If you’re not achieving the social media ROI you want, look at whether you’re making any of the mistakes below, and eliminate them.

1. Capturing The Wrong Audience

If your fans aren’t like your paying customers, you can’t expect them to buy. Make sure your fan and follower acquisition strategy is aimed at people just like your best customers.

2. Too Many Steps

With every step, from reach to fans to visibility to clicks to buyers, your prospect numbers diminish. If you have too many steps in your sales funnel, from the time people first hear about you to when and how they can finally buy, your conversion rate will be too small, and you won’t achieve a positive ROI. There are a lot of moving parts to optimize, but keep in mind that the shorter conversion path yields more sales.

3. Lacking Commitment to Social Media

Social media is a living, breathing animal. Make sure you have an ongoing listening and engagement plan with the resources to support it. Don’t leave your Facebook fans hanging!

4. Being Boring

Success means creating smart, helpful content. If you can’t create interesting social media content, hire a writer or third party content source. Or consider sharing the content from others in your field.

5. Too Few Exposures

You can’t work in a vacuum with just one type of advertising. Trackable ROI comes from social advertising combined with owned media strategies. You need to reach a lot of people, and you need to reach them more than once. In order to get them to buy, know who you’re talking to and target them enough times until you see results.

6. Self-Centeredness

At a dinner, no one wants to listen to a bore or the person who goes on and on about themselves. Social media accounts that only talk about your company or employees are similarly boring.

Your company offers something to customers, hopefully to help them. Focus on your customers, their problems, your solutions and their benefits, and most importantly, the dreams you’re helping them achieve. They’ll engage with you every day.

7. Not Persuading Or Warming Up

Even if you have a huge number of fans that you reach repeatedly and you create awesome conversations and get thousands of likes, and even if you get people to your website, you may still be missing one critical piece of the social marketing puzzle: persuasion. Unless you’re making money on ads on your website, even getting people to read your blog doesn’t magically equal sales. Think about how your posts and content marketing can help push people further down the path toward that buying decision.

The post 7 Mistakes That Block Social Media ROI appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Source: Google Analytics

Measuring social media efforts can get frustrating and difficult.  But it doesn’t have to.

Follow these three easy steps to make measuring social media easier.

Step 1: Pick a goal

As the great Zig Ziglar said, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”

Good social media goals are usually inline with the greater goals of your organization.  Here are some popular ones:

• Increase awareness
• Generate leads
• Convert leads to sales
• Retain existing customers

Pick a goal.  If you have the resources and the time, you may pick all four of these goals. However, it’s much better to execute well on one of these goals than to dilute your efforts.

Step 2: Pick a metric or three

This doesn’t need to be complicated.  Metrics that provide real insight rarely are.

Choose one or two (usually no more than three to start) metrics that indicate progress on your goal.  We call these metrics Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

Let’s choose the first goal on our list, Increasing Awareness to create some KPI’s that we can use to measure our success.

What KPI could we choose to measure this goal?  Here are a few metrics to measure the affect your social media efforts are having on raising brand awareness:

• New visitors from social media. This is the raw number of visits to your website that have never been to your website before.
• New visitor from social media with more than 3 pageviews. A better barometer of awareness might be to measure the number of new visits from social media but further segment by filtering out those new visitors that visited multiple pages on your site.
• New visitor from social media that engaged with premium content.  If new visitors from social media are engaging with eBooks, webinars, white papers or other forms of premium content, this is a strong indication of increased brand awareness.  You might measure form completes, downloads or views of this premium content depending on how you structure your content.

Step 3:  Segment and trend

You’ll know when you’ve segmented your KPI enough when you say, “Ah ha!  Now that’s something actionable!”

Until then, keep slicing and dicing.  For example, if you’re trying to figure out if your new Facebook efforts are driving awareness you might look at:

• New visitors from Facebook
• New visitors from Facebook with more than 3 pageviews
• New visitors from Facebook that engaged with premium content

Lastly, you’ll want to look at how these KPI’s trend over time.  For instance, did your recent Twitter ad buy increase your awareness metrics over the prior month?

