Brands have fallen over themselves to build social media profiles to reach their consumers, but is social really providing a return-on-investment? Where is it that most brands are going wrong? And how do you give your company the best chance of social media success?

This week Nic Hayes and Sarah Mitchell are joined by Kohen Grogan, founder of Yappy — a social media app and marketing software platform that makes it easy for users to set up and manage campaigns, harvest databases and track conversions from content across any platform on the social web. His platform is specifically designed to answer the ROI problem.

Here are some key take-outs:

  •  Unless you have clear business objectives there is no way you’ll be successful in social media
  • Return-on-investment needs to be defined more broadly than just a sales conversion — anything that moves people along the path to brand loyalty or an eventual sale is a return
  • Social allows you to influence consumers before they’re even searching for your product or service

“My huge frustration is that companies spend tons of money on social media without any kind of business plan or any kind of strategy, they just jump in with both feet. Now we get lots of pushback on ROI on content marketing — they don’t want to do anything like create an asset, but they’re happy to go out and spend thousands of dollars and tons of hours playing around on Facebook without any kind of plan” — Sarah

  Brands need to understand three core things before their social strategy can deliver on their business objectives:

  1. The content side: What type of content do you need to produce to achieve those objectives?
  2. The audience side: Who are the audiences that content needs to resonate with? (And be able to quantify the success).
  3. The campaign side: Run campaigns through applications and be strategic in harvesting data so you can test the success of the content

“The people are there, the mass audience is there, but what people aren’t getting right is the strategy behind it and being able to actually measure and quantify it.” — Kohen Grogan, Founder of Yappy.

  •  Traditional advertising is not free and nor is social media. It requires investment
  • Find the right social channel for your organisation, don’t just assume it’s Facebook

“We jump into these spaces too quickly and too easily, without any real strategy behind it and just hope that we get there.” — Nic

Here are the links you might need

  • Check out Kohen’s company, Yappy.
  • Here’s a newspaper article about Kohen’s journey and Yappy’s success.
  • And here’s last week’s podcast on TrackMaven’s social media effectiveness for business-to-business study, mentioned by Nic and Sarah…

 

Have you heard the one about…

Recently James Lush, Nic and Sarah also took a close look at ROI on content marketing…

 

(And here’s Sarah’s blog post on content marketing ROI.)

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