Social Media Marketing ROI
January 11, 2016
Social Media Marketing
Abra Marketing has managed many social media marketing programs as part of our online marketing services. Abra has been managing social media marketing programs since 2009 (the first page we set up is still active for Nor-Cal Think Pink, now with over 4,000 followers). Back then it was a tough sell for most of our clients to try this new medium.
We had early successes that helped reinforce the ROI benefits of the new social media marketing.
How did we achieve ROI from Social Media Marketing?
Most of all we stuck to the fundamental principles of marketing. We’ve been in marketing for a long time and every time something new comes along (the web, Web 2.0, social media, etc.) there’s this delusion that it’s going to be a magic marketing pill. Just put up a website and the customers will come flocking.
I’ve had the words to Herman Hutfeld’s “As Time Goes By” in my head a lot lately (The fundamental things apply, As time goes by).
In marketing, those fundamentals include:
• a clearly defined target audience
• a sound strategy to reach that audience with a relevant message
• a hook that helps your audience translate from a need to the solution that you are offering.
• a well-mapped system for tracking the effectiveness of the campaign
Social Media Marketing With Intention
Too much of online marketing/social media marketing is waste. People don’t need a company to tell them “Happy President’s Day”.
What is that unique value that you can offer? Social media as the name implies is after all “social”. People are on it to entertain themselves and engage with friends. Your content better fall more under the entertainment than sales pitch category. Or it has to effectively trigger a need.
You need to find one of two things: either a passion point or pain point.
Some of our early successes were in healthcare marketing. Honestly, I went in with somewhat low expectations, both due to the technical, medical subject matter and a concern about the level of activity we’d get from older audiences (the earliest of these were back in 2010 mind you).
However the pain point concept certainly worked. In one example we were promoting a solution for ankle pain. It was exciting not just to see the level of response to our campaign but also the level of engagement. People were really excited to engage and get more information about the types of solutions available. Fortunately we had a doctor available to help us respond quickly with more information.
This is just one of multiple cases where we were able to acquire customers and document ROI from the sales that resulted.
Comprehensive Marketing
The one other component that helped our programs succeed is having a complete marketing program. We never execute any of our social media programs in isolation. They are were always part of a cohesive effort, with multiple marketing initiatives working together.
So you can generate ROI from social media marketing. Take the time to design a campaign to achieve that:
• Audience
• Strategy
• Hook
• Tracking
And great creative is always going to help.