What KPI’s are you using for measuring social media efforts? Happy measuring! For more information on measuring social media, check out our free ebook below.

The post 3 Simple Steps To Measuring Social Media appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Social Media ROI and Metrics for the Sales Funnel

Let’s take a brief look at the sales funnel and the most common digital marketing metrics:

While your funnel and its strategies and metrics may differ from this table, the most important thing is that you have one KPI and at least one strategy per phase of the funnel.Prioritize your metrics and call the most important metric your KPI. Set target values for these KPIs, and improve the effectiveness of each strategy.

In campaigns I create or consult, I want to see increases in the metric in each phase. Often you don’t know what a good value is for a metric until you start. Let your first campaigns set your benchmarks. You can also look at the performance of other companies in your niche with tools like InfiniGraph to set interaction benchmarks. Then continually strive to improve all of your metrics.

On Facebook, due to EdgeRank, visibility to your fans can be dramatically reduced when your posts aren’t engaging. Therefore, you can’t only focus on sales and leads from Facebook. Without social media engagement you lose visibility and your leads and sales plummet. This is why it makes no sense to argue whether likes or sales are more important. Both are.

Similarly, awareness and reach are not less important than leads and sales, because no one can give you their email or buy from you if they don’t know you exist. The bottom of the funnel depends on the top of the funnel. And social media can lower costs elsewhere. Ford CMO Jim Farley said, “By starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

Social Media ROI Takeaways

• Pay attention to all phases of the sales funnel.
• Focus on metrics in all phases of the sales funnel. It’s easy to be entranced by likes. But do they turn into leads and sales? Demand it.
• Note if you have trouble tracking a specific phase, think of ways to measure it.
• Use these metrics to keep improving your sales and loyalty results.

The post How to Determine Your Metrics for Social Media ROI appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

What do brands need to know now about link shortening?

We’ve moved well beyond the point when link shortening is about making links compact enough for sharing in social media.

Link shortening through Bitly Enterprise enables brands to get branded impressions for links shared through all sorts of online and mobile channels, from the major social networks to chat windows. That’s because any time users shorten links from Bitly Enterprise partners’ sites, those links will automatically bear their brand name (for example, shortening a New York Times link will result in a nyt.ms URL, not a bit.ly URL, no matter who shortens it using bitly). Particularly as we’ve seen more links shared in social media without a brand’s imprint anywhere else in the post, this automatic branding is a significant advantage for brands.

Shortening also lays the groundwork for deep and relevant audience insight, as brands have an opportunity to know what content is being clicked on, and where, across the entire social media universe.

Andaiye Taylor, Director, Content Marketing, Bitly Enterprise

How does link tracking play a role in social media ROI?

There are two primary ways brands can track their impact in social media.

One is using the buttons and actions embedded within the social media platforms, which enable brands to answer the question, “How many people liked, shared, favorited, retweeted, repinned, or commented on my posts?” These are an important set of actions, particularly because retweeting, favoriting, or sharing social media content makes it visible to responders’ social media connections, thus propagating that content throughout the social web.

But what of the shared content itself? The key way social media posts “pay off” is when viewers click through to the content linked within those posts. This is where engagement with that brand’s actual content or e-commerce experience will begin.

Remember, it’s possible for people to share and click social media buttons prolifically without ever clicking through to the shared content. Link tracking closes that gap: it enables brands to determine how effective posts are at ultimately driving engagement with linked content, and it can help them start to make correlations between social media actions and direct content engagement.

When setting up a campaign, how do you ensure your program and URLs are aligned the best way possible?

We’ve developed a set of recommendations for how to track campaigns, in a nutshell: measure, tag, release, monitor. To make the best use of short URLs, brands should note the characteristics of a particular URL, like the topic, the time of day it’s being posted, the platform(s) where it’s being published, etc. before it goes out the door.

