Companies are diving into social media with a vengeance.  It’s like they saw the boat in the port for months (years?) and just bought tickets and boarded when they saw the mooring lines being cast off.  WHY?

Tracking! Everyone is out there selling the tools and the “engagement,” but no one is talking about how to measure success. We constantly hear “…what about the ROI of social media?” Well, listen up.

Determining the ROI of social media marketing and your efforts through your blog/website is imperative.  Too many sites have the tools installed for great engagement, but how do you know if they’re working?  Is anyone listening? Is anyone interested? What’s the point?

In other words, how can you TRACK THE ROI?

One easy way to track the ROI of your social media marketing and other communication efforts is to create a landing page specific to each campaign.

Example:
If you have a Twitter campaign with the intention of pushing people to the “order now” page on your website, how do you know it’s working, besides some pretty in-depth digging into your analytics? And how do you know sales are actually being made from THAT Twitter campaign? It’s often a guessing game.

Consider this:
If the link you send out lands your prospects on a specific landing page, then you’ll know for certain that the Twitter campaign resulted (or didn’t result) conversions.

Below is a screen shot of our landing page that those signing up for our newsletter (see sidebar for sign-up) see once they complete the sign-up process.  As you can see, for the one day we tested this campaign, we received 8 page hits and 4 were confirmed subscribers from the form.  SIMPLE!

You can apply the landing page technique in a number of mediums. Have a landing page for a direct mail campaign! Create a landing page for a radio campaign! Drive traffic to a landing page for a speaking event where you thank them for downloading your white paper (that you only mentioned at the event).

The measure of a successful marketing campaign is in the conversions. With landing pages, it’s easy, economical and trackable.

How are you tracking conversions for your social media marketing campaigns? Are you?

Don’t jump on the boat like Leonardo DiCaprio just to be lost in the icy waters of social media marketing.

Food for thought…

Keep Cooking,
Andrew B. Clark
The Brand Chef

By on   /   Blog, Social Media Marketing  
1 Comment
  1. Doug Mitchell
    8:41 am on September 2, 2010

    Take it one step further and “track conversion on your business card”. @abrudtkuhl got this idea somewhere to put “YouMetAndy.com” on his cards…and I promptly stole it. My cards say “dougmitchell.me” which forwards to a landing page with a welcome video, etc. (it’s repointed temporarily to something else so don’t check please)…but the point is that if you hand out 10 business cards at a networking event, and you have 6 visits, etc..within that week let’s say, you interested 6 people enough to connect/reach out/learn more.
    That’s conversion tracking!