Every marketer is using it or thinking about it, every marketer thinks it is important, and everybody wants to know about it – marketing via social media. While social media remains a fantastic channel for companies, large and small for maintaining a direct link with customers, it would be even better to have a cohesive social media strategy for achieving high ROI (Return on Investment) from social media related marketing activity.

Hard Facts to Put Things in Perspective

• According to Hubspot’s 7th annual report on Inbound marketing and selling (2015), demonstrating ROI on marketing related activities shows up as the biggest challenge for companies across segments, with an average of 57% of respondents ranking it as their greatest concern.
• The social media marketing industry report for 2015 from Social Media examiner also reports understanding how to measure ROI on social media marketing to be of high priority for marketers, with 88% of marketers wanting to know how to measure ROI.

Let us look at a few tips which would help you amplify your social media ROI.

Social Media Marketing Success Thrives on Promotional Offers

Social media is perfect for gaining traction with sales promotions. Be it a deal on a smoothie from your shop or a link to a white paper or webinar, you should absolutely use social media to publicize the offer in the market. It is very important to maintain a strong presence on all leading channels, including but not limited to the Big 5 – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Here are some key takeaways:
Hashtags are the perfect way to make content go viral on Twitter while Facebook allows you a lot of long-form and visual content, enabling engaging, feature-rich messaging.

As far as LinkedIn goes, you need to be a lot more careful to choose specific target groups for delivering offers instead of carpet-bombing multiple profiles.

Use URL Tagging

It is paramount to use custom links for social media marketing so that analytics reporting can easily trace out and visualize what portion of your leads/closures/sales came via social media links. This would be critical while showcasing trends to senior management which demonstrate the effectiveness of social media efforts relative to other channels such as e-mail marketing, on-retailer site efforts and conventions/road-shows.

Tap Direct Customer Channels Such as Surveys

By using direct customer channels such as surveys which gauge the ‘Voice of the Customer’, one can tap into a valuable source of information related to the effectiveness of social media related efforts. The classic “How did you hear about us?” question in such surveys must be populated with social-media related options such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This would help to build a complete picture of sales effectiveness efforts, including those related to social media marketing.

Use the Power of User-Generated Content

The customer’s word speaks for itself, in ways that are much more powerful than 3 pages of highest quality copy. Encouraging user-generated content with Twitter hashtags is one of the most powerful ways you can turbocharge your social media marketing efforts. Just by asking simple questions related to why customers like the brand, running contests, and by asking them to share images/video of product-experiences, one can immensely boost the amount of product visibility in a jiffy.

Use a Link Tracking Service Like bit.ly

It is crucial to use a link-tracking service like bit.ly in order to come up with analytics related to clicks versus conversions.

Trust your instinct, heed the action points highlighted above, and you can expect a decent jump in social media marketing ROI for the next quarter.