6 Simple Ways to Help Improve Your Social Media ROI

Ross Munro Williams Facebook, Instagram, Social Media, Twitter Leave a Comment

Please raise your hand if you’re a business owner who understands that social media is a necessity but sees it as waste of time and resources owing to the lack of return. I’m guessing many of you who read that believe that social media seems like an utter waste of time considering the amount of work that it takes to build an audience, and yet for some reason seems to have such a low ROI (return on investment).

Getting conversations going on social media seems easy enough for those with a good social media presence, but how do you go from conversation to conversion? Here are 6 ways from Cliff Worley, chief digital officer of Shark Branding (of Shark Tank’s Daymond John) to figure out how to get more out of your social media.

1.Know who your audience is

Social Media ROI

To start this one seems pretty obvious right? Wrong, too many business owners that we come across have zero idea of who is visiting their site, who is purchasing from them and what their social media following is made up of.

Using tools such as Google analytics you can see exactly who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. If random people are clicking, then there’s probably a good chance they’re not going to buy from you.

Together with the analytics and audience tools, you can add another layer of visitor information such as adding a survey on your website to gather even more useful information on who they are and what they want. The more you know about your visitors and your customers the better your personas will be which will enable you to drastically improve your targeted content and offerings.

2. Tailor your social media

Social Media ROI

Create content they crave – especially if they’re into cats. We love cats

Once you understand who your audience actually is, you can tailor your social media. Using Facebook’s tracking and optimization tools enables you place a snippet of code on your website and Facebook will track which of your ads lead to conversions and who visits your site.

That way it starts building a customer audience within Facebook for all the people who come to your site. That way you tailor your follow up to people who visited your site and serve them relevant content. Once you develop metrics on the type of people who visit your site, you can serve them ads later.

3. Check that your audience is engaged

Social Media ROI

If you do fall into the category of posting consistently but just not getting traction, it’s possible that you’re not posting the right kind of content. Sound familiar?

A good idea for small businesses is to look into what other companies in their same industry are doing and which ones are really killing it, then try to tailor your messages in a similar way that they do.

Another good idea to test your fan-based engagement is by asking questions on your page. If people don’t respond, you know your audience isn’t engaged and you need to figure out how to get them engaged. And that engagement is important because people need to build trust with a company. If people see that other people are engaging with a brand, especially their friends, people will feel comfortable initiating engagement.

One last idea that you could use to bolster your social media engagement is by holding online contests. You can get them to enter their email addresses to enter and follow up with them, because every person who entered is now a new prospect or lead for your business.

4. Invest in Facebook Ads

Social Media ROI

If you’re like a lot of small businesses you probably built up your audience via your friends and family, which is great but they’re probably not the target audience that will actually result in conversions. So running a Facebook ad campaign targeted to people who like similar pages, have shared interests and who live within your targeted location will quickly help you find the right people.

Investing in Facebook ads is especially important if you’re not seeing the results you want after having done the same thing over and over every single day without significant results.

It’s recommended to start small with amounts such as R1500 or R3000 ($100 – $200) and seeing what happens is a great start. If you get some results from there, you’ll start to see why it’s worth it to invest more. So boosting your posts can help you create that targeted audience and drive traffic to your website.

5. Use social media landing pages and lead magnets

Social Media ROI

When using ads or making offers, it is generally a great idea to send them to specific landing pages rather than just your home page for example. Landing pages are useful for a couple of reasons. First, they give you an easy way to measure how well you are doing on each channel. Second, they help you create a personal relationship with your social media followers by addressing them directly.

A good landing page makes visitors feel welcome and is a good way to deepen interaction in one place and also lets people know what they will get from connecting with you.

Often landing pages will feature a lead magnet such as an eBook, whitepaper, special offer etc. Lead magnets are vital for capturing more information on your visitors especially for those who are not ready to buy from you right now. These leads will need to be nurtured through your CRM and marketing automation tools such as Infusionsoft until they are ready to buy later on.

6. Follow up and segmentation

Social Media ROI

Once you have actually got people engaging with your brand and filling in their details, an absolute must is to then segment your leads into different lists so that you can automate your follow ups with them based on their interactions.

It is vital to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all customer, and there are usually several ideal customers for any given business. Each type of customer will have very different problems and needs, meaning they should be treated quite differently.

So once you have done the hard work of capturing their interest and their information, sending every person the same broad message follow up emails won’t be nearly as effective as sending each a targeted email speaking to their specific problems and needs. Specific products can then be created around these problems and needs – that is the beauty of segmentation and follow up.

Listen to Cliff speak about ways to improve your Social Media ROI by answering a question relating to a wedding photography business:

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About the Author

Ross Munro Williams

Ross is the co-founder of Inversion Marketing and clothing startup, Fanport.co.za. Ross heads up the marketing division of both companies. In his spare time, Ross is also a keen rugby coach with 10 years of experience under his belt.

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