Short URLs can also easily be used with analytics tracking. If a Bitly Enterprise user already has an analytics package – say Google Analytics or Omniture – they can simply shorten the full tracking URL.

What are some up and coming tracking mechanisms around link tracking?

In terms of tactical updates, we’ll soon be rolling out an integration with Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst that enables users to pass the standard analytics parameters within the bitly URL. This will give brands the ability to link their social metrics with their standard web analytics tools, letting them analyze their marketing campaigns within the social context. Until then, users can manually shorten their full tracking URLs using Bitly Enterprise.

We’ll also soon be launching an audience analysis report, which will offer brands an unprecedented view into the social media engagement behavior of people who click their content. The report will let brands understand what other broad topics and keywords pique their audience’s interest, and benchmark that against both their competitors and the entire Bitly Enterprise universe. The report will enable brands to answer the question, “What does my audience care about, outside of the interactions I have with them?”

Thank you for your time Andaiye and we look forward to tracking the results of this blog post with a shortened URL!

The post How to Track Your Social Media Impact with Link Shortening appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Long before I worked with them, I was impressed with how Radian6 and Buddy Media and Salesforce were using the new tools to engage in new ways (and that’s why I work for them now). After years of writing press releases that spoke in a detached corporate voice, I was excited by the possibilities, more than I had ever been in my career.

In my early days on Twitter, I was inspired by people like Marcel LeBrun, David Alston, Amber Naslund, Mike Lazerow, Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, David Armano, Justin Levy, Lionel Menchaca, Richard Binhammer, Padmasree Warrior, Sean McDonald, Marcus Nelson, Ann Handley and Tim Washer, who engaged because they enjoyed it, and they knew it was the right thing to do. They saw the future and jumped in with both feet. (I’m sure I’m leaving out dozens of people, but I’m not trying to turn this into a Twitter list.)

As more companies saw the light, it became more and more necessary to prove the value of social media to our bosses. That led to a healthy debate about ROI, which has evolved into tools and techniques companies use today to understand and prove the bottom-line impact of their content creation and community engagement.

It also caused some memorable mistakes and missteps, as well as the inevitable gaming of the system. “If Facebook likes are good, shouldn’t we do everything we can to get more Facebook likes?” Now, many of the most successful companies are thinking hard about how to drive engagement in a way that preserves the original intent of speaking with a human voice and providing useful and interesting content.

We are certainly one of those companies. Now that I am in the supremely lucky position of directing content and community engagement for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I want to make sure we are doing it the right way, and doing it in the way that our community finds most agreeable.

For instance, we’re talking a lot about how we use our Facebook page. I don’t mean data-heavy internal strategy meetings (although we do have those), but making sure we have the kind of social presence that we ourselves as marketers and communicators – and people – would want to read.

Everyone I know seems to have gotten tired a long time ago of “like baiting.”

“Here’s a puppy! Click like if you like puppies!”

We recently tried to tie this like baiting approach to the pending snowstorm on the East Coast, when everyone and their mother was posting on social networks about the weather.

One of the people on my team, Andrew Gothelf (he’s unembarrassable, so I don’t feel bad calling him out) posted “Like this if everyone in your networks is talking about the weather.” The feedback we got on the post could have been better.

Just like everyone else who’s doing social media for brands, we’re trying to balance the twin goals of talking with our community about things you are interested in, while also trying to have fun, and do things that will help our social channels be more visible.

Three. Three goals.

1. We’ve decided we’re not going to use “like this if you” posts anymore, even if it is a viable tactic for increasing Facebook engagement. Because even if the data shows that like baiting is effective, that’s not who we want to be. I’m willing to give up some short-term gains in favor of the long-term goal of being a trusted member of our community.

Thankfully, I’m seeing a lot of the best brands going through this process as well. There is a renewed emphasis on the value of content, in a way that makes my inner marketing communications manager very happy. It’s not so long ago that marcom was the redheaded stepchild of marketing.

“Oh, we could write this ourselves but we don’t have the time. Throw it over to marcom. Maybe give them a pizza.”

