#019 How Do You Show Social Media ROI Without Ads?

ROI really is the ultimate social media question. This question has changed over the last ten years, but the core concept has remained the same. It turns out we need to approach the conversation a little bit differently. In this episode, we're not talking about how to calculate ROI; simple math can help you do that. Instead, we're talking about the whole concept of "return on investment." We're diving into the value of the relationships, and how to qualify and quantify your return differently.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Social media was built on relationships. It's hard to measure relationships. They don't always show up on your balance sheet.

Answer these questions to help identify results:

Are you measuring results or measuring revenue?
Do we believe our customers are using social media?
Do we need to be on these platforms for our business to be relevant?
What are we trying to achieve with our social?
What things can we measure right now?
What assumptions are we going to have to make? (we don't have the data, systems, or we don't know our customers well enough)

How should you measure awareness?

If you agree that it would be more helpful for people in your target demographic and geography to see and remember your content? Then that's value!
Stickiness Strategy: Provide emotional storytelling like excitement, humor, value, FOMO in your content!
Value metrics:
- Views
- Reach
- Impressions
- Frequency - How often do they see our content?
- Audience Demographics (do these line up with our target?)

How to showcase your metrics to a board:

Show the qualitative content! Screenshot customers, donors, people of value, and their comments/engagements on your content. When you're doing your presentation and going through metrics, these qualitative real stories will cut through the noise. It doesn't matter if your audience understands the technology side of digital, they understand that 'Jim' is a power player and 'Jim' interacts once a week.

Tagging reviews, comments, and engagements can help you relate qualitative data and move it into quantitative space. You can use a software or you can literally count them up! If your goal is for employees to engage with content, count how many are doing it!

What's the ROI of social media? Your marketing team can not answer this question without transparency in your business. Enough said.

Transcript

This text below is a straight-up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

Hi, I'm Kelsey Martin, COO, at Chatterkick. And today I have Beth, Trejo, CEO at Chatterkick. And today we're going to be answering a question that actually got submitted via email about ROI and social media. Beth, you want to do a little bit of an introduction on what you've been up to, some of these conversations that you've been having around social media ROI. So the specific question is, how do you show ROI on social media without ads? I love this question. It's actually one of my favorites. So started Chatterkick or a social media agency about eight years ago and this question comes up so often, and it's changed slightly over the years. But I still think that's one of the biggest challenges for marketers, for CEOs, for business owners is really trying to understand ROI, right?

That's the question that they ask. And. I think it's difficult for a couple of reasons. The first is it's relationships. Social media was built on relationships and it's really hard to measure relationships. You could count them, you can, you know, mark the qualitative of the relationship, how deep they got, what, where are they at in the sales funnel, conversions, all of those things. But in the end, you're really talking about people. The people who are buying your stuff. And it's a hard thing to really measure that on a mass scale. There are ways, but I think the biggest, the biggest thing that people need to start with is, are you measuring results or are you measuring revenue? Because ROI just gets slammed together. And most people don't really know what they're asking, right? They're trying to see it in their balance sheet. And I imagine that's kind of the conversation that this person got into with decision makers, right?

We're all sitting around a room and I love, well, I love/hate that the buzzword ROI because I'm such a data person. I'm like, Oh, I'll do the math and like tell you exactly what it is. But the reality is like... What I love about this question, and I'm super curious to see how you're going to continue to unpack this, is that it's so much easier to determine some of those numbers when you do have ads. So that added layer of like, we don't do ads. How are we going to measure costs because we're not putting money into the platforms, but how would you if you were sitting in. And you do all of the time, but if you're sitting in a board room or like there's a room with a bunch of decision makers and they're not the ones doing social and they lay that question out of, so what are we getting for this?

Like what is the return on this? Should we continue to do social media? It's a low investment. Nobody really thinks social is a low investment. Even if they're not doing ads because they think it's wasting somebody's time. Where do you even start? Like what are the questions that they should start asking and addressing as an organization to start to determine what that ROI even is? Because there are metrics, there are lifetime value, there are all those things, but where do you even start to just kind of break down like here, let's address this first. Yeah, I think I would start at the very, very top. So ask yourself the question, "why are we doing this and why do we care, right?" Like why are the goals or just no, why are we even starting social media or why are we, why are we continuing this?

