How to Drive Real Value from SMM

Performance marketing is a modern approach to marketing that focuses on driving growth and revenue.

Traditional marketing goals can be somewhat vague. Think about a concept like brand awareness. Yes, it’s important for people to be aware of your brand. But it’s hard to link that level of awareness to your brand’s specific growth and revenue targets.

Because of that disconnect, marketing is generally seen as a cost center for the business. It’s something you have to spend money on, whether you want to or not — and you might not be able to tie that spend to real returns.

Performance marketing turns that approach on its head. Rather than a cost center, marketing becomes a high-ROI profit center. It supports real business goals like increasing sales and leads while lowering customer acquisition costs.

Modern marketing tools offer refined tracking, analysis, research, and attribution reporting tools. That data makes the marketing department a goldmine of actionable insights. The results can increase performance across the company.

Social media is often seen as a driver of “vanity metrics.” After all, the easiest results to see are things such as likes, comments, and shares. You can track these just by looking at your social accounts.

And, of course, those metrics have some business value — but it’s not directly tangible value. It’s impossible to say, for instance, that a like equates to a specific dollar value of ROI.

However, social media absolutely can provide tangible, measurable, concrete business value. But only if you apply performance marketing tactics and best practices to your social media efforts.

In fact, social media marketers have to become more performance-focused – and fast. Otherwise, they might see their budgets shrinking.

In 2024, marketing budgets are on a downward trend globally:

Here are 7 top strategies for making sure that your social channels contribute to the financial success of your business.

There’s no better source of real-time audience data than social media. Social media audience demographics provide extensive insights, such as:

• who your audience is
• where they live
• what social media platforms they use, and
• what their interests are.

Conversion rate is a relatively simple calculation. It measures how many people buy (or subscribe) after clicking on a social link.

Attribution models take this concept a step further. They recognize that the customer journey is not as simple as one click, one conversion. Instead, you develop a relationship with a customer over time. This eventually leads to a sale. There may be plenty of social media posts seen, blog posts read, and shopping carts abandoned in the process.

So you’ve set your tools up to analyze social media performance. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it situation. Your social media performance report is only as useful as the work you put into using it.

You’ll soon become familiar with the trends in your key performance indicators, social media metrics, and audience data. You’ll start to get a sense of the best cadence for check-ins and analysis. What do you need to look at daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

What kind of changes need immediate action?

Develop a plan to respond to changes in your metrics. Use a schedule that maximizes your ability to refine strategy while minimizing time spent looking at reports.

This is all about understanding how you can actually use the data for real strategic change. If it’s something you can change daily, check it daily. Think of post level metrics like engagement rate and click-through rate.

For metrics like conversion rates and revenue generated, you’re looking more at trends. So, you can likely track these on a weekly or even monthly schedule. On the other hand, spikes in social sentiment need attention right away.

Your social media performance data does not exist in a vacuum. To make the most of your data, you need to understand the larger context. Both for your own performance results and for the industry as a whole.

Just getting started with social media performance analysis? You may still have data on hand to establish baseline details. You’re likely already tracking many of the metrics needed. You’ve just been looking at them through a different lens.

As you shift your focus to a performance-based model, you’ll be able to identify long-term trends. Use these to benchmark your daily, weekly, and monthly performance.

You also need to benchmark your performance against competitors. This helps clarify expectations. You may also find you’re performing better than you realized!

Return on investment (ROI) may be the most important metric in your social media performance report. This is where you clearly identify the social media team as a profit center.

When looking at ROI, be sure to include all the dollar value your social team brings to the organization. Start with the net revenue generated from social marketing compared to your costs.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to social media performance. Here are some proven strategies to drive concrete results.

Social media is unique among marketing channels for its real-time feedback. You can see almost immediately what works and what doesn’t. This makes it a critical tool for refining strategy.

The most important thing to remember about A/B testing is that you need to test only one component at a time. This makes for slow going, but it’s the only way to really understand what changes drive results.

It is not a good idea to blast the same content across social platforms. But it is a good idea to make the most of your marketing assets by creating relevant content for each platform. So, to promote a blog post, you might create a short video for TikTok. But you’ll make an infographic for Instagram, and a poll for X (formerly Twitter).

This also works in reverse. You can use traditional marketing channels to amplify the reach of social content. Include your social handles in email signatures, your website, and so on.

Finally, an employee advocacy program can exponentially expand the reach of your social content. Make it easy for staff in all departments to share approved brand resources with their social audiences.

Affiliate marketing incentivizes influencers, partners, and even customers to promote your social content. In exchange, they get a commission on any sales they bring in. This type of marketing always has positive ROI because you only ever pay a commission on a sale.

On social media, you may see affiliates called brand ambassadors or associates. No matter what you call them, they have the power to extend the reach of your performance-driven social content and build the value of your social media campaigns.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of creating social content that simply drives engagement or click-throughs, you’re specifically focused on increasing conversion rate.

Rather than just getting people to your website, you want them to buy once they arrive. In turn, you lower your customer acquisition cost while increasing total revenue and your pool of highly qualified leads.

This requires a change in focus when developing your social content. Think about what you can offer your social audience to create a conversion event. Maybe it’s a whitepaper or report that requires an email to download. Or a live webinar with valuable advice from your organization’s top experts.

The important thing is to create resources with real value. Since these will live outside of your social channels, you’ll need to work with your larger marketing team to develop the resources themselves while planning out the social campaign.

Not sure what kind of offer your audience is craving? Social media is a great place to ask them.

Even with all of the metrics above at your fingertips, sometimes you need a good story to really drive home the value of social media as a performance marketing channel.

As you develop your social media performance chops, you’ll become an important resource for the rest of the organization.

A/B testing, performance tracking, and social listening all provide essential intelligence that can only be accessed through the social team.

To really provide value to the organization, though, you need to go beyond simply sharing data. You need to parse that data and use your findings to make strategic recommendations. This is where you really earn your seat at the marketing table and justify an increased budget for social marketing.

Remember: When it comes to social media strategy, you and your team are the experts. When you combine your existing expertise with ongoing data collection and analysis, you can identify trends, opportunities, and potential threats as they emerge.

Planning for how to maximize your response – from one-off campaigns to major strategic shifts – will continually improve social performance. Your own work days will become more satisfying, to boot.