Connecting Digital Marketing to the Bottom Line

With all of the push about the importance of having and being active on social media, one of the most difficult, but most important questions for any social media marketer to answer is:

“How do I measure our return on investment (ROI) for our social media efforts?”

In layman’s terms, the question is how do my social media efforts generate money for my business? This answer to this question can be difficult to pin down, depending on whom you ask. There are numerous metrics that try to connect the two, but if you ask any C-level businessperson, the only number that matters is sales, and what tactics lead to more of those sales.

Fans, followers, shares, likes, how can you connect these directly, or indirectly to sales and revenue? There are several methods or metrics you can utilize to support expanding your social media efforts. 

Here is one of many, straightforward methods that use metrics that are easy to obtain and calculate to examine social media efforts and how they translate to sales.

1. Use your website’s visitor source information or Google Analytics’ traffic sources to measure how many visitors to your website were referred to the site through your social media pages.
2. Compare this number to the number of fans, friends, or followers that your social media page has, to see how efficient your social media is at getting visitors to your website.
3. Ensure that your website can track the conversion process. Depending on your business, this could be a phone call requesting more information, or completing an online sale transaction. If this does not come built into your website’s user dashboard, Google Analytics also allows you to set up conversion goals, which will measure the number of times the goal is reached, such as reaching a confirmation page.
4. Use this number to learn the percentage of visitors to your site that result in a conversion. This percentage can be used with the number of fans, friends, or followers and the percentage of your social media following that will visit your website to show how sales have been affected by your social media efforts.

Using this fairly simple formula, it should be no problem for any online marketer to show how an increase in any of these three numbers results in more sales. Now it is your job to find ways to increase these numbers in efficient and effective ways and here at Dallas SEO Dogs, we will continue to help you do that. Contact us today and supercharge your social marketing campaigns.

Check out the Dog Blog throughout the month of June as we continue to give tips and tricks for increasing your social media following and getting the most out of it.