What are we trying to do? Like if you don't know that and you don't believe that if you pick up your customer's phone that they have five to eight social media apps on their phone. If you really don't believe that, then I think that's a whole different conversation. But if you, you look at the statistics and you look at the data and you say, okay, my customers, regardless of their age, regardless of where they're located across the country, they are using social media. The end, right? So true. You have that. And so if you believe, okay, our customers are using social media. Check. Do we need to do it for our business to be relevant? If they are not even relevant in this world as a business, like maybe that's not important to them. But most of the time people do believe I need to use social media to be relevant to my customers. To show them that I can communicate on the same platforms that they are using every single day.

So I think if you kind of agree that that is important and you agree that that relevancy of using the platforms as a business is not just an option, but it really is something you have to do because you need it for a lot of different reasons. Right? So that's where I start. And then I start breaking that down to, okay, let's understand what we can measure and what we know. And then what assumptions we're just going to have to make because we don't have the data or we don't have the systems or we don't really know our customers that well. And if you start laying all of that down, I think it really becomes a lot easier to identify the results, right? Because unless you have an eCommerce or you have a very clear cut revenue path, it's really tricky to tie it directly to your financials.

E-commerce is so easy, right? Costs revenue, like there's literally revenue from the platform. So it's easy to determine. Can you walk us through like let's say, um, our business is an association or a nonprofit and our value to the community is awareness. And like that's our goal is just obviously there's a whole other layers of donors and careers and recruitment and all of that. But if we could focus on the goal of awareness, which is really hard to measure, like would you approach that with determining and like walking a business through measuring the value of that and how it relates to social? So I think we, I would ask the question of just, would it help if for awareness, if you got more people in your, let's say demographic and geography to see your stuff, right? And, and have them remember what you're, the story you're telling them.

And in order to remember things as humans, we need to have some sort of an emotional connection that could be a positive one, like excitement, humor, um, or it can be negative, right? Fear, emotional tie, whatever that looks like. But you need to have some sort of a stickiness for people to remember. Um, and so it's, it is about the story that you're telling. Like if you put something out there and people would be so sad if you took it away, then you realize that that's probably good content, right? Because it's so powerful. And if you start there and you just be consistent, start posting things, just the number of views that you're getting is a really good starting point, right? How many people are you reaching? Where are they located, and how many times are they seeing your content? How would you help though a marketer...

Okay, so we're doing, we're posting consistently. Let's just pick like Facebook, right? We're posting to Facebook consistently, we're doing videos, photos, like we're, we're publishing content when we can. And then at the end of every quarter, I know that I have to deliver what I'm doing to the board. There's so many metrics, but where do you even, like how do you tell that story? Cause I've heard you tell this story and like our team tells this story constantly, but we also have a team of experts who can fill in the blanks if you don't understand or really relate this to a bigger picture. Like how, how does a one person marketing team or small marketing team like begin to tell this story with those metrics that you were just talking about views to a board who maybe doesn't believe in the value of social. So let's say, let's assume all your numbers are great, right?

Yes. That really awesome numbers to showcase. So a couple of things. One, if you are getting people to connect with you through social media, meaning sending you messages, commenting, responding, you know that your customers are actually interacting with you. I always take that like qualitative content, like screenshot it, put it in a folder. And so that way when you're doing your PowerPoint presentation or you're giving people reports, they can see, Oh Jim said this to us, he is interacting with us once a week, every single week. Is that important to you? Yes. And so that's value. So it's more about the specific stories. I do see the lights like go on for people specifically when you call out, you know, our biggest donor likes our posts ever and they're like, Oh, I had no idea that they were involved and like engaged in that way.

