Newsstand

August 4, 2011
The Importance of Measuring Market ROI in Your Digital Marketing Campaign [DMA11]

There’s a reason why a lot of companies don’t have the necessary tools in place to measure marketing ROI for their social media strategies: Facebook and Twitter, two of the most commonly used social media marketing platforms, are entirely free to use. That is, as long as you exclude things like Facebook’s pay-per-click advertising options. Otherwise, all come at no “real” expense. And when things are free, people tend not to track them as closely as they do things that are terribly expensive, like renting out a billboard on the side of a busy road or paying for radio and TV ads. But looking at social media marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter as “free” marketing tools is a mistake, because they do cost you something – especially if they’re a part of your overall integrated marketing strategy.

First, there’s the investment of time. If you put a marketing specialist in charge of running your social media campaign – or even if you opt to handle it on your own – every hour that’s spent on that portion of your integrated marketing campaign represents expense. The danger of not keeping track of every penny spent on your social media campaign is that you’ll end up completely clueless as to whether or not it’s being profitable for you. Worse yet, you’ll never really have any idea of what you can do to make it more effective, or how far you have to go before you can consider your efforts successful.

So how do you measure social media marketing ROI, apart from keeping track of how many hours you’ve spent in front of the computer engaging your Facebook fans, tweeting about upcoming sales and specials, and publishing updated blogs to your WordPress page?

Study the metrics. Dig into the numbers. This means you’ll have to have some sort of software program that looks at an array of different indicators, like the number of new customers, new Facebook fans, and new Twitter followers, as well as metrics like click-through rates and conversions. A good analytics program will also deliver data on generated sales. With this information, you can look for spikes that correlate with specific marketing campaigns to get a better idea of what’s effective and what isn’t.

There’s a lot more to operating a successful digital marketing campaign than simply studying the numbers, but this is a great place to start. If you want to learn more about how to run a successful integrated marketing campaign, you’ll have to go beyond simply buying a software analytics program. In order to make the kinds of quantum leaps necessary to turn your marketing campaigns into serious capital generating efforts, it’s important that you spend time talking to and learning from the experts. This can be easily accomplished by attending digital marketing conferences and events, where leading minds converge to share the most current and effective techniques in integrated marketing.

One such event is coming up this October in Boston, MA. The DMA2011 Conference & Exhibition will have opportunities for you to talk directly with these experts and share ideas with thousands of your peers. The list of workshops, lectures, and roundtables on offer will appeal to anyone involved in digital marketing, regardless of industry. For more information on how you can take part in this important event, visit www.dma11.org.

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