Getting a Return on Investment (ROI) from Your Business
There is no doubt that you would work very hard to make a success of your brand and your business and that you will at some point be able to bring your business to the next level. However, does all of your hard work, time, and energy yield monetary results as well as your ability to build meaningful relationships, etc.? Being able to get a return on investment (ROI) is very important as well. Of course, the ROI may be many different things and you will want to seek all of them.
Your business goals must be married to your ROI
If you haven’t given too much thought to ROI and how it relates to your business, you need to think about it and do something about it. After all, your survival depends on it. Before anything else, you need to have a clear understanding of what ROI is to you and to your brand/business.
The definition of ROI will be different things to different people/businesses. Once you have established your brand’s objectives, exactly how ROI fits into that scheme will become clearer to you. Of course, what sort of ROI will depend on your social media activities because they are a true potential source of revenue, etc. Of course, other efforts can also bring a return on investment as well. It is important to remember here that ROI can come in many different valuable forms.
[tweetthis]Your brand’s goals need to align with how you interact with your target audience.[/tweetthis]It is very important that you look carefully at what you want to accomplish and then make a plan for how to accomplish it. Some of the factors that you should consider when thinking about ROI are training, development, the type (and sophistication) of social media technology that you use, labor, and how much of an overhead you use.
Why ROI is important to measure
No matter who you deal with professionally, there will always be people who have some sort of investment (not necessarily monetary) in your business. It may be in the form of consistent interactions, relationship building, etc.
Some other really good reasons to measure ROI are that it alters the perception of your social activities within your business, it brings the importance of your social activities to light for your business, it allows you to determine if your efforts are being spent in the right areas, it helps you to understand where you need to tweak your efforts appropriately, shows you exactly where the gaps are in your social media efforts, and gives you a deeper understanding of your target audience’s wants and needs as well as what inspires them.
How do you set achievable social media goals?
The social media objectives that you set for your business/brand should be based on:
- Conversions
- Creating awareness and buzz of your brand
- Giving your customers the most meaningful, memorable experience possible
- Ensuring that security measures have been taken and continue to be followed
Social media will allow you to continue to have a successful business and if you tie your objectives closely to your social media objectives, you will succeed. Of course, those are not the only goals that you will want to establish for your business. Make sure that your goals are measurable, specific, can be obtained realistically, are relevant to what your business is all about, and are timely. You never want to fly by the seat of your pants. You will need to not only establish your objectives but you will want to have a clear understanding of exactly what you want to accomplish is a certain amount of time.
Make sure that you pay close attention to metrics
Metrics are extremely important because it is essential that you know what you are doing well (and what is working) and what you are not doing well (what is not working). At that point, you can make adjustments and improvements. If something is not working, you shouldn’t keep doing it. You have precious little time. The last thing that you need to do is to waste any of it. In that situation, there are other things that you should try. Perhaps, those things will work more effectively and you will achieve the results that you are trying to achieve.
When it comes to metrics, there are several different aspects of your social media activity that you will want to pay attention to:
- Audience engagement
- Your reach
- How your website traffic looks (whether it is increasing with quality connections)
- Lead generation
- Conversions
- ROI (in this case, monetary)
As far as your metrics are concerned, you will want to ask the following questions:
- Do the metrics align with your brand’s objectives?
- Do the metric types and trends help you to make business decisions?
- Are you able to compare the metrics with the objectives and have a clear understanding of the picture?
Conclusion
ROI is an extremely important aspect (result) of your business and even though you will not be obsessed with the revenue part of it, it is important, at the same time, that you don’t lose sight of it either. After all, you still need to run your business and, from a practical perspective, you can’t do that without money. In fact, without ROI, you can’t claim that you are running a successful business.
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