And so those specific comments and engagements are really important to tell the story. I know you're super passionate about tagging and I know we've talked about it in a couple other podcasts, but tagging reviews and counting up and tallying those engagements is a way to help you kind of relate that qualitative data and kind of move it over into the quantitative space. Yeah. So what, what Kelsey's mentioning is it's tagging. So we use a software to do it, but you can actually do it. Even if you just open your pages app on your phone and see who likes your page or go into a post and see who's liking the post. And it's manual and it's old school, but it's counting, right? Like if your goal is to get your employees to engage with your content, go to each post and count it up how many employees are engaging with your stuff.

Right? And I think that's where you can help connect the numbers, the views, the interactions, engagements, all of that stuff. People are like, yay, great. But if you don't know social media and you don't really know the impact of it, you don't get it unless you put somebody's name on it. Because he's a real humans and on local businesses, they are probably your customers or connected to your customers or your prospective customers. So there's a lot of value there. But if you can't connect the dots for people that don't understand the software or the platform or already are trying to fight you in their brain when they're looking at your numbers, it's a really difficult thing to have without that. I think one thing that's challenging about the ROI question, the value question, the metrics question is that social goes so much further than marketing.

It extends beyond marketing, so if you're really talking about if there's any strategy that you can do as a business that crosses into like your marketing, your customer service, your recruitment, all of that, like that value just needs to go unsaid, in my opinion, but I'm also not on a board asking these questions. The customer service element of it is just still so shocking. I mean the data is still says that a majority of businesses do not answer their social media messages and they're big brands. They're small businesses, they're mid sized businesses and I think people are like, well, I answer my inbox messages on Facebook, but they forget that there's eight other places that these messages are coming into and you're leaving business on the table. If you don't get back to people, right. That's a very basic business strategy. When someone calls you call, you call them back.

And so what's the ROI on not responding or responding to somebody? It's like invaluable. Yeah. And there's so many times that I've, you know, needed services or needed something from a consumer perspective and I couldn't find the right phone number or I needed to get ahold of somebody and I'll Facebook message them. I'll try and get ahold of them on Twitter and Instagram and guess what? The people like back to me get the business. I'm doing that right now with my mom just retired and I'm reaching out to all these venues and calling people during the day. It's like, I'll leave a message and then try to reach out to them on Facebook and they're still ghosting me and I just am like, are you serious? I would pay more money if you'll take care of everything and just respond to me. That's all. I know it is.

It's crazy. And I don't think that people understand how much that really happens on social. It's crazy. So I'm probably overly passionate about avoiding using like vanity metrics. And like when I say vanity metrics, I mean like page likes, posts, likes, comments. I'm probably, like I said, I'm probably overly vocal about it, but they do earn and hold a lot of value. And I've seen you calculate this value with people or walk through what the value of those metrics are with people specifically engaging in overall health of your social presence. Like I know for me and our team when they're listening to this is probably going to laugh because I hate like page like campaigns. I just think it's such a joke. But I you always kinda come back to me, and like, is it an embarrassing if there's only X number of page likes and there are like it kind of questions that legitimacy of your business.

So there are metrics there and I think you always kind of snapped me back out of like the don't be pretentious about vanity metrics. But how do, like, how do you shift your mindset on using these metrics and like how do they align with business objectives and how can you use those page likes, posts like, comments to communicate that value to decision makers. So, you know, I, I love that Instagram is going away with like the actual like counts because I do think it takes some of that vanity out out of the mix because that really is what we recommend for businesses is like get a, get a number of fans that makes you feel comfortable and confident in, in your business objectives. Like two is a little low, but you know, 200 is great. And then, but I, I think the value of those right now and I would, how I would leverage them the most from a business perspective is look at who it is.

I mean, you can see who is liking your page. You can see their name, you can click on their Facebook profile and see if they're public. What a great opportunity for sales. What a great opportunity to see. Who cares about your content, who, who literally hit that button to say I care I'm in, I'm in. Right. And so you have that opportunity to really look at the type of people you're attracting. Is that the right type of people? Is it the wrong type of people? Especially if it's organic because that is just whatever is coming across who is inviting other people to like your page. And I think people just forget about that. Like if you only have 20 people, like who are those people? It's a great testament to like the type of audience that really care. I think I'm always just trying to like stretch, not stretch but like focus the conversation on metrics just cause like well that's where I'm most comfortable and that's what I'm most passionate about.

