A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the influx of e-commerce thanks to the increase in smartphone users and social media. In this week’s post, I wanted to dive a little deeper into what social media marketing looks like, and how companies are leveraging data and analytics to prove ROI. I also wanted to examine some struggles that the common marketer faces in this expansion of social engagement and e-commerce, and how marketing teams can arm themselves with the necessary information.
Nerding out with statistics once again; Statisica.com shows that around 81% of Americans are connected to at least one social platform (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and Snapchat), and by 2020, the global population is expected to reach 2.95 billion. That’s almost 42% of the world updating statuses, shopping, keeping up with the news, sharing cat pictures, and posting TMI. It’s no wonder social media advertising has taken a foothold on most platforms and why companies are pushing to expand their social media presence. According to Skyword.com, marketers are struggling to demonstrate their social media ROI. Sure, you can measure the traffic on your site, and portray the click-to-conversion rates as a means to prove the ROI, but is it effective?
Unless your company has the budget for a full-time social media marketing analyst, then usually it will fall on the shoulders of someone who is juggling other tasks of the marketing role, or even being left up to a business leader if the company is smaller-scale. Now add all the social media platforms you’re trying to penetrate, then monitor your reach, social engagement, and conversion on each platform. It can be a very time consuming, daunting, and expensive task, and marketers need to quickly find out how their efforts are stacking up and penetrating their audience. Companies we’ve spoken with talk about dumping all of that data into spreadsheets, comparing numbers and engagements, figure out some trend, scratch their heads on what next to post, and then usually take a shot in the dark and hope it resonates with their following. Why is that so important? Most likely because that end goal of social media blitzing is turning those followers into customers if all goes well.
So why has it been such a struggle to dig into this data and compare social channels side-by-side? Well for one thing, no one really understood what to do with all of that information until recent years. Secondly, getting your company to approve and set aside budget specifically for social media marketing can be quite the task, especially if ROI can be difficult to prove. The silver lining to this struggle is finally appearing with the boom of software solutions. There are over 5000 different marketing technologies out there now. Explorics was designed with you marketers in mind, because we know how time-consuming making sense of ALL of your marketing data can be. Not only do we connect your different marketing platforms to curate up-to-date actionable insights, we integrate with your social channels and pull that data into ONE place and compare which social platform is performing great, and where to focus more attention. We’re here to help, so reach out if you have questions or would like to see the social marketing magic for yourself.