Measuring Social Media Marketing Results

Don’t you love to see the results of your hard work?  Whether it’s raking leaves or losing weight or building a successful social media marketing campaign, it’s a wonderful feeling to reflect on how far you’ve come.

But what happens when you get no results?

You change your strategy, right? Otherwise you’re wasting your time.  A mighty smart man named Albert Einstein defined insanity as: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

As marketers we understand this, which is why we are always testing new marketing strategies and then carefully studying the results to ensure the highest impact and best possible ROI. Sometimes people think you can’t track social media marketing results – but oh, you can!

We get clients all the time who never track the results of their marketing efforts.  None of them.  When we ask what’s been successful, we get shoulder shrugs or “well…..we think that….” But no measurements because they’ve never tracked the results!

In fact, a recent survey by the Atlanta-based cloud marketing automation software vendor, Pardot, revealed that nearly 30 percent of B2B marketers are not tracking lead generation and sales that come from social media marketing. Even more shocking, 42% of marketers who were tracking results replied that zero or an uncertain number of sales leads resulted from social media programs.

Not tracking social media results effectively is common because so many businesses jumped into social media without having a strategy in place.  They knew they had to “do something” with social media; so they did “something” – just not anything that was effective at building their business.  Social media marketing is so much more than just gaining Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Part of your social media strategy must include tracking leads and sales that come from social media marketing efforts.

In a recent article, The Tech Journal summarized the other survey findings:

• 55% of respondents said contacting a social media-generated sales lead by phone or email is appropriate, even if the prospect had not invited the vendor to do so
• Meanwhile, 48% said it is appropriate to respond to a prospect via social media, if the prospect contacted the vendor via email or phone first
• 100% of respondents said it is acceptable to invite a prospect to join a marketer’s online social networks, though some suggested the invites be limited to networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Plaxo and YouTube, versus more personal sites like Facebook
• 31% said it is acceptable to critique a competitor via social media
• 64% of respondents used “internal, free tools”
• Only 9% respondents rely on an outside agency or social media expert for help with social media marketing.

Do you have a social media marketing strategy in place that clearly defines why you are using social media and what you hope to gain from it?   If you’re using social media, and not getting any results, then it’s time to change your strategy.  If you don’t know how, then hire someone who does.

Oh hey, we do that!  Click here for details.