Last Updated on June 8, 2020
ROI (return on investment) is the most basic and reliable way to judge whether something is working for your business. With social media and influencer marketing, your decisions should be based on getting the most out of every dollar spent paying influencers and posting content. Here are some important guidelines to optimize social media spend.
1. Stick to a Clear Metric
To optimize your social media spending, you must determine the metrics by which you’ll judge your success. Every business will have unique ideal measurements, but some easy ones to consider are leads generated and profit on products sold. From there, you simply keep track of these performance indicators and use them to make budgetary decisions. If a certain type of post on social media is getting more leads, sales, etc., consider adding more content of that type to your promotion calendar. Find what works and make it work as well as you can.
If you work with influencers, give them clear instructions on what to post based on what you know will boost your metrics. However, be flexible enough to accept some small changes if the influencers request them. They know their audiences, and they might have ideas to engage with them for even better results.
2. Consider Engagement as a Metric
Not all businesses will want to base their success measurements on leads or profits. In some cases, building a passionate community of fans is a business’s goal, in which case engagement should be used as the chief metric to optimize. Engagement is simply how many likes, comments, shares, etc., a business’s content gets online.
How exactly you measure it is up to you, but if you put an emphasis on increasing engagement, you’re sure to end up with a group of loyal customers who both buy products and promote you organically to others.
With smart influencer marketing, engagement is extremely easy to build. By connecting with the right people, who share their audiences with you, you’ll get more potential customers who take an interest in your social content. Over time, this sort of campaign can turn into a reliable, organic source of sales and leads.
If you want to optimize your social media spending based on engagement, however, then it’s important to find an average value for certain actions. For example, you might choose shares and calculate that, on average, every 10 post shares leads to a sale. If you make $50 in profit on a sale, every share you get is worth an average of $5. From there, you have an easy value per share to compare against your spending.
3. Choosing the Right Platform
Any attempt at advertising, online or otherwise, won’t be as successful as it could be without targeting toward a niche, such as young fathers for kids’ sporting goods. Knowing your audience is one thing, but for the best results, you’ll need to participate in your target audience’s favorite websites, also known as platforms.
Choosing a platform will come down to where your target audience hangs out. For instance, Facebook might be big, but if you’re interested in a young gamer audience, a platform such as Twitch could be better. If your business is targeting artists, photographers, or other visual people, Instagram might be a great choice. If your business gets involved in world events, Twitter may be your best bet.
Some influencers might be a great fit for your business but don’t have any solid following on the websites where your business is marketing. If that turns out to be the case for many of your most appealing potential influencers, consider making a shift to their territories.
4. Spending the Proper Amount
As you continue to optimize, be careful about how much of your total marketing budget you spend on social media alone. Even with great optimization, some businesses stand to grow more in the long term if they still allocate and optimize their marketing budgets in other areas.
If you take too much money from content marketing, for example, and pour all of that into social media marketing, you may be in a difficult situation in the future due to a change in the algorithm or some other event on the website you were using. The best strategies have several marketing tools that all work together.
This is why it’s a great idea to combine standard social media marketing with influencer marketing. With influencer connections, a brand can gain not only increased social media attention but also content on influencer blogs and websites. Beyond that, the connections made can be useful for promotion long into the future.
One major factor in optimizing influencer-based social media ROI is the time you spend discovering influencers and forming deals with them. Finding the right influencers using the Intellifluence Discover tool will save you huge amounts of time. Once you find viable candidates, you can seamlessly add them to your campaign and keep track of every step of the transaction. As long as you provide clear instructions to influencers, the organized communication platform on Intellifluence will make this style of marketing as simple as possible.
SallyBot is committed to helping users get the most out of Intellifluence. By helping brands create campaigns, providing unparalleled customer service and offering useful advice, nothing makes SallyBot happier than hearing she is liked… Really, really liked.
