Absolutely! Well, in a manner of speaking.
But it will not happen because you have an e-commerce store on Facebook’s platform. Regardless of a Facebook currency concept being proposed, an option ‘to buy’ may never come to fruition. Other popular social media platforms, like Twitter or Pinterest, do not have ‘buy now’ buttons either. So how do companies justify their marketing dollar budget spend? How did companies spend billions on Social Media Marketing in 2012?
There is increased pressure for marketers to find and engage new customer prospects. In my seminar talks across the country, I ask for an audience member who has recently purchased a large screen TV. Once I know the model, I delve quickly in to how they made their purchase decisions and ask the kind of product research and comparisons conducted. My final question is “now, did you visit the TV manufacturers website as part of your decision making process?” - The answer is always “no”. Wait a minute, what is going on here? Today’s customer is smarter, they make purchase decisions differently, and they may never come to your website – social media has changed how we make decisions.
The reasons on why a company must market in social media are evident, but we must do a better job of measuring the effectiveness. Justifying your marketing program success by stating “we have increased our Facebook likes by 40%” is not a ROI. Marketers need to ask themselves the ultimate question. If you owned the company and your marketing budget was your personal money, would you be satisfied with this answer? No, you would ask Marketing to show how these budgets spend has increased sales.
If you have a limited budget, you can do this cost-effectively. Assuming you have a web analytics program in place like Google, there are certain calculations that need to be identified. First, what is your ratio of new to repeat visitors? Are you seeing an increase in new site visitors as you increase your social media spend? Next, identify ‘success event’ webpages; for B2B companies it is a landing page with a lead form and for B2C customers, it can be a “thank you for your purchase” page. The fundamental approach is simple, what % of new/repeat visitors is visiting your ‘success event’ webpage today? This % ratio is now your benchmark for identifying visitors that become a customer prospect. Example, 5% of new visitors completes a ‘success event’ and is now identified as a customer prospect. Use this ratio as you begin your social media programs to calculate the % of new visitors coming from Facebook, Twitter etc.
Your other option is talking to us at StoneMass about our in-bound marketing platform solutions that can help generate leads and sales and measure ROI accurately from Social Media – ask for a demo today.
At first glance, we failed on meeting our objective of improving customer retention. However, you should be more interested in understanding what could contribute to a lower website customer satisfaction level – therefore further research into the data is required. We soon learned that a national marketing launch occurred in January. As a result, there was a huge spike in new visitor traffic to the website. Marketing and public relations were successful in driving new visitors to the site but was the cause for the drop in % returning customers.
This ‘Far Side’ comic reminds me of a company I previously worked for. This was the typical response from fellow marketers when asked what kind of metric reporting is being done to measure campaigns. Simply, no one wanted to own the metrics data or be held responsible for reporting it.