Social Media Marketing Investment is Going Up, BUT…
Social media marketing investment is going up — but marketers’ confidence in their ability to track its ROI isn’t.
Nielson’s Annual Marketing Report suggests that over 70% of marketers will increase their social media marketing investment over the next year, despite how difficult it can be to measure ROI.
Another 70% of those who said they were planning to increase their spend on social media marketing also said they were “not very confident” in measuring their efforts’ return on investment.
More analysis from KO Marketing:
“This is not the first batch of research to suggest that marketers have had problems in terms of measuring the impact of their work with social media. Previous data indicates that revenue is also difficult to attribute to this channel.
“DemandLab conducted its ‘Revenue Attribution Outlook Survey,’ and the statistics showed that out of all top digital channels, social media marketing (44%) is the most challenging to analyze in terms of how it contributes to sales revenue.
“Content marketing (39%), display advertising (38%) and email marketing (33%) were also considered challenging. SEO (18%) topped the list of least difficult channels to analyze.”
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An area of marketing which mirrors the above findings is video.
Video — another promising tactic which integrates well with any social media strategy — also shows a high promise with slightly less clear paths to measuring ROI.
Simply tracking the views of a video may lead to misleading takeaways, as views aren’t the only measure of successful branding or customer behavior changes. Sometimes, the creation of video simply creates trust and a sense of thought leadership if it answers a specific question your target buyers have.
Social media marketing investment can be seen similarly: if you’re providing your target audience with engaging, not-too-salesy interactions on social media, you’re increasing your company’s overall presence and therefore increasing the chances that someone will think of you the next time they are in the market for the solutions/products you provide.