Cerebra

It was with great interest that I attended a working group session on social media ROI. The room was filled with both brand marketing as well as agency social media people. I must state up front this was an open discussion session and not a talk from a panel.

First off, I was fascinated at how sales focused most of the questions were, with the majority of the Q&A revolving around how people have succeeded in selling more via social. Considering the environment and audience, I really would have thought the conversation would have progressed a bit.
The main points, which we’ve all heard over and over, are outlined below:

• Billboards can’t track sales so why should social.
• Brands with no online sales presence to track, and other brands with long lead/sales times find this very hard to do.
• It’s difficult for marketing departments that get allocated budget for media based on how well that media sells – these brands can’t see budget going to social.
• An interesting amount of discussion about social as a competing channel to the rest of the traditional media mix. This mindset has to change.
• There were a few brands and agencies that noted that engagement on social was directly linked to online sales for them (when tracked)
• One of the larger fast food brands went dark (no ATL advertising) for a period, only advertised via social and barely broke even on the campaign with near no sales lift.
• Many agencies are using complex tools to track sales vs. engagement, and finding that click-through to e-stores via social are increasing (same as what we are noticing).
• One interesting case study was a motor manufacturer that incentivised sales via social with “coupon type” redemption, and covered cost of campaign as well as made a profit on the total number of vehicles sold.

With big names like Burger King and AT&T in the room I expected some more discussion around the full ROI of social for other parts of the business. I was surprised to still see the siloed the “marketing owns social” approach for so many, and the obsession that only sales had a return on the investment, when in fact the entire business should be obsessing around social and each department a return metric for the input to social. There were only 2 people that commented that social media is in fact a great way to listen to customers and drive feedback into the business for product or service improvement.

I still believe a layered approach to your social media KPIs means that your ROI should be more than just one number, but rather individual ROI metrics for different departments. For example the online department could have a sales metric but customer service could have a deflection cost or faster response times via social. Social should be core to the business, not just another channel for marketing in the media mix.