2. This commitment to doing things right goes both ways. Brands need to commit to engaging honestly and sharing things of value.

But you have a responsibility as well. I see lots of angry comments on Sponsored Posts these days. In my cynical moments, I wonder if these people also shout at the television when commercials come on. Sponsored Posts are one of the ways that social channels make money. They have a right to get revenue from the value they provide us. And just like everybody else, they have to pay the bills.

But as a person, I understand how annoying it is to see something in your stream that is meaningless to you. It’s a violation of your trust, and a waste of your time.

(And my wife will tell you that I often shout at TV commercials.)

3. Brands need to use social channels in a respectful way, and that absolutely can be done. The same platforms (like the ones we sell) that show you how to reach people, will also show you what they most want to read.

Everybody’s learning. But if you don’t like what you see, let the brand know. You don’t have to get angry. Just let us know what you’d like. And what you don’t like. And what you find valuable. The onus is on the brand to do things the right way, yes, but I hope we can remember that we’re all just people trying to do our best.

I wish social channels made it easier for you to see the face and name of the person posting on behalf of the company. We’re trying harder do more of that.

So with all that said, please do let us know what you like about what we’re doing, what you’d like more of, and what you’d like less of. Feel free to leave your comments on this post, on Facebook, or send them to us on Twitter. I promise I will read them all. (And I also promise this isn’t a cynical ploy to boost our engagement.)

We sincerely want to be the kind of company that we ourselves would like to follow, but most important, we want to be the kind of company that you want to follow.

And of course, that means more cat pictures.

Because we have the platform at our disposal to monitor social media engagement, we’ll be tracking and will share the results of our social efforts. Feel free to share your ideas and share your experiences.

The post Social Media Engagement: Would You Like Yourself? appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Many companies focus on the easiest numbers like followers, likes, comments, and shares. While it’s important to keep up with these types of numbers to track growth of platforms, they should not be a measure of success. You can buy followers or clicks very cheaply. Develop a measurement framework that relates to business objectives. Your CMO isn’t interested in how many likes your Facebook page has. What is she reporting to the CEO? Align with that. The big one is return on investment (ROI). According to IBM’s Global CMO Study, 63% of CMOs want to measure ROI of social media. The challenge is measuring the return. If you are not looking at leads or sales or something else with clear monetary value, it can be difficult to determine those numbers.

Another issue with social media measurement is that there are not yet standard success measurements that everyone agrees on. Brands publish statistics, marketing executives stand on stage at conferences and talk about their successes, but nobody says “here are the things to measure.” Oh, and there aren’t really benchmarks for anything anyone does measure. You can see how many followers your competitors have but you don’t know how many leads they drive, and more importantly, how their social media efforts contribute to marketing effectiveness and reducing cost per lead.

Not Tracking

Even with all the above in mind, there are companies engaging in social media activities that just don’t know where to begin measuring. So they wind up doing nothing. This really does happen. It can also be a symptom of technology. Early stage companies use a variety of tools, based on personal preference, and some of the free tools have no metrics associated with them at all.

A company may track time related to social media so they can address the resource issues, but there is no connection to the business impact. They may also track volume of how many posts they shared as a measure of activity. This is not how social businesses operate.

Tracking the Basics

Once companies start tracking social media metrics, they are usually looking at optimization. These are the obvious metrics that are easy to compile: followers, likes, shares, comments. These tell you how your company is doing building reach by growing an audience and how the content you share is resonating with that audience. These numbers can help you improve what you are doing. You can think of this as fishing for bait. If you catch a small fish that you will use for bait, you don’t take a picture holding it. You reserve that for when you land the big one. These kinds of metrics stay within the team that is doing the work. Share reports with executives when you have something to share (and have progressed to the next stage).

