The Financial Worth Of Social Media
As social media has grown and evolved one of the largest questions asked concerns the return on investment (ROI) and how it impacts the bottom line for a company. It is a fair question, but what I want to know in return from the client is how has their current marketing spend impacted their bottom line? Too often it is a question they cant answer or they spit back stats that have been fed to them by a vendor or a marketing sales person. Its awesome to know that so many people drive by your billboard on I-95, but what is the ROI of that presence?
Why arent companies asking the same hard questions about their traditional media programs that they are about social media? They arent because they have been sold what people have been pushing on them for years, even though most of the stats created by marketing and public relations firms are dubious at best when compared to the analytics of internet marketing.
Im not saying that social media should completely replace your entire marketing strategy or that traditional advertising is completely ineffective, but by not integrating social media into your marketing mix and allocating part of your marketing budget, your company is ineffectively investing money.
By creating a comprehensive social media strategy, you cannot only impact your companys bottom line, but several aspects of your business including customer service, sales, and awareness of your brand.
Businesses can retain customers by using social media to reach out to people that have had poor experiences with their brand. Through social listening you can monitor what is being said about your brand and then engage the customer through your social media presence. Retaining the customer, saving the sale, and achieving additional future sales all has a value that you can track using a CRM and tracking your communication. In the past, these are customers and conversations that you wouldnt have had access to, but through social media you have gained the ability to retain or regain their business. You can assign a value and an ROI to this.
Through a company blog you can generate traffic to your website for terms that have value. Using analytics and SEO tools together can provide you with the keywords your blog ranks for and a value for each of those keywords. I have clients that rank for keywords which have a value of over five dollars per click if it were paid search. There is a value to the time and effort it takes to create content not only from a SEO perspective, but in a branding and thought leadership perspective which admittedly is harder to quantify.
Additionally, you can target people on various social networks based of their interests and keyword searches. Then you can reach out and make them aware of your brand. Building a targeted audience with an interest in your company at low cost has value, doesnt it?
Does your traditional media spend bring the same value?