{"id":103435,"date":"2014-01-13T23:12:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/social-roi-we-know-you-love-your-mother-2\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:41:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:41:56","slug":"social-roi-we-know-you-love-your-mother-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/social-roi-we-know-you-love-your-mother-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Social ROI \u2013 We know you love your mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the early days of social media, measurement was an afterthought. At first, the investment in the channel was relatively low, and companies were willing to take the risk of just putting stuff out there without necessarily having a plan for it to yield returns. Then came the obsessive vanity metrics tracking, and that seemingly unanswerable question: “What’s a ‘like’ worth?<\/a>” Then came the measurement detractors, claiming that trying to measure social media was wrong and that we shouldn’t do it because it was like trying to measure the ROI of your mother<\/a>. Enter, the Business Insider (BI) with a report that calls social media ROI a ‘myth’:<\/a><\/p>\n

Between 2010 and 2013, the percentage of marketers using a revenue-per-customer metric on social media went from 17% to 9%, according to the February 2013 CMO survey.\u00a0The percentage tracking conversion rates also dropped, from 25% to 21%.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The argument goes like this: Social media involves building long-term customer relationships. Putting pressure on these relationships to yield short-term transaction sales goes against the\u00a0entire purpose of social media. Therefore, we should stop trying to measure the ROI of social media. With the close of 2013, it’s time to dispel a lot of these notions.<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s true, most social media won’t yield\u00a0an immediate sale. Then again, neither\u00a0will most other forms of marketing. The notion that we, therefore, shouldn’t be measuring social is utter hogwash.<\/p>\n

Very few social marketing channels will yield immediate conversion to sale. Many of them are designed to yield awareness, interest, conversation or leads, which can then be converted to a sale as a prospect moves further along the path to purchase. Just as marketers had to learn not to put pressure on every single other digital channel to yield last-click conversions, they are learning to do so for social media. Social formed a part of the decision process for virtually every transaction that took place online or offline in 2013. Understanding what worked and what didn’t, or how to measure success, is the key.<\/p>\n

The BI report didn’t suggest that there are no returns for social media. It simply called attention to the very true fact that these returns may take different forms:<\/p>\n

“They’ve realised that social media isn’t a transactional engine or sales machine, so they’re dropping half-baked indicators that gauge secondary effects, such as financial return. Instead, the new metrics evaluate social media strategies<\/a> in terms of audience-building, brand awareness, and customer relations.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s leave aside the characterisation of financial return as ‘half-baked’ — indeed, it can be tracked pretty credibly for many forms of social media investment, but it’s true that in some cases it’s a stretch to make a direct connection. The thing is, audience-building, brand awareness and customer returns are all forms of return on investment, too. People dismiss these as ROI metrics not because they’re not valuable (they are) but because they have traditionally had a tough time quantifying them.<\/p>\n

But in fact, they are relatively easy to quantify. We just need to shift our focus:<\/p>\n

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