Tracking and Analyzing

Social media success is determined by how it achieves company goals. Alignment here is very important. Companies that have reached this level of maturity in measurement don’t have awkward conversations with others in their company where they try to explain how the siloed social media metrics are relevant. The social media team does not create their own reports, but the data is integrated into other reports. It’s not about how social media drove web traffic, but how it contributed to web traffic along with pay-per-click ads, banner ads, and other marketing tactics. Can social media support improving customer satisfaction and increasing brand awareness? Of course it can. If these are the goals that are important to the company, you start by looking at how these are measured in the traditional sense and develop a methodology from measuring this in social media. These approaches are not common, but there are companies doing them.

Tracking, Analyzing and Integrating

What does social media measurement nirvana look like? The importance of social media has risen to the highest levels within an organization. It is not just fully incorporated into regular company reporting, but the information is so valued that it is taken into account for business planning. The CMO gets the return on investment reporting that is so coveted. Consider one of the goals of becoming a social business is to put the customer at the center of everything you do. If you think of social media as one of the best ways to bring together the voice of the customer with the voice of your company, then this doesn’t sound so unattainable.

Social media measurement is just one component of Marketing Cloud’s Social Maturity Model. Answer 10 simple questions to see how your company ranks across all of the categories.

The post Social Media Success Metrics Must be Tied to Business Goals appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

To help, we’ve collected our most popular social media strategy ebooks from 2012. They were viewed nearly 700,000 times. And they’re all free. Here they are in order of popularity.

40 Ideas for Your Social Media Plan

Looking for fresh ideas to add to your social media plan? Here you’ll learn how to integrate social throughout your entire business, train your employees, find the content sweet spots, listen for business intelligence, delight your fans, handle your detractors, and measure your growing influence.

How to Craft a Successful Social Media Content Marketing Plan

If you produce and share fantastically useful content, your social media community will be more likely to become customers, remain customers, and send you more customers. Learn how to create a content marketing plan that results in downloads, shares and leads.

ROI of Social Media: Myths, Truths and How to Measure

Justifying the business case for social media is a BIG question. This ebook, written by Dr. Natalie, will take you through the dos and don’ts as well as the different measures to calculate true social media ROI. You’ll soon be able to sync up your social media strategy, business goals and objectives with social media ROI calculations that prove truly valuable.

The Guide to Social Media Monitoring 

Learn the principle behind social media monitoring: the process of filtering out the millions of post, Tweets and status updates for the ones that matter to your business. This ebook also features social media monitoring success stories from VeriSign, TD Bank, Frontier Airlines, GNC, Dell and Beachbody.

5 Steps to Effective Social Media Measurement

Measuring your initiatives is an important aspect of understanding how your social media efforts are performing, but many find it difficult to identify the specific metrics they need. In this ebook, you’ll find step-by-step processes and explanations for establishing metrics that help you track the progress of your social media efforts.

How to Develop a Social Media Strategy

If you want real business success, you need to develop a social media strategy to keep you honest and focused. Here, we present a straightforward, step-by-step guide to get you started on the path to social media success. There’s even a Social Media Strategy Worksheet you can fill out as you go along.

Social Media Blueprint: A Step-by-Step Plan to Prepare Your Company

Wholeheartedly embracing social media involves a sea of change in an organization. Social media isn’t just a technology that can be bolted onto the traditional way of doing things: it’s an entirely new way of relating and doing business. This ebook will help you overcome cultural/company obstacles, adopt social media and get everyone working together.

Social Media for B2B: A Beginner’s Guide

Social media for B2B organizations can be used to increase awareness, capture customer feedback, generate leads, research target markets, and monitor competition. This ebook walks you through how to set broad goals and tactical objectives so you can leverage social media for your B2B organization.

20 Ways to Succeed at Social Media Engagement

Social media allows you to be in direct contact with your customers, potential customers and brand representatives about everything from products to challenges. Here’s a helpful list of ways to successfully participate in these conversations.

Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

We are in an era where all business is social. By incorporating social media into every part of your business and marketing practice, being a social business becomes much easier to manage and scale. This has a positive impact on your bottom line, shareholder and customer happiness, lead generation and so much more. Read this ebook for all the details.

