Category Archives: Finance

6 Ways to Assess If Your Social Media Marketing Is Making Money Online

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Social media marketing is everywhere. From pop stars to reality TV stars, from big brand names to small businesses, from internet marketers to MLM, you cannot be taken seriously unless you have a social network presence. It seems the more fans and followers you accumulate, the more popular you supposedly are.

Is anyone making money?

It is far from clear whether there is real value of social networking in terms of return on investment. How does this online media frenzy benefit your business or does it just burn a hole in your time freedom, outsourcing or advertising budget?

Research from eMarketer* indicates that almost half of brands are unconvinced that social marketing’s offers real value as a advertising investment, be it time or money, and has shown the lack of clear measurements of impact and ROI from social media marketing are the reason most social efforts remain low.

What is striking is the conclusion that “While relatively few marketers reported social was pointless and overhyped or too complicated to deal with, most are still not increasing revenues or otherwise profiting from their social efforts.”

In fact of the half that had some kind of social media marketing campaign going, only about a third felt it was making them money!

What can you measure?

In an attempt to crack the complexity, Cisco have developed a social media measurement framework as a guide and resource for their internal teams to help determine what and how to measure for their social media programs and initiatives.

The measurement “streams” group the most common goals and ties them back to potential key performance indicators and metrics to track them. Hard ROI type quantitative impact measures are certainly difficult to pin down for social media marketing. The environment is completely different to the straightforward cause and effect of most pay-per-click advertising strategies.

With social media marketing, you have to track what is happening in the wider sense first, and extrapolate, thus assessing some of the softer benefits than can have a financial impact further down the line.

6 ways to assess ROI

Here are six ways you can start to assess whether social media marketing is working and your business is actually making money online:

1. Have a clear strategy for your social media marketing. Decide if it is for brand awareness, reputation building, networking, lead generation. Set targets for number of followers or fans, number of leads and assess against daily, weekly, monthly activity over time.

2. Add tracking codes to every aspect of your social media marketing so that you can attribute lead generation to different parts of your strategy specifically and follow them through your sales funnel.

3. Analyse your costs per lead, cost per conversion, cost against earnings etc. For each tracked aspect of your social media marketing campaigns, such as tweets, Facebook posts or social network PPC, videos etc. right down to the specific ad copy for any given posting or page.

4. Analyse your demographics, by using your own tracking, Facebook reporting, or different twitter profiles, or with Google Analytics. Again, track through your entire sales funnel, from impressions to clicks to leads to front end sales to back end commissions to see if there are patterns of people (gender, location, interests etc) who convert highest and are thus most targeted ‘hot’ prospects to focus on going forward.

5. Incorporate feedback activities into your marketing, such as questionnaires (e.g. Survey Monkey) based on open, focus group type questions that ask specifically how people found you, what they like/don’t like about what you do/provide.

6. You should follow up on the ways people enter your social media marketing networks and build out your marketing from there. For instance, you can use tools in Alexa to see where people come from when they visit your site and where they go next!

These are the very basics metrics you should be reviewing. At its very best, social media marketing can be an effective way of attracting highly targeted prospects into your sales funnel.

However, the path to securing a real return on costs in terms of time and paid advertising has far more to do with building trust than selling technique. Social networks are not the place for blatant sales pitches, in fact businesses and individuals show their ignorance and lack of professionalism with that approach.

Rather, social media marketing has everything to do with the development of authentic relationships and giving good value and service to others, a strategy which fosters social proof, long term customers and loyalty.

Social Media Marketing Guide

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Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of internet marketing that uses social media networks to achieve marketing communication. Using these networks one can achieve a number of goals in marketing and is now a widely used option by people for marketing their products and services. Social media sites are very popular among people and it is this popularity that has to be capitalized in order to promote the products and services. Some of the goals that you can achieve using these networks are

· Creating a brand identity

· Building positive brand association

· Generate website traffic

· Increase the awareness of the brand

· Convert traffic into business

· Reach out to key audiences

It is very important to have a social media marketing plan before you set out on your social media marketing campaign and the plan has to be in tune with the goals that you want to achieve with the marketing campaign. If you don’t have a plan you will not be able to focus on the marketing goals and may end up with no gains out of the campaign. Ensure that the marketing plan you have drafted for the marketing campaign is one that suits the needs of the networking sites and that of the products or services. Each of the media platforms works in a unique way and therefore there is a need to have individual plans for the social platforms so that you get the most out of the campaign.

There are various aspects to a social media marketing campaign and each of them is important and can influence the result of your campaign. Let us look at some marketing tips that will help you in your marketing campaign.

· Plan the campaign properly and research on the content ideas and the keywords that will help you to reach out to the target audience.

· Content that is posted in the social sites is very important and therefore ensure that valuable information is provided that will interest your target audience.

· When marketing in the various media sites ensure that the core identity of the business is maintained and that sufficient brand building is done to promote the brand image.

· Blogging is considered to be a great social marketing tool and therefore it pays to have one in which you can hold contests, events and also publicize your social media efforts.

· Using the right links is very important and though you will be using links to your website in most of the posts but you can always add links to other articles that provides valuable information to the readers too. When links to outside sources are added, it will help build trust and reliability and you may even end up getting some links in return.

· Always keep an eye on your competitors as it always will help you gauge what they are up to and also help you to pick up on some keywords and other insights. If there is a strategy that is used by your competitors that seems to be working, take that, make it better and then use it yourself.

· Analyze the performance of the campaign from time to time using data and statistics and make necessary changes to the campaign if and when necessary