Social Media Performance Marketing
Social media performance marketing is a strategy that aligns your social media goals with your team’s and broader business objectives. It focuses on driving growth and revenue for your company.
Unlike other marketing channels, social media allows you to showcase products in real life and generates immediate sales with product-based content. This makes it a critical component for businesses that want to be competitive online.
1. Identify your audience
Defining your audience is crucial for performance marketing. It’s harder to link traditional marketing goals like brand awareness with specific growth and revenue targets when you don’t know who you’re targeting.
Social metrics are like individual puzzle pieces, and good reporting turns them into a complete picture through data storytelling. For example, a monthly report can highlight post-level metrics and what they mean for your strategy.
2. Create a social media strategy
Having an impactful social media strategy is critical for showing ROI. Without one, you risk missing your mark and alienating consumers.
Start with clear goals and audience definitions. Use this information to create content that stops the scroll and connects with your audience. Schedule regular reviews to uncover new insights and opportunities for growth. This includes understanding competitors and learning from their performance.
3. Create a social media calendar
A social media content calendar is an effective way to organize and streamline your posting schedule. Calendar tools like Sprout’s can help you maintain consistency, track content themes and campaigns and manage your overall strategy.
Use your social media analytics to identify top-performing posts and understand what kind of content your audience responds to best. This will guide your content decisions moving forward.
4. Create social media content
Content creation is the heart of social media marketing. Creating high-quality, relevant content that supports your business goals can drive engagement and grow your audience over time.
Images, videos, and stories are some of the easiest types of content to create, and work well across all platforms.
Creating engaging content requires strategy, which you can learn about by reviewing your performance data.
5. Create a social media listening strategy
Social media listening is a great way to stay on top of your audience’s needs and wants. It can help you spot new trends, improve customer service, and even prevent PR crises.
To get the most out of your social media listening strategy, tie your efforts to clear business goals. Whether it’s improving customer service or boosting brand awareness, set SMART objectives and measure your results.
6. Create a social media monitoring strategy
A social media monitoring strategy is a process of collecting and synthesizing social media AI-powered audience segmentation data to inform your marketing strategies. This includes creating social media dashboards and reporting.
Use this information to set SMART goals for your team. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. These goals should also be aligned with business objectives. A good social media report will highlight your successes and provide recommendations for improvements.
7. Create a social media reporting strategy
Using social media reports helps to streamline and improve the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Reports should focus on metrics that align with your goals and provide insights into how your social media strategies are performing.
Share the most compelling data points, such as follower growth and content performance. Use visuals, which can help convey information that might otherwise be hard to digest.
8. Create a social media analytics strategy
Ensure the metrics you track align with and push your business toward its goals. It’s not about tracking every metric but honing in on those that deliver visibility and engagement results that support your objectives.
Evaluate your competitors’ strategies to identify strengths and opportunities. Use this insight to refine your own social media campaigns and set goals for long-term success.
Implementing a data-driven attribution strategy, like first-touch and last-touch attribution, helps you understand what’s driving ROI. This enables you to allocate your budget wisely.
9. Create a social media ROI strategy
Demonstrating social media ROI helps agencies build trust with clients and supports smarter strategy decisions. For example, if you see a lift in website traffic, attribution models can quantify the value of your efforts.
But proving ROI requires more than tracking vanity metrics. It also means connecting your social media activities to monetary values—like revenue and engagement. This guide explains how to do just that.
10. Create a social media ROI report
Demonstrating ROI is an important part of securing leadership buy-in for social media marketing. It shows that your efforts are working and enables you to optimize strategies based on real data.
Remember, ROI takes time to measure and calculate. It also requires a clear understanding of the metrics that matter.