In the last two blog posts on ‘ROI of Social Media: Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it’, I spoke about why many marketers try to hold social media to a higher standard of measurement when traditional media isn’t even measured and in the previous post about the need to measure across the entire marketing mix in order to properly measure the impact of social media.
For more information on all these topics, please check out our book at http://www.ROIofSocialMedia.com, or follow the topic on twitter at #ROISM.
1) Last Touch Attribution verses indirect. Many times, I’m asked how does social media marketing work if there aren’t any click-throughs? There are no conversions that can be directly attributed back to social marketing activities. Firstly, many marketers need to realize that we are trying to measure the impact of our marketing activities, not the noise of all social media. Our marketing drives incremental social media consumption, conversation and invitation (that is, inviting others to participate in the brand). So we first want to attribute these results to our marketing activities, both social and traditional. Second we want to determine how this incremental consumption, conversation and invitation leads to incremental revenue (and then, of course, profit.).
Next we’re interested in determining not only how this marketing effort drives direct response in terms of clicks and conversion, but also how it drives the brand (awareness, consideration, purchase intent, and brand imagery) in order to fully attribute all the direct and indirect effects to their proper drivers.
Once we have this in place. We can now start to really see how social media marketing drives value for the brand.
Lastly, we need to realize that marketing isn’t the only function for social media. Social media also supports the operations of the company and in so doing, can reduce costs (e.g., call deflection, time to resolution, improved hiring), increase service levels and impact the long-term value of the brand. This clearly applies to companies that have a direct support relationship with their customers. It also applies to FMCG, but to a much lesser extent. Even FMCG has service issues once in a while.
The Point: ROMI for social media is not only about click-throughs and conversion. It must also consider the long-term brand effects. Click-thru and conversion are only partial metrics. They’ll do if that’s all you’ve got, but smart marketers work to measure more - a lot more. Social media provides not just a marketing value, but also an operational value. To truly determine its full worth, we need to measure both.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, come join us at MeasureUp, the conference on the art & science of integrating traditional & social media marketing ((Use this link for 25% off! http://www.iirusa.com/measureup/welcome-page.xml?registration=SPKRM2308GP).). Otherwise, stay tuned for my next and final blog post. I hope you’ll find it interesting. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
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