Even brands that are shrewd enough to monitor their social media performance rarely try to figure out where they went wrong. If you are not getting an adequate ROI with your social media campaigns, you may be making the following mistakes.
Social media marketers often focus all of their efforts on engaging their audience. While engagement is obviously very important, you need to think about how it plays a role in your overall conversion funnel.
Your end goal is to get readers to your money page. You can incorporate this strategy into your social media strategy by:
Social media is a form of interruption marketing, so it's generally best not to try visitors directly to sales pages. However, you need a clear strategy to ultimately get your visitors there, even if your initial goal is to just grow your brand over social media.
Too many brands get their inspiration from BuzzFeed and other viral marketing sites. They forget that their conversion goals are different, so they need to focus on reaching a more specific audience.
Jonathan Crossfield of the Content Marketing Institute, emphasized why brands need to avoid marketing like BuzzFeed.
“Your content is far more than a fluffy distraction. You don’t want to attract readers who are merely curious to find out what you’re about. You want to attract an audience with an interest in your chosen topic area that cannot be sated in 10 words or less. Otherwise, your content marketing strategy is targeting the wrong people with the wrong content.”
Crossfield’s last sentence about targeting the wrong audience with the wrong content is spot on. BuzzFeed is monetized through advertising. Their conversion goal depends on getting as many people as possible onto their site.
As a business, you don’t have the luxury of relying on viral marketing. You need to get your message in front of a very specific audience.
You don't want to use your brand's social media platforms to share funny posts that people will share with their friends. You want to share enlightening content that offers something of value to your target customers. Your goal is to get potential customers to follow you, rather than engaging as many people as possible.
The biggest reason your social media strategy may be faltering is that you aren’t measuring it correctly. Brands are too obsessed with vanity metrics like their follower count and social shares, instead of focusing on more relevant revenue metrics.
Jay Baer of Convince and Convert points out that there are always ways to measure your brand’s performance.
“The optimal place to measure the effectiveness of social media is in an e-commerce environment, because you can track behavior all the way through sale. But even if you’re not e-commerce enabled, could you provide coupons, or even an offer redeemable offline? If you want to neatly measure social media ROI, give your customers and fans a clear assignment with tracked clicks and post-click landing pages and forms.”
This doesn’t mean you should ignore social media metrics entirely, but you need to find a correlation between them and your ROI.