But to get like have one nerdy answer into this scenario is... Looking at like your reach or looking at those like page likes or looking at those posts likes even and and looking at if we have a hundred page likes, what's the saturation in the community? If, if our opportunity s to have every single person in Sioux city or Le Mars even like, what's our percentage of like we have this many people now here's this many people later. Obviously you need to take into consideration not everybody in Le Mars is a qualified customer. Right. But you could get some sort of number of like we have, you know, 8% of the overall population is connected to our messaging. So that's kind of the one nerdy answer that I'm going to put into this. But I think that's a lot of work to do the math on that for a number that might not be that interesting and it just might not hit certain decision makers in like a interesting way.

Yeah. I think every, every time I answer that question, what's the ROI? I use a different answer because it's, it's a value and it just depends on what matters to the person asking the question because I think it's a natural tendency to be like, well, what am I getting out of this? But I think that in itself just requires so much more like diagnostic of like what are you really trying to do or you know, what are you putting into it to? You putting into it and who are you giving the keys to like of your social tools? We see this all the time with interns. People will have interns through their social because again, they think it's a very entry level, easy thing. And some interns are great at it, but we've talked to interns as well and they feel like they are handed this responsibility with very little insight to the business itself.

They don't know how the business is making money. They don't know how much money the businesses making, but they're charged with providing that value without having any of that insight. Right. So if you're going to ask someone what is the ROI of social media, you better hope that they have 100% transparency into your business because that's really the way that it works the best. Right. Do you feel like it's critical for businesses... You know, we've been having a lot of conversation and like internally and externally about determining the lifetime customer value. Like do you think that that is a, you have to do this if you really want to have strong conversations about ROI or is that like an advanced next level? Yeah, I think that that's one of the biggest things people miss when they're talking about like customers and acquiring new customers that many times in business you have a customer lifetime value that is going to be higher than a one purchase, right?

There's a few businesses that their purchasing cycle is extremely long, right? Like you're only going to get, you know, one, maybe two purchases from the same customer, but you still probably have opportunities for service work or maybe you have opportunities for, you know, small upsells. And so you have to take that calculation of customer lifetime value. You can Google it. There's a very straightforward calculation. And if you have that, it makes it so much easier to understand how much you should pay to actually get a new customer. Investing. And when we're talking about investing, again going back to this question, it's not just about the paid spend, right? It's investing in the people. You're paying someone to do the work, right? And the software, all of the time, the software, everything that it takes for you to equip someone to be successful on social, like that needs to go into the cost so that you can determine, you know, we're investing this much.

I think it's just, you know, when social is so fast and so we get wrapped up in the day to day, or a lot of people are doing monthly planning or quarterly planning, you forget that if we get one customer a lot of the time, depending on your business, but a lot of the times like less than five customers will pay for your entire social strategy for a year. And so when you're in it and in the trenches, you forget the big picture of one person who says, Oh, I'll come in now. Or you know, that commits to business completely changes that investment in that return conversation. Right. And I always say like, just try to make, get your formula. If you really want to set this all up and do the math, get your formula to kind of break even on the first go around and then second try to get a really great return because it is 100% doable.

Right. So just to recap the answer on this question, like what, how would you, what like what are the three basic steps that you would tell someone to determine this ROI? Ask yourself, is being relevant as a business important to you? Second, understand that social media is more than just marketing. It's customer service and that plays a huge factor in it. If you're not calculating the value of your phone calls, it's going to be tricky to calculate the value of your social messages. And I think that third one is there are definitely ways to measure it, but you need to understand what you have the tools to measure and the know how to measure and what you don't have access to. Boom. There you go. There you go. Answer that question. So it's been a couple of episodes since we've done this. So I'm bringing this back to the OG Generation Social Media Podcast.

