While ROI means that there is a return on the money you invested, some people argue that Social Media is more like ethics or CSR. Zygote identifies a lot of qualitative attributes generated by Social Media, such as loyalty, trust, passion, interaction and brand awareness. If we look at these attributes, some of them are also found in the lovemarks, since these are brands that you deeply love and respect.
If social media is full of such qualitative attributes, how can you set up quantitative metrics to actually calculate its ROI? Well, the first things you have to do is to try to eliminate the useless potential metrics, Zygote says. There are a lot of things that can be measured in terms of digital communication, but which of these measurements are really meaningful for your business? Well, if marketers might be talking about awareness, reach or other qualitative terms, your sales people might be more focused on leads, sales and other more quantitative things.
Defining success metrics also depends what are the goals of your marketing communication campaigns. Are you aiming to generate buzz about a new product? Do you want to make your existing customers trust your brand more and be more loyal to it? Do you want to attract new customers? Your social media metrics should be in perfect sync with your defined goal. If you want some examples of succesful social media campaigns, think about Burger King’s Sacrifice a Friend Facebook campaign.
Finally, Zygote warns that generating targetted traffic from social media sources is only half the challenge, especially if you are actually trying to sell something to your customers. Convincing visitors to pass through your door only covers the first steps of purchasing process phases. The most cost efficient marketing takes place inside the point of sale.
For more information about Social Media ROI, see Zygote’s presentation.
