How to Yield an ROI from Social Media Marketing
/A strategic social presence can open doors to meaningful connections and opportunities in your business. As we mentioned in our last post social media truly serves as the gateway to your brand. But its role doesn’t stop there. After people discover your brand via social media, it’s important to pay attention to what is or isn’t happening next to assess if you’re on track to receive a return on your investment.
Vanity metrics don’t equal profit
Building a meaningful and profitable social presence isn’t solely about the size of your audience or the number of likes or comments you receive on each post. Yes, engagement is vital to the visibility of your content, but vanity metrics provide little insight into the potential for profitability.
If you are trying to judge the effectiveness of your social presence based on the size of your audience and likes and comments, you’re focused on the wrong things. Vanity metrics will never tell you the whole story of how your content is performing on social media, yet we see entrepreneurs fall into this trap far too often, judging if their social presence is “good enough” based on vanity metrics alone.
So if vanity metrics aren’t an accurate focal point to measure your success, then what is worth your attention? How do you truly know whether your social presence is working for you?
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Social media should mobilize your tribe
As the gateway to your brand, you don’t want your social networks to be where your tribe pumps the brakes along your client pathway. After your target audience discovers your amazing brand, the ideal outcome would be the beginning of a relationship taking place. As you share amazing content, share your mission and purpose, and engage with your tribe, you are building trust.
Along with creating space for meaningful relationships to grow, in order to be an effective part of your client pathway, your social channels should be able to mobilize your tribe onto your blog and mailing list.
If you were to peek at your blog analytics, you would see traffic coming from the social channels you use to promote your brand. If you were to check out who is subscribing to your mailing list, you would see that the people who are engaging genuinely with you on social media are on your mailing list.
This is truly what it means for social media to function as the gateway to your brand. Your social presence should give your tribe the confidence to check out your blog and opt-in to stay connected with you via your emails. Of course, everyone won’t click over to your blog or opt-in to your list, but if your tribe isn’t mobilizing to the other platforms of your brand, then it’s time to take a closer look.
Auditing your social presence
Your social presence should also generate interest in your products and services. Social media marketing is one of the primary methods available to you as an online entrepreneur to advertise your offerings, so if your tribe is not demonstrating any interest in what you have to offer, there are a few questions worth your attention:
Am I actually promoting when I’m available to take on new clients or when I have new products on sale?
It’s harder to receive inquiries from your social media networks if you don’t make it clear to your audience that you’re available or that your products are in stock. Kleneice and I made this mistake early on when we began promoting our services at Humble & Whole. We wondered why a month passed without a single inquiry until we took a hard look at our social media promotion habits and realized that we had been silent about our availability.
Am I promoting too much?
On the other end of the marketing spectrum is the possibility that you could be promoting too much instead of balancing your promotions with free value. If every single post is a direct call to action to work with you or purchase a product, you could be overloading your audience. Remember that as a small business owner, your audience wants to get to know the face behind the brand and get familiar with your brand through your free content first before investing in what you have to offer.
Am I attracting the right people to my social media channels?
Sometimes it’s not a matter of promoting too little or too much. If your target audience isn’t discovering your brand on social media, then you won’t receive those genuine inquiries about what you have to offer. Take a look at who is following along with you online. Who is engaging with your posts? Do these people match the profile of your dream clients?
Your brand’s social presence is a valuable part of your client pathway. It is so important to make sure your social presence is actually capable of pushing you closer to your goals. We recommend that you conduct this audit of your social presence at least quarterly to ensure that you stay on track to crafting a social presence that is both meaningful and profitable.
If you already know that you’re having trouble attracting your target audience on social media or mobilizing your tribe to visit your blog, opt-in to your mailing list, or inquire about working with you, then we would love to strategize with you. We’re ready to serve you by creating a social strategy specifically for your brand so you can finally stop spinning your wheels and actually build momentum.
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