Ever get the feeling that your social media marketing isn’t giving you such a great return on investment? Ever want to find out how many businesses feel like you do? Well, that’s actually not so easy to discover.
Search results on this topic will give you lots of information about why you’re not doing a good job of using social media marketing, but not so much about the downside of using it in the first place. This makes sense, because the social and marketing giants put a lot of effort into making sure that search results on the topic lean their way.
The moral of the story is this – when it comes to marketing, don’t follow the crowd. Every company has an optimal marketing channel mix, and it takes research and experimentation to find the right fit.
Case in point
According to this survey, almost 90% of businesses state that social media is important to their overall marketing strategy. To this end, Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. Almost 2 billion people log on to Facebook every day, and each day, these people watch over 4 billion videos. Facebook is a marketing force of nature, with a global digital advertising market share of 19.7%.
Sounds ideal, right?
Back to the survey and a puzzling twist. Even though 90% of businesses think it’s important, only 30% of them believe that social media marketing is very effective. About 20% say that they don’t know if social media marketing is any good for their business, and 8% don’t think it helps much.
In fact, when looking at ROI for different marketing channels, social media comes in fifth out of ten categories, after eMail, search, live events, and content marketing.
The message also counts
Another way in which many marketers are on autopilot is in the message they send when using social media. For instance, at present, “woke” marketing is being used extensively. These are ads that are more about a social justice issue than the product.
Some of the most notable examples include Gillette’s The Best Men Can Be and Pepsi’s Live for Now ads. In these cases, consumer feedback was very negative because the ads appeared to exploit sensitive topics that the advertisers were not necessarily genuinely concerned about and were not connected to the brand. Pepsi’s ad was pulled after only a day, while Gillette’s was blamed (by some) for causing a significant valuation discount for the brand.
In comparison, there is Nike’s “Find Your Greatness” campaign, which focuses on how athletics can be enjoyed by, and benefit, everyone. This message is universal and is closely related to Nike’s image as a supplier of exercise equipment, but with a progressive attitude.
Measure, measure, measure
The problem is that many companies spend a lot of effort in developing marketing channels and messages, but not enough effort checking their value over time. that’s part of the reason we see so many companies running towards social, yet not really seeing the value in it with a hunch.
To run a Facebook page, a company must devote staff to monitoring the fan base; tracking clicks, impressions and conversions; dealing with comments; and producing content. But, as illustrated by the above statistics, a large percentage of companies don’t know if all of this effort is worthwhile.
Instead, one marketing rule of thumb should be that a channel is only used if there are resources available to measure its effectiveness. For digital channels, there are three basic types of measurement that must all be analyzed to get an accurate picture of ROI and why it is/is not being created:
§ Front-end metrics indicate the extent to which your content is resulting in a desired action by the target audience, and include measurements like click through rate and engagement ratio.
§ Middle range metrics illustrate what’s going on in the middle of the “funnel” and show how many leads are on the way to becoming customers.
§ Back end metrics give you figures that you need to calculate ROI. These numbers include revenue, average order value, win rate, CPA, lifetime value, and number of qualified leads.
In terms of Facebook marketing, it’s therefore essential to use Facebook Insights to measure front-end activity; Facebook tracking parameters to assess back end metrics; and the Facebook Pixel to understand middle range performance. “But doesn’t everybody use that stuff?” you ask, and the answer is “no”. For example, only 10% of websites use Facebook Pixel.
Consistency, consistency, consistency
Doing what is right for your brand, and not what everyone else is doing, also goes for the message you send. As McKinsey reports, the three Cs of customer satisfaction are “consistency, consistency, and consistency”, including for your brand communications. Once you discover a message that works, stick with it, and avoid fads (like “woke” marketing as described above) that don’t match the positioning that you have been using successfully.
Finding a fit
Take our experience as an example. Air Doctor has Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin Pages because we deal both with B2B as well as End Users. We have a very defined goal of what each social channel should achieve and what value we place on each one. Linkedin is tailored more to our business partners whereas Facebook and Instagram are more tailored to the end users or doctors we work with. Most of our effort and budget though go to content marketing, events and public relations as we see a clear benefit within those channels (see an upcoming article about marketing channel types). For this reason, we focus more resources on developing these channels, yet we are always looking at new sources as part of a process of continuous improvement that every marketer should follow.
As published on LinkedIn.
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