Every comprehensive marketing strategy should include a social media component that includes the relevant social media networks for your business. It varies for each business.
If you have instructed your marketing department to include social media, it is also important to receive reliable evidence that investment is producing results. Most marketers will support the contention that social media is a more subtle marketing channel than SEO or PPC, so it begs the question: How do you measure ROI with a social media campaign?
The answer begins with understanding the goals for a solar social media campaign. Goals for ANY social media campaign have to be reasonable, measurable and, most importantly, realistically attainable.
A common goal is for consumers to recognize your brand. While networking should produce a rise in visitors to your website, it is more effective as a long term investment that enhances brand visibility. The relationships that are made on Facebook or LinkedIn may not produce immediate leaps in traffic, but the number of references to your brand should build steadily. This is of key importance in such a young industry as solar energy, which is building equity with consumers. This may be measured using some innovative new tools:
- Klout: This measurement tool uses 35 analytics on Facebook and Twitter to determine how much influence your brand enjoys. Among the many features it evaluates are: Followers, Retweets, Likes, and Influence of Friends.
- HowSociable: This dashboard offers metrics in 12 to 36 various categories across the major social media sites including LinkedIn and YouTube.
As the head of marketing, you are probably more concerned with the immediate ROI on your social media campaign, and there are some specific ways to measure that.
- Incremental marketing: If you are implementing various components of your solar marketing strategy in stages, you can easily differentiate returns from these components. You may wish to implement PPC first then social media at a later stage. The ROI from your social media should be easy to differentiate after subtracting the ROI from previously implemented stages. Your social media campaign may also be implemented in stages, with various social media accounts coming online in phases.
- Google Analytics: Google produces Social Reports, which provide information on Key Performance Indicators like followers and likes. The links between social media sites and homepage visits are easily tracked. This will enable you to determine which social media sites are producing the greatest ROI for your company.
- Coupon conversion: You may wish to introduce exclusive deals on your Facebook site that can only be redeemed through your website. This provides 100 percent reliability in measuring visits from Facebook. Facebook has now made available the Offers tool, which helps track coupon redemptions. The only flaw with this method is that a coupon produces different types of responses than a typical visitor transaction so some diversification in offers should be utilized.
- Software: There are also software programs out there, such as HubSpot that you can invest in to provide a multitude of different analytical reports for you. Including, but not limited to: tracking the social media traffic to your website, leads generated from social media and even customers you closed that found you via social media.
Most successful inbound marketing plans for solar companies require some expenditure on social media. Determining a ROI on the social media campaign should be a focus for you and your marketing department.
Evaluating key metrics that include Likes and Followers can be an important baseline, but the platforms and using social media as a marketing tool has come MUCH further than that. It’s all about how much engagement is happening with your brand.
The power of social media is that it produces lasting and deeper relationships with consumers than other marketing channels. With that in mind, determine attainable goals and keep an eye on whether or not you are reaching them!
Measuring social media is just one of the important elements of a successful advertising and marketing campaign. Want to learn what other elements it takes to run a succesful campaign?
