How does your brand justify investing in social when it can’t be tied to sales or ROI?

[RollinDeepWithData]

Can’t you tie it to sales using attribution? You should have something like view for social traffic set up in google analytics and check sales from there.

[climbonapply24head]

Yes it can. Engagement stats and impressions can be loosely tied to ROI

[goofunkadelic]

Depends on what kind of social you are talking about. Sometimes, it’s a similar conversion to ‘how do you justify investing in customer support or accounting when it can’t be tied to sales or roi’. In short, you can’t and you need to look at it differently.

[Shorse_rider]

it’s a long term strategy. It has potential to tap into new audiences, drive a particular brand image and you can measure it in other ways, I.e sentiment, reach and engagement.

It is also an invaluable consumer research tool. We can investigate and leverage trends picked up on social to entice new audiences and take part in cultural moments. We can observe how our brand or the category is discussed to get a better understanding of how our brand is positioned. We see it as the world’s largest untapped focus group. Key feedback and insights can drive all kinds of innovations. It also serves as an early warning system. We can learn where we need to improve before things get out of hand. We put social listening insights above all else (content etc)

[julian5000]

Impressions, reach, engagement are all a type of Return. Beyond that, you can also use social to deliver things like ecommerce sales (measured in dollars, or ROAS), lead generation, database growth etc.

It’s arguably as measurable as any other marketing, and more so than most. What do you think it lacks compared to other channels?

[H8NforS8N]

Why does coke still buy billboards

[migvelio]

Depends on the brand. At my last job the company wanted to “just be there” in the best way possible. It was a telecoms company that deals in a niche b2b market and the main sales strategy is going to industry-specific events (wholesale sms) to make sales connections. The strategy made the other companies go “hey, I think I had seen those guys somewhere” which was effective to gain recognition and appear trusty in a market where there were some kinda shady companies involved (robocalls, spam).

[funkidredd]

Run your analytics in a dashboard such as Google Data Studio that has pulled your financial packages revenue into it. Then you can see any correlation between social activities and revenue together there and then.

[Fondeezy]

It all depends on what product you are selling and how you sell it. From eCommerce to brick and mortar CPG, you can get the ROI on social. Question is: how much money and time do you have to devote to it. MMM can Tell you the ROI, or you can use NCS/IRI/Nielsen/Catalina/etc to measure campaign ROAS through ANCOVA.

Also, it also depends on what your goal is. Are you looking for upper or lower funnel metrics as KPIs for your campaigns. Not all channels use strictly ROI as an indicator of performance again depending on what you are selling and the strategy used to sell it.

[rr1154]

Yes, it can. Check how much revenue was attributed for each social via the platform or Google Analytics. If you have site tracking and tags setup correctly, you’ll be able to differentiate social ad/organic/other by breaking the website data by source/media and campaign. Filter for only social data and you’re good to go. One thing to note…Google Analytics is last click attribution by default, which is my preference.

[erinmonday]

Compare the organic ROI to paid ROI to demonstrate value. Ie id have to pay this for this many impressions/clicks etc.

Also, UTMs and CIDs to track conversion and traffic. And, check webside source data by channel.

[gmh1977]

It can be tied to ROI through attribution. There are tons of tracking tools that allow you to track direct attribution of someone coming into a business through social and buying direct online. Most tools will give partial attribution to social if that initial channel brought them to the website and then they eventually bought through another channel.

[growthbusteragency]

Social Media is about building a community. Your acquisition and retention strategies should be what you look at. And tbh, all you need is an iPhone and some free tools to start.

[Viper2014]

lift in revenue
lift in organic searches
lift in traffic from organic social

Usually, you will see an increase in sales MoM

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Ps I am viewing it from the point of a performance marketing [only digital] dude

[goodgoaj]

MMM is the bigger, omni-channel approach. But its slow & not really easy to optimise with.

Analytics tools exist to measure site/app in relation to traffic coming in, which can ultimately be both paid & organic. But generally speaking these are either click based (GA/Adobe Analytics) or are screwed by third party cookies / IDFA going away.

The social platforms themselves have solutions also. FB for example has lift studies you can do to look at the incremental benefit of FB alone as a channel. Or you can take it a step further with a cross-publisher lift study. They also have their Attribution product (called Facebook Attribution) which is getting more powerful.

Plenty of ways to do it but no perfect way due to data legislation & privacy.