We are going to be looking at a couple of different people's, well we're just going to look at one today, but I did pull some screenshot time of where a couple of our, our listeners are spending time on their phones and their social. So this one is an early 20s male college graduate. And he's in the creative space, so he's on his phone on average five hours a day, which isn't really that surprising. Um, but here's the top app. So the very top one was 1. Instagram and then 2. Spotify 3. Crunchyroll, which is podcast, audio scenario 4. messages and then 5. Facebook. And then it goes into maps and g-mail, Snapchat messenger. So the top social media platform by far was Instagram. That's like 34%, and the next one up is 16%. So the amount of time spent on that platform is a lot.

What was the age demographic of this person? 20 early twenties. Male. in college. Just got into college. So the reason that we're doing this is really to kind of break down the barriers of who uses what app. It's so funny because I always noticed this when I go to concerts, it's my favorite like snooping tool. Everybody takes their phone out and when they go to a concert, and I love to see what app they're recording the concert on because it's so interesting, especially if you're kind of looking down to the crowd and you can see different demographics. You can see if it's Snapchat is that frame. You can tell if it's Facebook or at least I can tell and it is so varied. I think it's wild. Like Kristy and I went to Post Malone not that long ago and that had a, I'd say like pretty wide range of demographic for a hip hop show.

There were many people live during that or there was literally someone sitting next to us that was FaceTiming like their homie the whole entire time. And it was like, while they're at the concert. I was just like, this is so wild. I would never want to see a concert like over FaceTime live. So I'm sure the audio sounded terrible, but I just think that that's crazy. Yeah, I think it is really interesting too because it just shows you that the barriers are already broken. I mean we're watching this with TikTok. Everybody thinks that TikTok is such a young, young platform, but if you look at TikTok, the people that are doing those are not always young. I mean teachers have TikTok'd, there's so much happening there that I think the second people let their brains go to, well I'm trying to reach a 20 year old, I need to only do Twitter.

Right? You know, only do X, Y, Z. It's kind of, everybody kind of gets into those boxes of like, well this is how everybody's defining this. So that's the only box that we can check and the only platform. So what do you think like initial thoughts on this profile? Like is this, was there anything in here that was surprising to you or is this like pretty typical? I think it's what I would imagine. I think what's what I want to call out though is the fact that a 22 year old still has Facebook on their phones and is still using it. It still popped up in the top five. Yeah. So don't let that, those news articles or that, I mean there is differences in how young people use it versus older people. There are differences in the, the frequency of the use and the attention on these platforms.

There are differences, don't get me wrong, but the reality is is you can still reach a lot of people with all the apps. I think our podcast should name should be changed to like Fighting for Facebook because I think all of all of our times when you look at these we're always like, look, see Facebook is still on here. Like we're pro Facebook. But I think that that's the... That's the biggest platform and it's the one that's gotten the most like heat. Yeah. In a lot of like, you know, privacy areas. But whatever. Uh, I think, you know, everybody says that younger people aren't, aren't on there and it's just like, this is not what we've been seeing consistently. But I do think it's interesting. I think both Spotify and Crunchyroll on here are forgotten and lost platforms when it comes to businesses.

Like those are spaces that you can play in with ads or you know, with, with podcasts and audio content. And I just, people just put those to the side cause they're not one of the big seven. Right. And they are huge opportunity here. They're trickier to advertise in some regards, especially if you're going one-to-one podcast. But, um, I do think that, I mean just the world of audio is huge and slightly undertapped when it comes to the way that brands play in that space. And how they get their message out. Right. We will leave on this last tip of, I think Spotify is like self, what is it called? Self-serve ad platform. Really easy and some really insane targeting things you can do on there. So, and it's not that expensive. So definitely there's no, there's a very low barrier to entry on that platform. And again, when you look at what things could you try with your internal team, that's definitely one of them. Perfect. Well, thanks for being on the episode. That's it for today. All right. See you later.

Social MediaChatterkickApril 7, 2020social media tip, reporting, ROI