Many businesses have made use of social media marketing to increase traffic and make conversions. However, industry specialists together with the said businesses find it hard to strategically measure the ROI of SMM. This leads to this question, does SMM offer any real business sense?
Here’s the deal:
The social network is the in-thing these days. Many people spend countless hours on their favorite social platforms every day.
But here’s the problem:
Business find it hard to measure returns on SMM.
Using social media is a great business strategy but measuring its returns is tough. For you to get good returns, you must create a good plan and execute it correctly.
You may be wondering:
How do you create a working SMM plan?
Just like market research, you need to find out if your target audience is engaging with social media (they definitely are). Check the platform that they are using and see if it can work for you. Also, do not assume anything, for example, on Twitter, one of the fastest growing group of users is the 55-64 age group.
Engaging with SMM is a necessity for businesses. The results will not come overnight but with continuous monitoring and engagement with clear implementation, you will reap the benefits.
In SMM, businesses don’t know the type of returns to expect. Depending on your sector, you might not get immediate returns but you can get plenty of reach and impact. This is the case with distributors, manufacturers and B2B resellers.
But why?
Their target market caters to a narrow client base that needs sales efforts.
How do you interpret social media effectively? The following are three ways in which decision makers in an organization interpret social media:
Those in this group need social media because everyone speaks of its importance. Such people don’t know what to expect from social media marketing. They only see it as the in-thing. However, their perception changes to one of the remaining 2 groups after a discussion with a specialist.
The people in this group assume that no business is brought by targeting social media users. They negate social media because they work directly with customers whom they have no idea whether they use social media or not.
This group understands the long-term benefits of social media. They can foresee future trends and invest in them. They understand the need for establishing a social media presence with useful content in their niche industry. This is the group that hires social media consultants and marketers such as Artlogic.