Mastering Social Media ROI: Steps to Empower Your Team

The struggle is real for social media leaders, managers, and teams. Every time you mention that you work in social media, from the outside, people think that you take a photo and/or video and just hit “post” to make the magic happen.
However, we know that managing a brand on social media requires a lot more work. This includes the importance of social media for discovery, reputation management, community building, and brand awareness and engagement. However, social media as an industry still lacks the resources, budget, and, frankly, the respect it deserves.
55% of consumers discover brands for the first time on social media, according to Sprout Social. It’s no surprise that consumers turn first to social media to search for and discover new brands to follow.
The brand is social and the social is the brand.
According to SociallyBuzz, 78% of consumers are more likely and willing to make a purchase from a brand after positive engagement with the brand on social media. So if we know how important social media is for connecting with consumers and moving them along the social media marketing funnel, why do we find it difficult to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) to leadership within a company? organization?
In this post, we’ll help you get rid of the overwhelm on this topic and break down the steps you’ll need to take to start championing social media marketing, start training your social media teams so they start owning what to do best and ultimately demonstrate the ROI of your social media efforts.
Remember, the steps outlined below should be followed once you have completed a general audit of your brand’s social channels. Once you have a solid foundation of data to analyze and rank the current level of maturity your brand has on social media, you will be able to understand how it ranks against your competitors and the industry, so we have an established benchmark to go by. from which to build and create KPIs and objectives.

1. Discover your “why” as a social team

Every successful team is driven by a common vision, purpose or mission. What’s yours?
First, you need to understand what your North Star is as a brand.What does your brand represent? Once you have that, dig deeper into what your social team “why” or north star. What do you want to achieve overall on social media for the brand and what values and mission will help the social team stand out and stay top of mind both internally and for your community?

Define the role and responsibilities of the social team. As the brand’s social team, you hold the keys to the most direct connection the brand has with its audience. What boundaries do you want to set internally? What are the rules and process of working with the social team? Who is on the social team and what is their role? What is the social team responsible and not responsible for? Lastly, how do you want other teams to work with the social team? (i.e. bring the social team on board at the beginning of campaign planning rather than at the end).

2. Create social KPIs that relate to the business and marketing organization’s goals.

How will the role of the social team help achieve these goals? Next, you want to understand the company’s overall business objectives and how that shapes the marketing organization’s business objectives. In turn, you’ll want to create social team KPIs to scale toward all of those goals and communicate how social media “moves the needle” for the business.

Important areas to focus on:

• Relationships and visibility – Identify who directly impacts the social team through business decisions and build relationships with these key stakeholders. Create opportunities for social team visibility. Enlist the support of leaders and cross-functional teams to become social team advocates.

• Create custom KPIs for social teams – Create a master dashboard to house all social data. Use social analytics reporting tools to collect data. Identify which metrics support business/marketing metrics and research industry benchmarks.

• Testing and optimization – Understand the goals you want to create and choose the desired experimentation to test and learn. Gather the results of such an experiment to have a proof of concept. Evaluate and optimize KPIs to include learnings and insights.

• Data Storytelling – Create a system and standard to extract and measure data for consistency purposes. Measure social data among other marketing metrics to show impact. Use tools to make your data visual and tell a story of what is good and bad.

• Market your marketing – Do you want to create impact? Find existing opportunities or create new ones to present social data to the larger business and/or marketing organization. Always keep the social team in mind. Create a process to market your achievements internally consistently and include cross-functional teams. Create a role for a dedicated team member to own the team data.

3. Data storytelling is key

How is data used to educate, tell a story and make an impact? The final step to consider is to be data-driven in your overall social strategy and approach within internal communications. You want to Implement storytelling when showing data and ideas. to internal stakeholders in order to be effective and making an impact by “selling on social media” and gaining leadership buy-in.
94% of leaders agree that social media data and insights have a positive impact on building brand reputation and loyalty, according to Sprout’s 2023 State of Social Media Report Social.
You want to visually tell a story that the C-Suite, your target audience, can understand. Research has found that marketers and leaders perceive the value of social media through different metrics. You want to show data to this time-poor audience, have your data be concise, direct, broad-thinking, show a competitive advantage, visually appealing and engaging, and be focused on business objectives to help sell acceptance. of social media resources. and support.
Marketers know that we have access to A LOT of data; However, we must identify what are the key metrics to highlight to measure success and pace towards our year-end KPIs. For example, engagement rate is a primary metric we want to analyze and compare. Basically, you can calculate it by taking the total number of public interactions/reach OR views * 100 = ER%.

4. Stay in your power as social experts

The constant challenge of having to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of your work can become increasingly daunting; However, as marketing leaders we know the power of social media. It is best for us to rely on our experience, knowledge and insights to lead by example.

Empower your social team to focus on data. Data doesn’t lie and can be the key to unlocking budget, resources and the freedom to take risks and challenge the brand to innovate and stand out from the noise. Maintain a strong bond with senior managers and involve them in your plans and feel included in the fun and joy of being on the social team, whether it’s brainstorming, brainstorming or data reporting. Context is key. Tell them what you’re trying to do (i.e. jump on the latest TikTok trend), how important it is within industry trends (what is the trend exactly?), and why it’s important to the team, the brand and business. (that is, what is the impact for the brand if we join this trend?)
We hold high hopes that you too can help demonstrate the ROI of social media to business decision makers, and we are here to help you achieve this for your business or organization. To learn more, contact a strategist on our team or sign up for a free 20-minute consultation during our strategist office hours next month.