How to Drive ROI on Social Media

Using social media to nurture your audience can be a powerful way to expand your outreach efforts. In fact, 92% of U.S. marketers use social media for digital marketing purposes. While traditional advertising methods may still be effective for attracting new customers, in this day and age, social media is a marketer’s best friend. With over 3.6 billion social media users and counting, by using social media marketing, your brand’s potential reach is limitless. 

So, what’s the key to maximizing your ROI on social media? In this article, we’ll show you how to create a social media strategy, and share 10 tips for driving ROI on social media to generate impressive results for your business. 

The first step in an effective social media marketing plan is to decide your ‘why’ — otherwise known as your mission. You can do this by creating a social media mission statement that your team can refer to whenever required. Not sure what your statement should be? It can be helpful to start with the end in mind.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Summarize your answers to these questions in an easy-to-reference statement or paragraph. For example:

Hiring and training social media experts may seem costly at first, but it can drive ROI like nothing else. If you’re a social media manager, you’re probably nodding your head right now. 

Social media managers and specialists have one core focus: to grow your social media presence as strategically and efficiently as possible. A social media marketing manager can help you with: 

When considering hiring a social media management team, take a hard look at their portfolio, experience, and testimonials. Ask for data that prove their tactics work better than anyone else you could hire. 

Setting goals and KPIs that support your brand’s mission is vital to bringing your vision to life. 

When setting goals, be specific, but also be tenacious. In other words, don’t be afraid to aim big. 

Remember the old adage, “shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”? That’s what we’re talking about here.

At first, start by setting two major goals, such as:

Once you’re on track to meeting those two, feel free to add another goal. And then another. Taking it a couple of goals at a time will help your team stay as focused as possible. 

As far as KPIs go, meet regularly with your social media manager to determine the most important KPIs and ensure you’re on track to meet them. 

While setting goals and KPIs is crucial, it won’t do much if you’re not consistently tracking and measuring them. Not only does this keep everyone on the same page, but it also helps you determine when to course-correct.

In other words, tracking and measuring goals helps you:

Consider using a centralized social media dashboard for reporting and hosting a weekly or bi-weekly strategy meeting to reflect on your tracking efforts and brainstorm improvements.”

You can’t calculate accurate ROI without tracking your social media expenses. To make it easier to track expenses regularly, create a template or spreadsheet you can fill out quickly. 

Here are some examples of social media expenses you may incur:

Next, it’s time to compare your spending against your goals, KPIs, and social media profits. To measure social media ROI by revenue, use the following formula: 

<Profit / total investment X 100 = social media ROI>

By applying this formula to your social media campaigns, you can ensure maximum ROI on your content. And don’t forget to consider using automated expense software to manage, monitor, and track your marketing and other business expenses.  

Now that we’ve covered the basics of creating a social media strategy, here’s our 10 top tips for driving ROI on social media. Let’s jump in!

Understanding social data is fundamental to curating relatable, personalized, and valuable content. In case you haven’t heard the term before, social data is information your followers and other social media users publicly share. This may include their location, biographical data, what languages they speak, and other details. 

If you already have a social media presence, spend time analyzing your followers’ behaviour. Be sure to audit your current posts, engagement rates, and comments, too. If you don’t have a presence, spend time analyzing users within your target market, e.g. those who follow your competitors.

A/B testing is an experimental process that involves changing two or more variables for the same campaign. That may sound like a mouthful, but it’s simply testing two different versions of the same campaign simultaneously and then examining which made the most impact. 

For instance, let’s say you’re testing an image of the latest line of sneakers you’re marketing. You may decide to test a version showing a frontal view of the shoes and a version showing a side view. Or you may decide to test a frontal view of blue and green shoes and a frontal view of pink and white shoes. 

Once it’s clear which version had the greatest impact, you can test it against other versions too.

It’s important to know what channels your target audience frequents most. Once you’ve determined this, double your efforts on them. 

It can also be beneficial to do a deep dive into your target audience. What do they like? How does your brand make them feel? What are they passionate about? Curate your content around who they are so your targeting is as specific as possible. 

For instance, the open learning platform StuDocu targets young learners and college students. Since StuDocu knows its audiences love TikTok, it has prioritized targeting that platform and making relatable student content.

At this point, you’ve honed in on your targeting in a big way. You know where your audience is, who they are, and what they’re interested in. The next step? Creating valuable and shareable content your audience will love. 

Unique, high-quality assets are key – but finding them can take a lot of time and effort. Envato Elements’ ever-growing library gives you a constant supply of fresh designs that will wow your customers time and time again.

With just one subscription, you can access and download millions of premium quality creative assets. Whether you’re looking for trendy social media and branding templates, professional presentations and slide decks, unique and authentic stock photos, or dynamic video templates for your next blog post, social post, or email marketing campaign – Envato Elements is a one stop shop for creating visually rich and valuable content. 

It can also pay to:

Leveraging social commerce is a strategic way to maximize ROI and boost social media profits.

Social commerce is the act of buying and selling goods or services directly on social media. For example, you can sell or buy through Facebook and Instagram Shops. Since users don’t have to leave the social app they’re on to buy something, it’s easier to make a purchase. In other words, they may feel more enticed to buy something since there are fewer barriers in the way.

To take advantage of social commerce, make a list of the social media platforms you’re targeting. Then, find out if they have social commerce features such as:

Once you’re familiar with your social commerce options, upload your product catalogs, services, and shoppable posts. You’re now open for business. 

One of the best things about being in business today is all of the helpful tools we have at our fingertips. Use auto-post generators to create social media update libraries. Visualize your strategy with social media calendars. You can even build campaigns and publish social media content with campaign builders.

If you’re looking for social media templates – from Instagram Stories to TikTok templates, then check out the full library on Envato Elements.

Influencers know the social media game like the backs of their hands. But possibly their greatest skill? Being able to build loyal audiences. Consider hiring influencers to take over your social media accounts, run campaigns, and even help you strategize content.

Affiliates are like dedicated sales reps. In exchange for a commission per sale, they’ll sing your praises, host product demos, and encourage audiences to buy from you.

When a reader clicks on one of the author’s affiliate links and buys something, the author (also the affiliate) earns a commission. Starting your own affiliate program can help to drive sales, widen your creative community and spread word of mouth.

Offering time-restricted deals and discounts can be an effective way to entice on-the-fence users to give your offers a try. 

Once you’re on track to meeting those two, feel free to add another goal. And then another. Taking it a couple of goals at a time will help your team stay as focused as possible. To help you reach those goals, you can also rely on growth resources and get inspired by other brands.

When a user posts content about your brand on social media, it’s considered user-generated content. Engaging with and sharing user-generated content is a strategic way to build social proof. In other words, it encourages other users to get to know you.

The key to making social media work for you is maximizing your ROI, so simply follow the tips in this guide to set yourself on the right track. Craving more social media tips? Head to our blog and read to your heart’s content.

Vikas Kalwani is a product-led growth marketer and B2B Marketing Specialist skilled in SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. He works at uSERP and is a mentor at 500 Global.