ROI, or Return on Investment, is a term marketers and business owners use to define how much money or engagement they are getting from their efforts. Making measuring social media ROI important for financial advisors. While traditionally, “return” referred to a dollar amount, with social media marketing, it can refer to a number of things.
In this post, we set out to explain the importance of measuring social media ROI when marketing. Along with what it means to measure social media metrics and show how you can measure your own returns on investments in 3 simple steps.
3 Steps to Measuring Social Media ROI
Knowing how to improve your ROI is important for financial advisors whether they’re on a budget or not. Here are the 3 steps all financial advisors need to know to start measuring social media ROI and boost their marketing efficiency.
1. Set a Goal by Measuring Social Media ROI
It can be hard to nail down a goal when it comes to social media marketing because it is such a vast field, and there are countless possibilities. But to measure your ROI, you have to start with something tangible. All financial advisors want to grow their social channels, whether it be getting connections on LinkedIn, engagement on Facebook, or followers on Instagram. A great way to manage your wants is to set statistical goals that can be tracked and measured.
For example, if you’re currently at 50 followers on Instagram, you could set a goal to hit 100 followers by a certain month or maybe by the end of the year. Having an actual endpoint makes reaching goals more realizable, and once you’ve hit it, you set another goal. It’s an endless cycle that can help keep you motivated.
Some analytics that might guide you could be:
Obviously, these metrics will come in different amounts and must be measured appropriately. For example, you may get 100 new followers a week but only one appointment request. But by establishing a quantitative goal, you can start to measure your ROI.
2. Track Your Goal and Monetize Your Returns
This is the tricky part and why marketers shy away from social media ROI. You need to track your goal and assign a dollar amount for each engagement. For example, let’s say we decide to track new followers on our Facebook page.
Facebook makes it easy to track followers because when you administer a page, you get a daily report of your to-follow count. To find the monetary value of each follower, compare it to a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign. According to Buffer, a Facebook page averages 50 cents a like.
Now, you can monitor how much your likes would amount to if you were paying for them. If we got 500 new followers a week, for example, that would equal $250 of returns.
One example of doing this takes YouTube as its main platform. Many advisors these days have started creating videos to share with their audience to teach them about important information, industry updates, or general knowledge. What we’ve done at FMG is keep track of our YouTube metrics to see which videos perform best. From there, we put them into categories and use them as a review for future content. It allows us to keep our goals in mind and work towards them by creating content that resonates with our followers.
3. Calculate Your Investment
Social media platforms are free, but we can all agree that our time is valuable. To get an accurate ROI measurement, you must establish how much time and money you spend on social media marketing.
To monetize your time on social media, multiply the number of hours you spend managing your accounts by how much you make an hour. For example, if you spend 4 hours a week on social media marketing and get paid $50 an hour, your social media marketing time would cost $200 a week.
Add in any other social media marketing expenses you may have, such as scheduling tools and paid campaigns. All of these values equal your investment cost.
Now that you have all the data needed, you can use the simple equation:
Unfortunately, not all ROIs will be positive. If you find that you are losing time and money on social media marketing, you may have to analyze your strategy and figure out what works well, hire an assistant (with a lower hourly rate) to help or automate your social content.
Struggling with What to Share on Social Media?
