Michelle Krasniak - Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

Book 1, Chapter 3suggests online market research techniques to help you define your markets, match them to social media services, and find them online.

Think niche! Carefully define your audiences for various forms of social media, and target your messages appropriately for each audience.

Estimating costs from the bottom up is tricky, and this approach rarely includes a cap. Consequently, costs often wildly exceed your budget. Instead, establish first how much money you’re willing to invest in the overall effort, including in-house labor, outside contractors, and miscellaneous hard costs such as purchasing software or equipment. Enter those amounts in the Cost section.

Then prioritize your social-marketing efforts based on what you can afford, allocating or reallocating funds within your budget as needed. This approach not only keeps your total social-marketing costs under control, but also lets you assess the results against expenses.

To make cost-tracking easier, ask your bookkeeper or CPA to set up an activity or a job in your accounting system for social media marketing. Then you can easily track and report all related costs and labor.

Return on investment (ROI) is your single most important measure of success for social media marketing. In simple terms, ROI is the ratio of revenue divided by costs for your business or, in this case, for your social media marketing effort.

You also need to set a realistic term in which you will recover your investment. Are you willing to wait ten weeks? Ten months? Ten years? Some forms of social media are less likely to produce a fast fix for drooping sales but are great for branding, so consider what you’re trying to accomplish.

Costs usually turn out to be simpler to track than revenues that are traceable explicitly to social media. Chapter 2of this minibook discusses techniques for figuring ROI and other financial metrics in detail.

Whatever you plan for online marketing, it will cost twice as much and take twice as long as anticipated.

A social media service is likely to produce results only when your customers or prospects are already using it or are willing to try it. Pushing people toward a service they don’t want is difficult. If in doubt, first expand other online and offline efforts to drive traffic toward your hub site.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Estimating the cost of customer acquisition

Figuring sales metrics and revenue

Managing and converting leads

Breaking even

Calculating return on investment

In this chapter, you deal with business metrics to determine whether you see a return on investment (ROI) in your social media marketing services. In other words, you get to the bottom line! For details on performance metrics for various types of social media as parameters for campaign success, see Book 9.

By definition, the business metric ROI involves revenues. Alas, becoming famous online isn’t a traditional part of ROI; it might have a public relations value and affect business results, but fame doesn’t necessarily make you rich. This chapter examines the cost of acquiring new customers, tracking sales, and managing leads. After you reach the break-even point on your investment, you can (in the best of all worlds) start totaling up the profits and then calculate your ROI.

To get the most from this chapter, review your business plan and financial projections. You may find that you need to adjust some of your data collection efforts to ensure that you have the information for these analyses.

If numbers make your head spin, ask your bookkeeper or accountant for assistance in tracking important business metrics from your financial statements. That person can ensure that you acquire the right data, set up spreadsheets to calculate key metrics, and provide regular reports — and then he or she can teach you how to interpret them.

You don’t want to participate in social media marketing for its own sake or because everyone else is doing it. The following sections help you make the business case for yourself.

To calculate ROI, you have to recognize both costs and revenue related to your social media activities; neither is transparent, even without distinguishing marketing channels.

Surprisingly, the key determinant in tracking cost of sales, and therefore ROI, is most likely to be your sales process, which matters more than whether you sell to other businesses (business-to-business, or B2B) or consumers (business to consumer, or B2C) or whether you offer products or services.

The sales cycle (the length of time from prospect identification to customer sale) affects the timeline for calculating ROI. If a B2B sale for an expensive, long-term contract or product takes two years, expecting a return on your investment within a month is pointless.

For a pure-play (e-commerce only) enterprise selling products from an online store, the ROI calculation detailed in this chapter is fairly standard. However, ROI becomes more complicated if your website generates leads that you must follow up with offline, if you must pull customers from a web presence into a brick-and-mortar storefront (that method is sometimes called bricks-and-clicks ), or if you sell different products or services in different channels. Table 2-1provides resource sites that relate to these issues and other business metrics.

TABLE 2-1Resources for Business Metrics

Include the business metrics you intend to monitor in the Business Goals section of your Social Media Marketing Plan, found in Book 1, Chapter 3, and the frequency of review on your Social Media Activity Calendar discussed in Book 1, Chapter 4.