Understanding Social Media ROI in B2B Marketing

When running a social media campaign, it’s pivotal to understand the value of time and resources you have invested compared to the results you have obtained. 

With measurable results, you can understand how your audience is perceiving your ideas and what else you could do to improve the outcome. 

Accurate analysis of social ROI through certain key performance indicators will help you understand how well your social strategy is working and how you can align your goals accordingly.

Apart from that, here are a few more reasons to measure your social media ROI:

• To show the value of social media to your organization.
• To connect social media with your long-term marketing and organizational goals.
• To improve your current social media marketing strategies.

Given its benefits, marketers must calculate their social media ROI. However, 60% of the marketers still struggle to accurately measure it, mainly due to the lack of clarity between brand awareness and bottom-line business results.

This is why in this blog, we have curated the best techniques that you can use to accurately measure your social media ROI and amplify your business growth. 

But before that let’s understand what social media ROI is in general and why it’s so important for your organization.

What Is Social Media ROI?

Just like overall business ROI (return on investment), social media ROI has the same basic formula: 

Social Media ROI = (Social Media Gain / Social Media Cost) x 100

Now that we have the formula, let’s understand the variables.

Social Media Cost: This variable describes the amount you have invested in your social media campaigns. It includes planning, creating, developing, and promoting your content. 

Here are some of the most common social media expenses:

• HR costs - It includes both salaries and training
• Materials and equipment
• Social media marketing platforms and tools
• Third-party agencies and consultants
• Accounting fees, insurance, legal fees, and other forms of business overhead

You can also use a list of your expenses and decide what’s important to be included in the calculation. Once you have all the costs included, add them up to determine your overall social media cost. 

Social Media Gain: It represents how much you have earned from your social media marketing efforts. However, it can be subjective depending upon your marketing and organizational goals.

In the B2B marketing space, the gain is the number of leads you have earned. But the challenge for marketers is to accurately attribute leads to social media. 

Let’s understand how you can measure social media ROI effectively and get a clear picture of your social media gain.

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Measuring the value of your social campaigns is not only about tracking your marketing efforts but also about executing your marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at some important aspects of it:

Focusing on KPIs and Metrics

We already know the importance of metrics, but since there are so many of them, it becomes difficult to track every single one. Using some pivotal B2B marketing metrics that are listed below, you can effectively track your social media performance.

Clicks

By using attribution modeling, you can track how many customers are a result of social media clicks. 

It’s important to track not only the number of clicks you have scored but also what happens after people click through. This will help you evaluate how many social media engagements convert into actual leads.

Interactions

Interactions can be in the form of comments, shares, re-tweets, and mentions that you get from your social media posts. Evaluating interactions help in understanding:

• Whether people are interested in your content
• What your audience likes or dislikes about your products or services
• Conversations and latest trends in the market

Share of voice

Measuring B2B social media ROI also involves comparing your campaign performance against your competitors. 

By analyzing how much your brand is mentioned against your competitors and whether those mentions are positive or negative will let you know your position when it comes to conversations about your industry.

Measuring B2B Social Media Performance Against Other Marketing Channels

B2B companies can select any marketing channel they want to focus on apart from social media, such as email, SEO, and PPC. 

Comparing your marketing performance in other marketing channels against social media will help you understand the bigger picture when it comes to knowing target customers and converting them into leads. 

For instance, looking at your social media traffic through Google Analytics will let you know how many leads visit your website from social media and what actions do they perform.

You will also learn how much nurturing is required for social media leads, and whether they are only interested in a specific type of content.  

Defining Performance Benchmarks

Before you start working on improving your social media ROI, it’s imperative to build a foundation around parameters that are beneficial for your business.

A high-performing post or campaign for one business may not work for another. This is why it is important to track data from social media and other marketing channels to build some baseline data.

Even if you get more than a thousand website clicks with a 6% conversion and 3% engagement rate, it is of no significance without baseline data. 

Hence, by benchmarking your B2B social media data over a certain time period, you can determine what’s working for a campaign and making more impact than others.

Publishing the Right Content for B2B Audiences

Did you know 84% of B2B marketers use paid channels for content distribution, out of which 72% use social media? 

Yet, the easiest and most effective way to build social media presence is by creating a top-notch content strategy. By publishing the right content for the right audiences, you are more likely to advance through all the metrics we’ve discussed above.

Here are some basic types of content that work great across businesses: 

• Original research with infographics
• How-to videos
• Questionnaires and community discussions
• Thought leadership content

Measuring Your Social Media ROI with a Marketing Automation Platform

Running campaigns with your marketing automation platform will enable you to build a database of every customer engagement you make, including names, email addresses, and other types of form data.

The automation platform will track every interaction along the sales funnel and calculate program costs simultaneously as part of the campaign creation.

If you want to run some reports, the platform will let you measure multi-touch attribution to understand which programs are most effective in driving people forward in the sales cycle.

Wrapping Up

While there are many ways to measure social media ROI and evaluate what works best for your B2B business, the methods mentioned in this blog are simple and easy to implement.

Even if you require some time upfront to set up Google Analytics or select the right automation platform, the investment will generate greater profits in the long run.

Confused over which will be the right automation platform for your business and how you can have a competitive edge over your competitors using it? Try out our professional growth marketing services that our experts deliver aiming to build a robust B2B social media strategy for your business.