Digital Marketing ROI? Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
Digital marketing Return on Investment (ROI) is the measure of the profit or loss that you generate on a digital marketing campaign, based on the amount of money you have invested.
Here are a bunch of specific metrics to track each stage of a social media campaign. This set of metrics will not only help you determine your overall digital marketing ROI (which comes in the late-stage of your campaign), but also help you to optimize early stages of a campaign.
A. Early-Stage Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
At this stage, your objectives are to build brand awareness through your organic posts. The relevant metrics can be separated into two sub categories: Soft and Hard Metrics:
Soft Metrics:
- # FOLLOWERS: How many people are interested in your brand and what you have to say, on each of your channels.
- ENGAGEMENT: Clicks, likes, shares, and comments on your posts and time spent watching your videos.
- REACH/IMPRESSIONS: Number of people who have seen your posts. This is an important indicator of brand awareness.
Hard Metrics:
These can be separated once more into two sub-categories: Conversions and Costs. There are two types of conversions you should track:
- NEW NAMES: This is the number of people your campaign brought in. It helps to measure how successful your social media campaigns are at acquiring new leads or how many purchases your campaigns generate.
- EXISTING NAMES: Converting known names means measuring how they converted (e.g., downloaded a whitepaper).
For your paid social media campaigns, you’ll want to track the costs:
- COST PER LEAD/ACQUISITION: B2B marketers typically track the cost per lead through their paid social campaigns, while consumer marketers may track the cost per acquisition. To calculate cost per lead/acquisition, divide the cost of your paid social campaign by the number of leads or acquisitions it brought in.
B. Mid-Stage Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
Your mid-stage content should be educational and engaging to drive your audience toward interacting further with your company. You will be using the data previously collected on your social media campaign conversions, which will be critical to measuring your mid- and late-stage metrics.
- MARKETING QUALIFIED LEADS (MQLS): Prospects who have reached an agreed-upon threshold based on their overall fit, behaviors, and interests.
- SALES QUALIFIED LEADS (SQLS): Prospects who have been qualified by sales as good leads.
- OPPORTUNITY: If an SQL is deemed to have a sales opportunity, they’ll become an official opportunity in your system.
- PIPELINE: This indicates how many leads your social media campaign brought in. You should target a pipeline at least five times the amount of cost.
C. Late-Stage Metrics for Social Media Campaigns
At this point, you will begin to see how your social media campaigns contribute directly to revenue.
Track the following late-stage metrics to tie your social campaigns to ROI:
- OPPORTUNITIES WON: Indicates the number of closed-won deals that your campaign achieved.
- REVENUE WON: Refers to the dollar amount of the deal size that your campaigns brought in.
- CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE (CLV): Represents the total value that your relationship with a customer brings your company, across the entire customer lifecycle.
Finally, the overall ROI of your Digital Marketing campaign can be calculated by dividing your total profit from the social media campaign by the total money invested. You can optimize your ROI by increasing (decreasing if cost related) each of the metrics cited above. The ROI can be calculated following this formula:
Social Media campaign ROI = (Total revenues – Total investments*) / Total investments*
*Total investment = Total ad spend + Content creation cost + Labor cost
⇒ Are you an expert and do you know of any additional metrics for determining the returns of social media and/or internet marketing campaigns? Please add to the list.
Sources:
Adobe, Inc., (2019) "The Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing", pp. 76-81
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