On the most recent New Marketing Labs TV episode, I was joined by an all-star cast from New Marketing Labs to give a sneak peek at the New Marketing Labs dashboard. The NML dashboard gives businesses the opportunity to monitor their social media activity and to assess the ROI of their digital marketing and social media marketing activities.
The NML dashboard gives summary/graphical information, allows you to see detailed posts/tweets, provides workflow capabilities, and more.
Oops! this is beginning to sound like an ad. I guess you should just take a look at the video itself…
If you do not see the video above, please click here.
Recently, I presented on New Marketing Labs TV (NML-TV) on the topic of “Assessing ROI for Social Media Campaigns.” I addressed the question which many folks ask, “Is my social media campaign effective?” I was joined on the show by Chris Penn, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at the Sky Factory and Nichole Kelly, Director of Social Media at CareOne Debt Relief Services.
Here are some of the tips which we gave on this topic:
First of all, you need to have an overall strategy in regards to your social media campaigns. When crafting a strategy, you should keep the following in mind:
Define your target audience and get an in-depth understanding of their problems and questions
Become a trusted source of information for your target audience
Build an online presence with relevant content
Make it easy to transition the client from learning from you to buying from you
Measure results.
“Ok…” You’re saying, that’s a good starting point. “But, what type of results should I be looking for?”
Well, glad you asked. Here are a few areas where people commonly look for results:
Exposure and buzz
Branding
Reputation management
Sales and new business
Exposure and traffic
Subscribers and repeat traffic
Links
Rankings
Now, all the above are very interesting metrics, but my colleague Chris Penn would point out that you need to differentiate between diagnostic metrics and objective metrics:
Diagnostic Metrics: Tell you how the trip is going
Objective Metrics: Tell you when you have arrived at your destination. And, at the end of the day, the most important objective metric is a financial ROI.
Of course, all business folks will tell you the simple formula used to calculate an ROI. It is easily defined as ROI = (E – S) / S where E = “money you earned” and “S = the money you spent.
When calculating the money you spent, be sure to include the “opportunity cost” of the time spent by personnel on the marketing campaigns.
Nichole Kelly gave us some good thoughts on other factors which we should consider when assessing the “money earned” and “money spent” variables, including:
Improved Customer Retention Rate
Decreased Operational Costs
Increased Usage of Self-Help Options
Customer “Saves” (turning around a previously dissatisfied customer)
Cross-sells
Improved Process Innovations
To learn more about all of these tips, please feel free to view the entire episode:
If you can’t see the video, you can find it over here:
You can delve even deeper into the calculation of ROI by reviewing this video and these worksheets from Chris.
You can tune into NMLTV live every Friday from 2-3p EST. Follow the conversation and jump in using #NMLTV on Twitter. If you missed any episodes, you can dig through the entire NMLTV archive.