There are many more social media ebooks to come in 2013 and we always appreciate your thoughts and ideas for topics! Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments or Tweet us @marketingcloud. Here’s to a happy, healthy and social new year!

The post Download the Top 10 Social Media Ebooks of 2012 appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Five Pathways to ROI: Getting from Return to Investment

1. Action

“If your customer is already doing something that makes you successful, make it simple, make it fun, and get out of the way.”

Don’t over-complicate a process, but do look for ways to make it even more efficient for your customers. Eric used SlideShare, Hulu, and Spotify as three great examples. Watch the webinar recording at the end of this post to get the full story.

2. Assists

“Know what efforts played a role, and reward consistent closers.”

Social media can be an intermediary step between the person and action you want them to take. Know where social media played a role and where it was most effective, and provide rewards and incentive to encourage that behavior. Use a tool such as Google Analytics to see conversion paths and use inbound marketing to draw people to a place where you can easily track interactions, such as your blog or website.

3. Advocacy

“Advocacy is one consumer telling another consumer where to find a great experience.”

As Eric says, advocacy is greater than influence because it creates a conversion and an endorsement for your business. Encourage advocacy by inviting your customers to share their stories and experiences.

4. Awareness

“Awareness has value only when it can be monetized.”

Awareness is more than looking at eyeballs or impressions; you need to look at how many impressions led to conversions. Watch the webinar recording to hear more about a shoe store in Guatemala that is using a mobile app to generate awareness and monetize the resulting actions.

5. Attribution

With the maturity of CRM technology and the increased availability and quality of big data, businesses can capture, categorize, and understand this information to see how one action creates a measurable effect.

Attribution is a great way to test and improve your marketing strategy. While correlation is not causation until proven, it gives you opportunities to test the relationship between your social media actions and business successes.

To hear more about the above points, as well as some great examples of how businesses are achieving measurable success, watch the full webinar recording below. You can also view the presentation on SlideShare.

The post The 5 Pathways to Social Media ROI appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Here are some key points to help you measure what matters in social media.

Define Social Media ROI

Before businesses can calculate ROI, it needs to be defined. Eric goes beyond the Wall Street notion of monetary investment in his definition:

“ROI is more than ‘money in, money out’. It’s about efficient business success.”

While ROI is more than monetary success, Eric cautions that you have to go beyond measuring social media actions (fans, likes, friends) and look at real return.

Understand Real Return of Social Media

Return is any action taken by your customers that directly moves your business forward. One question to ask when determining whether an action provides value: If you had zero of these actions, would you still have a job?

While sales and commerce are the more obvious returns, there are non-monetary returns your business can measure, including brand health, thought leadership, and changes in perception. Eric provided three great examples of how FreeRice.com, American Airlines, and Geico are using digital marketing to encourage their customers to take particular actions. Watch the recording at the end of the post to get the details.

Find Your Investment in Social Media

Just as return can be more than financial gain, investment goes beyond money; it’s the decisions we make with our resources.

Eric defines investment as this:

“When an organization makes a choice to devote a resource to an effort.”

Some easy examples of investment are supplies and materials, media budgets, and travel costs. However, time, priority, and bandwidth allocation are also examples of investments your business makes on a daily basis.

It’s important to remember that investments have context. Businesses make different investment decisions depending on the situation at any given time (current projects, available budget/time/people).

How to Get From Return to Investment

Many businesses start with the investment and try to calculate the return, but it’s much more effective to start with the return and work your way backwards. What are your business goals? What do you want to achieve? In what time frame do you want to achieve it? From there, you can identify your online conversation pathways and the actions you want your customers to take.

To hear more about the above points, as well as some great examples of how businesses are achieving measurable success, watch the full webinar recording below. You can also view the presentation on SlideShare. Watch for part two of our webinar recap later this week, where we’ll cover the pathways your business can take to measurable ROI.

We received so many excellent questions during the webinar that we weren’t able to get to all of them. Eric was kind enough to take time to answer some additional questions from our community regarding ROI.

Q: Hi Eric, How do you go about finding advocates and get them engaged with your brand without paying them?

