShare103 A look at the creative ways to measure (or at least validate) your social media efforts. Calculating ROI in social media is a hot topic. As companies have rushed into the elusive social media marketing gold mine, many are left trying to figure out if all the time and effort is paying off. The problem is that social media is extremely difficult to measure. In a former life, I worked as a financial analyst at P&G, and a big part of my job was to measure the ROI of our different marketing efforts. There are many challenges to measuring the return from social media, most notably: Volume of social media activity isn't always related to social media efforts.
These are only a few of the challenges that you may face as a part of your social media marketing measurement. Creative Ways to Measure (or at Least Validate) Your Social Media Efforts 1. Costs/lifetime value of one customer = # of new customers acquired in social media for neutral ROI 2. The 7 Slides You Need for an Epic Monthly Marketing Report. Here's a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?
One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team's impact. For as long as there’s been marketing, marketers have struggled to show their impact. But today, there's no need to struggle. Today, it's simple to collect the data you need to show how your marketing investments are generating revenue for your business. You just have to pull together the right reports. At HubSpot, our marketing team creates a deck of over 200 slides each month to cover every last marketing detail. So here are some of the core slides we use to report on our results. 1.
This is your measure of the top of your funnel. 2. This is your measure of your middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) activity. 3. 4. 5. This slide helps you keep track of the content that's engaging your community. 6. 7. Marketing Research: Only 25% of marketers can show value to the organization. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (Information Technology Services Marketing Association), and Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing. Both were involved in recent marketing research, 2012 ITSMA/VEM Marketing Performance Management Survey: The Path to Better Marketing Results. The survey was conducted during the summer of 2012 via email and social media invitation through Twitter and LinkedIn, and included 405 completed surveys. Here is a chart outlining details of the respondents: Click to enlarge All respondents were analyzed by company type, company size and by a self-grading system (grade results included, and note that “D” was the lowest possible grade): Here are the key takeaways from the research: The missing middle Anecdotally, she attributes this to a rough stretch for marketers in the recent past with limited budgets and external resources.
Creating connections Related Resources:
Business Metric Resources. Metrics & ROI - A Three-Step Approach for Linking Content and Behavior: Measuring Relevancy. Various studies over the years have examined the relationship between content relevancy and behavior. Almost everyone would agree that content must be relevant. But what is relevance? According to Wikipedia: "Relevance describes how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter. " A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose. In the context of this discussion, the purpose of content is to positively influence customer or employee behavior, such as increasing purchase frequency, purchase velocity (time to purchase), likelihood to recommend, productivity, etc.
When we ask marketers and others how they measure content relevancy, we often hear, "We base it on response rate. " Clearly there is a relationship between relevance and response. So, what is the best way to measure relevancy? The best-practice approaches for measuring relevancy are many, and many of them are complex and require modeling. The process and equation include the following: