Social media marketing is a great way to establish your brand, increase awareness, gain more followers, connect with your audience and build trust. It’s also a powerful way to drive conversion if you focus on the right metrics. In this mini guide, we take a look at the most important metrics to monitor social media marketing conversion.
Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Conversion
It’s important to note that social is not the best platform to sell directly. There are many other channels that will help you achieve this particular goal. That’s not to say that you cannot convert followers from a good Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or LinkedIn strategy, however. Rather than expecting to drive direct sales through social media marketing, focus on increasing conversion through the following ways:
Engagement
Engagement is crucial on many levels. It helps you grow your reputation, increase trust, establish your brand, connect with your audience on a deeper level and, in a less direct way, boost your sales. You could think of engagement as warming up potential sales before they are redirected to your website or established as potential leads. Engagement is what helps you grow a following of loyal fans. It helps to increase recommendations and referrals while allowing you to grow your brand online. All of these things will help to ultimately result in sales.
Traffic
If you have a cross channel marketing strategy that incorporates social along with other channels such as mobile, email marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing, you will be able to increase a flow of traffic from your social channels to your primary sales channels. A good way to determine how much traffic is generated through each channel is to check your analytics. If you find that certain channels perform better than others, you will soon determine which add genuine value from a traffic referral point of view.
Leads
Are you using CTAs effectively on your social pages? Are you giving followers a reason to make enquiries, proceed to sales pages or complete a pre-defined action? How clearly defined are your lead generation goals when it comes to social channels? Some of the ways that you can generate leads through your social platforms include promotional posts, sponsored posts, carefully placed CTAs, dedicated landing pages, testimonials, reviews and social proof. Just be careful to back up any lead nurturing efforts with fast, efficient service, consistent content and a seamless customer experience.
Once you begin to measure and track the metrics that matter, you will soon start to see how social media marketing can impact your conversion.