How much does it cost you to market your work for free?
This sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. It’s great to market your book and/or your services on free social media sites. The sites are free but your time is not. Time = money, whether you’re working for someone else or running your own business.
Once upon a time in the corporate world,
…social media gurus argued that since social media marketing is a conversation between friends and not a sales pitch, return on investment for these marketing activities could not be measured. These conversations were good for business and that was a good enough reason to do it.
The bosses in charge of the budgets saw it differently. In order to continue funding for social media campaigns, CEOs demanded proof that social media campaigns had a tangible – read profitable – benefit to the company.
You, too, as an author/entrepreneur need to see financial results for your social media marketing campaigns. To measure your ROI (or, return on investment) you need to do the following:
Step #1:
Write clear objectives as to what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Use concrete numbers, like “sell 500 copies of my book in the next quarter.” Or, “grow my mailing list to 5000 in by July of 2012.”
Step #2:
Establish your social media and website baselines before starting your campaign. Where are you now in your social media presence? Use tools like Google Analytics, Klout, and Hubspot’s new Marketing Grader to determine your current traffic, including unique and total visitors, incoming links and other sources of traffic, and what pages are getting the most visits. Look at your social media profiles to note your Facebook business page “fans,” your Twitter followers, number to retweets per week or month. Do you use Feedburner or another blog syndicator? Check how many subscribers you have. Do you have an ezine? How many subscribers do you have?
Spend some time going through your client records. How have your clients been finding you up to this point? Referral? Your website? Facebook?
Step #3:
Set a time frame to measure – weekly or monthly.
- For your reporting period, look at sales revenue, the number of transactions, the number of new customers, and the average sale.
- Use Google analytics, Facebook Insights, a customer questionaire, (and ask your new customers, if you can) to determine the cause and effect of your campaign.
- Look beyond the numbers to what happened as a result. For instance, does your increase in website traffic correlate to higher sales? Maybe you’re getting more referrals?
You’ll need to track this information consistently for a few months to see what patterns emerge.
Here’s the easiest thing to do after you see where you’re getting your new customers from: do more of that. If you’re seeing more business because of contests you’re running on Facebook, run more promotions like that. Your audience doesn’t seem to be on Twitter? Okay. One less profile to worry about.
Numbers and reports may be a bit tedious to do, but they can provide very exciting information on the best ways you can promote your business and make a living. And that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?
December 14, 2011
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Mary В· 
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Tags: measuring return on investment, measuring your social media results, ROI В· Posted in: Social media marketing
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