How businesses can measure the success of their social media

One of the biggest concerns potential clients have when they approach us to discuss working together is whether they will see an investment in their social media activity. We get it, as a small business ourselves, we understand how precious your resources are. You don’t want to spend your hard earned profits working with a social media agency unless you can be confident in getting a return on your investment.

The hard truth though is that it can be difficult to directly track the ROI of your organic social media strategy (although not impossible). Social media is a long term investment that can bring huge business growth down the track. Sometimes, it take a while to see the revenue come in. However, when you stop your organic social media entirely, you’ll quickly see the adverse affects on your business.

A great way to understand the role social media has in your customer journey is to understand the concept of a digital marketing funnel. This is something we’re super passionate about as a social media agency, and often educate our clients on.

What is a digital marketing funnel?

A digital marketing funnel is a marketing concept that explains the journey a person takes from learning about your brand to becoming a paying customer. Think about it. No one finds out about a brand and makes a purchase there and then (unless it is for something extremely simple and affordable). There is a process where trust needs to be built so that the customer feels excited about making a purchase.

How does your social media fit into your digital marketing funnel?

Your social media content sits primarily within the awareness / discovery phase of the digital marketing funnel. To some extent it can also sit within the consideration and conversion phases alongside other marketing initiatives.

It’s important to take a holistic view of how social media works alongside other platforms, such as email marketing and your website content to draw someone down the digital marketing funnel.

Take for example someone who discovers a brand in their Reels feed by watching a great video that is very appealing and inspiring to them. They then might follow the brand and interact with a few more posts before deciding to check out the website. From there, they might sign up to the email newsletter to get a special discount code and read a few brand emails. Finally, they will visit the website a couple more times to decide what they want to buy before making a purchase.

So if we track where this purchase came from using a last click model, the revenue might be attributed to the newsletter or via Google Search / Ads. However, this tracking model doesn’t take into account that the person came across the brand on social media and might not have ever made a purchase without this interaction.

But can’t you track links on social media?

Yes, you absolutely can. But unfortunately there are a couple of reasons why it’s still hard to track revenue generated via social media.

Firstly, is the example above, whereby a lot of time has lapsed since the initial interaction and other platforms directly led to the same, with social media feeding into this larger journey.

Secondly, it can be hard to actually add links to social media posts and platforms. Take for example Instagram and TikTok posts, where links can’t be added (except for Stories). Or take the Facebook algorithm, which actually penalises brand content that includes links.

Often customers see content on social media, then use Google to access the website rather than directly clicking.

What about social media ads?

One thing we’re really passionate about as a social media agency is re-targeting our clients’ social media followers with paid ads. This is a great way to drive more people down the digital marketing funnel. It’s also a smarter way to use your ad dollars as you are targeting people who already have a certain amount of awareness of your brand.

We really love it when clients sign up to both organic and paid social media services with us, as it means we can take a holistic approach to their ads and content strategy. There are also cost savings to the client as we can repurpose organic creatives and make them perfect for using as ads. We love bringing our creativity to ads, which we feel puts us ahead of some other social media agencies as the ad creatives we offer are more impactful.

So why is social media important for businesses?

As we mentioned above, if you’re not continually creating awareness content to drive people down your digital marketing funnel, you will eventually run out of paying customers! It’s so important to see organic social media as a long term investment for your business and not neglect this because you don’t think it is bringing immediate returns.

Customers are unlikely to trust a business that doesn’t have a good, consistent social media presence. They may question how legitimate a business is, or may think it’s not an exciting, inspiring brand if the social media isn’t on point!

If you’ve been struggling to see a return on your social media investment, it may be that you’re not looking at the bigger picture and where social media fits into your overall digital marketing strategy.

However, of course, you want to make sure your social media IS actually appealing to your target audience and is doing its job to generate interest and consideration for your brand.

If you’re ready to take a fresh approach to your social media, feel free to reach out to us! We’re Melbourne’s newest, best social media agency for organic and paid content. We’d love to help you raise your content to the next level and see more long term returns from your social media investment.