Alan Coleman, founder and CEO of Wolfgang Digital, says whatever the difficulties of measuring ROI, the channel should not ignore social media for marketing. As a way of illustrating why, he points out the biggest TV event in Ireland in 2014 was the Late Late Toy Show which had an audience of 1.35 million people. “Facebook can offer an audience this size every day of the year,” he notes. “Twitter has 600,000 daily users in Ireland and LinkedIn has over 1 million users.”
He agrees with Cashion that businesses are going wrong when it comes to measuring KPIs but it’s because they’re looking in the wrong direction. “Conversion should not be a KPI, nobody goes from flicking through their Facebook feed to buying software in a few clicks,” Coleman argues. “Bounce rate should not be a KPI, social traffic bounces back to social. If you have implemented the new ‘adjusted bounce rate’ feature in Google Analytics this will tell you if people are reading your material or not. Traffic is your number one metric and engagements (likes, shares, re-tweets) are a brilliant indication that people like your content.”
“In the absence of this critical planning, companies can’t expect to hit performance indicators or deliver RoI” – Deirdre Cashion, ProfIT
Interestingly, the survey found increasing traffic was a very important reason why companies used social media although it came slightly behind increasing awareness. A large number (82%) had already integrated social media into their traditional marketing activities. The most used platform was (87%), followed by LinkedIn (74%), Facebook (73%) and YouTube (51%). In terms of marketing effectiveness, 67% replied their Twitter marketing was effective, 59% said the same for LinkedIn and 55% thought their Facebook marketing was effective. Those are high numbers when you consider that less than half have KPIs in place or can measure their RoI on social media marketing.
One company that does view social media “as a critical element” in its overall marketing strategy is Envisage Cloud. Marketing manager Sinead Hayes believes it is important businesses “know what their objectives are when they incorporate social media into a planned activity”. A few years ago, for instance, she says companies would have just thrown a bit of money at social media by investing in pay for click campaigns. Now, companies like Envisage Cloud have invested in “internal tools and platforms to enable us to understand what we’re trying to achieve, our objectives and goals are clear and we can align them with all other aspects of our marketing strategy”.
She says the paid element of social media has a place “but it should be complementary. You need to look at your own SEO. If you get that right, you don’t need to spend money on a Google Ad campaign. It’s about platforms, system and strategy, then looking at complementing it with paid activity if it’s warranted but that’s secondary to getting the basics right.”
Integration
Christian Jago-Byrne, country manager Ireland for Microsoft Advertising, says that it makes sense for brands to be active in the social media space if high levels of their audience are spending time there. But he agrees with Hayes that it “needs to be part of an integrated communications strategy that reaches your customers right across their day and in the right moments that matter for your brand. Social is definitely part of this, but just one part of a wider media mix”. He notes a “definite trend from Irish brands engaging in more and more multi-platform campaigns across desktop, tablet and mobile”.
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