Latest research from DMA states that only 48% of marketers agree that social media is actually gaining them any ROI. There are some of the trends that DMA realized in its reports, but not all are positive. Almost, 77% of marketers do use at least one source of social network for promoting their brand. The research was done with 111 marketers from B2B and B2C companies, in 2017 that they did their own research with a sample size of 609. They result found a divide in the way marketers see the effects of Social media marketing
What channels are used for marketing?
Marketers would obviously be directed towards the channel that is most effective to them. Twitter is number 1 choice since it doesn’t have any filtering and marketers can be sure that the posts will appear on follower’s feeds without paying anything. Facebook ranks 2nd overall and stands at number 1 for B2C because it has considerable margin. It really makes sense for the brands to target it. Instagram has overtaken Twitter, these are clear signs of how popular it will become with marketers.
For what purposes brands use social networks?
Most brands are using social networks today but what are primarily their aims? It was interestingly found that it varies depending if the brand is engaging in or organic social activity.
There is some type of logic that is involved in using paid social media differently. Lead generation can easily justify the investments that are being made but at the same it’s hard to convince marketers of the need for paid investments in customer engagements. It’s worth mentioning that all social media activities by means are a paid activity since you are paying someone for doing it.
How much you agree to below given statement?
Organic is undoubtedly better than social media while getting your perceptions clear for ROI. A mere 48% feels they see results with social marketing it shows how others are failing to engage rightly with right platforms. One-third of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with the statements; this means they do not have clear picture of the impact of social media on ROI. This clearly states the need of better use of analytics and attribution models amongst marketers.
How to get more ROI from social?
The most obvious way to improve on ROI is to do your social activities in a better way. There are millions of posts online demonstrating how to boost engagement on social media. Read the posts where you can seek more information giving you better returns.
Using social data for other channels
Social media is too vast and often we see customers do not properly utilize the insight it provides. More money is spent on crafting social campaigns. The data achieved can be used for targeted email marketing or on-site messaging.
The above chart clearly indicates that only few marketers used social data for messaging and generating relevant content. The data gathered from social can help increase lead generation and revenue on the main site since customers like to respond to messages that are tailored to them. There is great scope of improvement here with majority of brand rarely use social data for other channels.
Research from Smartinsights members
The latest research conducted by SmartInsights in partnership with TFM (Technology for Marketing) and Ecommerce expo has bought forward things that marketers think of social media on ROI in 2017. The senior marketers were asked about channels they use most and the least ROI ones, a total of 609 marketers took the survey and it revealed that social media is far from best channel in terms of ROI.
The results reveal that organic social is a poor performer for those who think it gives low ROI while it did quite well for those who think it gave high ROI. There is a big divide in marketing community for how they perceive the effect of social marketing. It could be because of over-hyped marketing or may be some socials just do not work in particular industries.
