Is Social Media a waste of time and money?

Thinking of using Social Media to help you connect, engage, and grow your business. Before you start make sure you know how to measure the value of social media marketing to avoid wasting time and money. Here is how.

Digital landscape

Social media marketing has revolutionised the way in which businesses can communicate with their customers. Companies can now have direct access to their ideal client, ask them what they actually want and create a stronger relationship with them.

Yet, the online space is not infinite and as it becomes more crowded, you have more competition, and more noise over which to be heard.

So, how do you know if you are being heard by the right people? How do you know you are not wasting time and money?

What are your goals?

Before you start you need to understand what you want to achieve. What does success look like to you and your business?

It is far too easy to waste time and money on social media, thinking you are being productive because you are being busy. This approach will not give you any meaningful success because you haven’t set any purpose to what you are doing.

Are you looking to raise brand awareness, build your audience base or increase sales? It could be a number of other things too.

By setting a clear goal you can start to measure your progress.

Put a number on it

Whatever your goal may be, put a number on what you want that to be at the end.

• Are you looking to increase sales as a result of a campaign, say by how much and by when.
• Raise brand awareness, what does that look like in terms of followers?
• If you are building your audience base, by how much do you want to increase your newsletter list and by when?

When we put a number on something, we make it measurable. We give it a value.

Return on Investment

If you now have your goal and a concrete figure attached to it, you can work out what you want your return on investment (ROI) to be.

ROI is an important figure to measure when it comes to social media marketing because your initial investment is lower much lower with less risk. It could be an investment of time or money, depending on if you are outsourcing social media or doing it yourself.

Understanding what you want in return for this investment and the time frame in which you want it is key to understanding the value of your social media marketing campaign.

Metrics

Having a clear understanding of the analytics will give you the answer to your question on value.

If, for example, you wanted to increase your brand awareness among a certain audience set, you can see how well your social media has attracted them to your website.

You can even set up reports that automate this for you. And you can check a year-on-year comparison see what is or is not working.

However, you can only do this if you know what your goal is in the first place. You can, of course, go back through 12 months of metrics across all of your social media platforms, but that is pretty time consuming and not likely to be the best investment of time.

What social media is not

Social media is not advertising, nor does it exist in its own bubble. It works as part of the bigger strategy for your business. It’s a vehicle to develop those close conversations with clients.

It is estimated that a client will need 6-7 touch points with your business before they decided to invest in you. Social media can form part of these touch points, build that trust needed to follow through to a sale but alone is not enough. There are other elements of your business that play a part in this as well.

Knowing how to measure the value that your social media is giving your business will help you understand how to finesse your strategy and work smarter.

Get in touch

If you’re unsure of how to approach your metrics or what your strategy should be on social media, our marketing team would love to help.

Call us on 020 7952 1460 or email us at info@designatedgroup.com

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