How social media marketers creatively optimize ROI

Social media marketers optimize ROI in many ways, and it is not a secret that social media platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and SnapChat are redefining what it takes to advertise on online media.

The social media advertising experience which consumers and marketers go through is enhanced because of the evolution from the outdated banner ads to the latest and new age native advertisements.

Also marketers are forced to design quality content that are not only interesting but brings value to the lives of the audience. In response, consumers are now easily able to make a better informed purchasing decision. Additionally, content can be displayed based on location, gender, company, interests, role and more. For marketers, it is easy as they can target their audiences better.

Interestingly, firms are increasing their social media marketing cost from $17.7 billion in 2014 to about $23.6 billion in 2015. Basically a 33.5% jump. Since algorithms improvise the data analysis and collection, the cost of social advertisements will also increase.  

Steps social media marketers take

• Improvise The Brand Story

Motivational speaker and author, Simon Sinek, feels people will not purchase what you sell. They purchase why you sell it. Nowadays, consumers get targeted on social media by various brands and businesses that sell as well as market the same thing. You need to use the brand story to stand out and the best avenue is social media platforms.

As per social media services for business – a Factosocial 101 infographic of iDigic, each social media website has different strategies to create brand awareness and reputation for your products and services. With the right tactic, you can see how social media can make a difference in your ROI.

Avoid the part where you design a cheesy ‘About Us’ video and share it online. Instead, you can exemplify the story of your brand through interesting and brand new ways to show why and what you do. You can try the following tips:

• Design a 10 or 15 second video to spotlight a happy customer.
• Make a slideshare which provides detail of the culture code of the company.
• Allow your employees to take control of your social media accounts for a single day. You can show what it is to work for your firm

• Direct Audiences To Correct Place

Gone are the days when your social media profile served as an online dressing window for your business. Currently, it has the power to do much more. For example, you can position it as the digital GPS of your audience.

You can use it to distribute visuals and links to guide visitors to where you want them to go next. Make sure to use the banner image to present a high-converting content offer. Also you can change the link in your bio to become the landing page of the offer. There is no harm in using social media platforms as visuals in order to highlight the current campaign.

Try to add a robust call-to-action in campaign related messages. This can persuade visitors to navigate to blog posts or landing pages. You can update the link in your profile on weekly or monthly basis, so that it can be a link to webinar registration page, downloadable content offer, and even link which subscribes to the company’s blog. Even tiny tactical modifications can liven up the social media profile better than the previous one.

• Optimize

SMO (Social Media Optimization) is nothing but a phase that fits better among SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). Frankly, SMO uses the strategic social media strategies across many platforms to expand as well as create a good business presence, services, and products online.

Social media marketers can optimize their efforts in many ways:

• Awareness: Here this kind of optimization often uses social media to drive brand messages and to announce the arrival of new products or services. You can measure them through views, impressions, clicks and shares.
• Community Development: The foundation of social media is community. This is why businesses depend on social media as a channel of community support. You can optimize the community by giving community relevant content, responding to the audience members, and monitoring the details or feedbacks of your firm.  Also you can take into account the negative comments too.
• Lead Generation:  Here one uses social media to get new conversions related to content offers and products. Even targeting specific members of the audience based on interests, location, firm and more will assist social media marketers to optimize the efforts of lead generation.

• Meet Up With The Audiences

Social media has designed a way for individuals to be nowhere as well as everywhere at the same time. Basically, this is a trap in which most of the marketers fall into. Businesses who want to be on all social media platforms fail drastically while trying to achieve the results from their efforts.

To make it simple, you have to be on social media platform where the target audience is active. And if your demographic is not on Facebook, then you must not create a Facebook page.  If your customer base likes to tweet their thoughts about you rather than commenting on the latest blog posted on the LinkedIn page, then you need to be active on Twitter and start tweeting back.

It is not important that you have to be everywhere. Rather, you must go and meet audiences where they are. Now this will assist you to concentrate your efforts, so that you can utilize the social media strategies in a way which works best for your audience.

• Bring Back Your Efforts To ROI

For many social media marketers, it is challenging to track your progress between tweets as well as status updates. In fact, about 42% of marketers are confident of accurately measuring their social media results. So, this leaves a room for improvement.

For effectively measuring the results of your social media efforts, you must start by setting up smart goals, find out the key performance and metrics indicators. Frankly, only about 42% of marketers are confident that they can easily measure the social media results. So, this leaves room for improvement.

For effectively measuring the results related to your social media efforts, you must smart by identifying key performance indicators and smart goals. The following are some of them:

• How many conversion you would like to get from social media?
• How many social media visits would you like to get within a month?
• What is the engagement rate you team must try to achieve?

Now once that is set, you have to evaluate the resources that you have invested or planning to like:

• How much time did or will creating and managing the campaign take?
• Are there any costs associated with such campaigns? If so, how much it is going to be?

Lastly, try to find out your results and see if you have achieved your goals:

• How many visitors have come from social media when compared to the goals?
• Did you exceed or maintain the engagement goal?
• How much conversion came from social media?
• How could one improve such efforts?

Conclusion

These are some of the major steps which can assist you in assessing the value and efforts of your social media strategies. No doubt, each month your objectives and goals will differ. So, when this occurs, you must take time to think about the methods to measure the success of your strategy. You need to improve as well as modify the strategy you have based on the previous results and avoid being afraid of trying out something different and new.

Nancy Grace is a social media writer at iDigic; a service that can help you increase your Instagram follower count.