Is Social Media Marketing like “Cat Herding”?
The first thing I did today when waking was to run down to get some coffee. I needed caffeine in a bad way. You see, I was challenged to answer a question, can you quantify a ROI with Social Media Marketing? I already knew the answer however let me bore you a bit of what I found when searching for this topic. Google, Yahoo and Bing each had over 14 million results for “Social Media Marketing ROI’’s”. So I set out on a mission to read them all……just kidding, I barely got off the first page when it struck me.
I couldn’t help but think, “my audience is Small Businesses and if I am going to be true to this I need to be painfully blunt.” Of all the posts I read on this seemingly elusive question; “Can you put a ROI on Social Media Marketing” all and I do mean all were over intellectual attempts at trying to impress others that they have the answer. Some well meaning, others a blatant marketing campaign. Here are some of the babble.
“an overarching truth about business: The best marketing strategies, those that yield long-term value, are based not on trends, anecdotal evidence, or past “success stories” but on new scientific methods and metrics explicitly developed for analyzing often-imprecise data.”
HUH?
“The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”
Really now!
“No marketing program has value that can be measured separately or independently. The value of marketing derives from its ability to help the organization implement its strategy … Marketing programs seldom have a direct impact on financial outcomes such as increased revenues, lowered costs, and higher profits. (Rather,) Marketing affects financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships.”
… No impact? Ouch!
At the risk of insulting some of my colleagues I am going to stop there. The point I want to emphasize here is this; small businesses are concerned with one thing, can we make money? We can all agree ROI is hard to measure or because it is too time consuming, many small businesses shy away from social media. I myself own a small business and I am largely concerned with my bottom line. How we get to a good bottom line is with constant Plan, Do, and Review with marketing as a whole.
Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, Are we getting what we want out of the conversation? When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? Most, “to make money,” If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web.
In it’s simplest term let me tell you the why you need to be engaged in this type of marketing, however, Social Media on it’s own is not the end all be all. A well executed Online Presence for a business should include a well designed and thought out Web Site/Blog, Search Engine optimized pages, as well as a well researched Pay Per Click program. On top of this should be the inclusion to the 30-40 Social Media sites which will in turn earn you back links to your site.
You may be wondering, “you didn’t answer the original question”, and your right. Let me answer it this way. Did you ask the Yellow Page sales person for the return on investment? Did you ask the Value Coupon rep for that same answer? Even still there is an answer, yes in your business it can be tracked and quantified with some very simple techniques like simply interacting with your costumers. I’ll conclude with this, the Internet is the place where your potential customers are looking for your products and services and you do need to be there. Be there in a way that shows how great of a business you are.
Lastly, I hope I didn’t over simplify this issue, please comments and questions to l.mcleod@bulbwired.com, we love the interaction.
Tags: keyword research, On Page optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marekting, Twitter, Yahoo Search Marketing