Most true advocates usually want something you already have in significant supply – your product! I usually tell clients to look for incentives that have a high perceptual value, while having a low organizational cost. Ford does a great job of this with their badges (available on social.ford.com). These are essentially free, so they have low organizational cost, but their exclusivity and uniqueness can provide high perceptual value. For Zappos, it was free next-day shipping. For Freshbooks, it’s their weekly birthday cake giveaway. Gary Vaynerchuk made a name for WineLibrary.tv with his wine library wristbands, and Woot has issued so many versions of their screaming monkey that there are actual eBay sales for the more rare ones. Your advocates already love your products, they just want something to show off their exclusivity and identify with each other.

Q: Can you combine social measures like these and match it to conventional research tracking trend measures?

Absolutely! At my Social Analytics & Insights practice here at M/A/R/C, that’s one of our specialties. We often use correlative time series models to match up social data with brand health surveys, guest satisfaction data, sales data, Nielsen or Arbitron ratings, or many other external indicators of business success. You can also gain a lot of insight at a qualitative level, using open-ended responses (such as from focus groups) to fuel social ethnography studies.

Q: I work in the Medicaid sector, and in our business, we don’t sell a product or have a trackable conversion. How can we show ROI if there is no money changing hands?

Social analytics within healthcare sectors is particularly difficult, and government sectors even more so! The good news is that this is not an insurmountable challenge. As I mentioned during the presentation, the foundation of any ROI measurement should start with your desired return – what is the thing that makes your organization win? When I work with clients in these sectors, that’s often the hardest question – not the measurement itself. I’d take a hard look at those “trophy numbers” – statistics management uses to determine their own success currently – and find out how those became anointed as the business’ KPIs. Once you get to the story behind the reports, you’ll often find what the business really wants to achieve, and often you’ll find other measures that track that more effectively.

The post How to Define Your Social Media ROI appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

We’ve pulled together some takeaways and resources to help marketers overcome these social media obstacles.

It’s Hard to Calculate True ROI

At 56%, this was the biggest frustration for marketers. While social media metrics on their own do not ROI make, correlating these metrics with overall business objectives will allow you to calculate the return on investment of your social media efforts. We go over the fundamentals in 7 Steps to Measuring Social Media ROI and cover seven essential equations for social media measurement. If you have more time, check out the below webinar on ROI with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and be sure to download the ebook.

It’s Hard to Link Social Engagement to Sales

When linking social media metrics to sales, you need to look at conversions or the number of people who took action as a result of your social media efforts. Create landing pages and promo codes available only via Facebook or Twitter and use web analytics to help track your referral traffic. You can also cross-reference inbound leads with your social media subscribers to measure conversation rates for your customers who follow you on social media versus those who do not. A CRM system will help you track your lead sources and how many convert to sales. For more on this, download our ebook, 5 Steps to Effective Social Media Measurement.

Curating Content is Too Time Consuming

While some brands and agencies have full-time teams dedicated to producing content, it is an achievable goal for brands of any size. Creating content takes time, but doesn’t need to be time consuming if you delegate your resources. We give you some ideas for how to organize your social media editorial team here. If your team is small, consider having members from other departments in your organization create or collaborate on content, whether it is a blog, ebook, or webinar. You likely have lots of employees outside your marketing team who would be willing and eager to help out. Don’t rely on your internal team alone – turn to your customers and industry influencers to contribute as well.

The Constant Need for Fresh Content is Overwhelming

Inspiration can come from anywhere, as long as you know where to look. Check out our post from earlier this week on how to overcome content fatigue. Some suggestions? Brainstorm with your team, crowdsource your customers, keep up with industry news and trends, and ask the experts. You can also re-purpose existing content if you’re strapped for ideas. Read some ways to extend the life of your content in this post. For more ideas on driving your social media content marketing, read our ebook, How to Craft a Successful Social Media Content Marketing Plan.

The post How to Overcome Social Media Marketing Obstacles appeared first on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.