Starting out with your social media campaign can be a lot of fun and can feel very rewarding as you witness you fan and follower count grow. People can feel thrilled and surprised with all the Facebook post comments and retweets they are getting. Indeed social media marketing can be one of the most engaging and far-reaching solutions that one can implement to promote their business online. Needless to say, social marketing represents one of the best and most popular ways of getting your online content out there.
Now that’s all good but no one decides to go into social networking for their marketing campaigns just for the fun of it so you have to ask yourself how all these fit in when you look at it at the sales and marketing perspective. If your superiors or staff are beginning to ask such questions, then its about time that you begin assessing data regarding your social media strategies and integrate it into your social and internet marketing scheme.
Let’s take a look at some of the important data that one ought to look into when assessing and measuring the effectiveness of your social media strategies. Doing so would help you attain your marketing goal which is what really matters in the end.
Begin evaluating social media networks together and individually
Each social media platform like Facebook and Twitter have their own weaknesses and strengths. For instance, in most cases you’ll find that Facebook creates more leads while Twitter can generate the most website traffic. Other social media platforms like Linkedin typically generate less leads but they provide you with more qualified ones that are more likely to convert to sales.
Assess your social media marketing strategies as a whole so that you can draw viable comparisons to other types of internet marketing campaigns but be ready to have an individual breakdown of each platform – this will help you figure out which social networking sites are actually helping you achieve your goals and which ones are letting you down.
Check traffic to lead conversions
Indeed social marketing is an excellent way of generating traffic to your website but traffic alone doesn’t bring you money. Check which social network actually gives you the best traffic to lead conversions. This will help you get a concrete idea on just how effective social marketing is in generating leads and assist you in attaining your monthly goals. The data that you collect out of these will prove invaluable in setting educated and realistic goals depending on how much lead conversion social media is actually bringing in.
Keep track of lead to buyer conversions
Now that you know how many leads you are getting from you social media marketing efforts, the next step would be figuring out how many of those leads are actually turning into buyers. Such information would help you come up with an effective and reasonable lead-scoring system that your sales group can look into so that they can concentrate on the leads that are more likely to close as a sale. You can also use that information to determine how much you are actually spending to acquire customers through social networking as well as the amount that these leads are actually spending on businesses like yours.
Scoring leads and monitoring the sales cycle
Whenever you score leads through social media marketing, you need to keep track of how long it actually takes for such leads to complete the sales cycle. This will help sales make better use of their time. More importantly, you can also use this information to implement solutions aimed at effectively shortening the sales cycle. All these will help you better appreciate social marketing leads and how it compares to other leads generated by other solutions in your internet marketing campaign.
Check website behaviors from traffic generated through social media
Your ability to take good care of the leads generated through social media will rely greatly on your ability to check their site behaviors. This means getting a firm grasp on where social media marketing leads enter, leave and spend most of their time on your website. Having this insight will allow you to understand their needs better and introduce content that will provide the most interest and value.
People in the social marketing business are constantly dealing with the task of providing concrete justifications for the resources they are spending on social media. Thus it is crucial that you ought to pin down exactly how much money and time you are spending against the results of your social media marketing efforts in creating and converting leads.
Keeping track and assessing the various metrics mentioned earlier will enable social media marketers to determine whether or not social media marketing is really bringing them the revenue they need.