As a business owner, no matter how small or large your business may be, Social Media Marketing is not an option, it’s a necessity. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most efficient channels of Marketing a business, with objectives of Brand Awareness, Building Trust & Respect, and the eventual goal of Sales.

ROI (Return On Investment), is a simple marketing term which means, how much have you got in Return for your Investment, in Social Media Marketing, or any other forms of marketing you may be using, as a mix.

To Optimize your ROI on Social Media Marketing, I suggest the following steps in order of importance:-

Research, Research, Research :

I cannot stress enough on this aspect, because this is one area that most business owners tend to overlook, or under investment into. Now you maybe thinking, why should I spend resources on research? Well, if you do not thoroughly understand your audience and their relevant pain points with regards to what you offer as a product/service, then you would eventually choose the wrong social media channels, create and publish content that is not getting you to the goals you want to achieve, thereby leading to zero or very low ROI.

This should be your number one activity, before you work on choosing the right social media channels and working on content. You could revisit this step every 3 to 6 months, if your ROI is not optimal. This step is not restricted to just research on your target demographics, but also research on your competition, to figure out what works for them, what doesn't, and more importantly, how you could be better at it.

Choosing the right Social Media Channels :

One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners doing is being present on as many Social Channels as possible. The reason, I feel it is a mistake is because, each Social Media platform speaks a different language, has a different mindset, so for example, if you are a Tax Consultant based in Hyderabad, India, your audience would most likely have a Facebook account, but, that does not mean, they are there in a mindset to hire a Tax Consultant, they are there to mingle with Family and Friends.

A more optimal channel to be on, would be either LinkedIn as a number one choice and/or Twitter, as those are more professional channels to be on, which would also help your end goal of attracting clients, through positioning your Brand as a subject matter expert in the Tax Consultancy field.

The other reason it is best to pick one or a max of two Social platforms to be actively present on, based on step 1, which is through research, is so you can optimize your ROI on every dollar spent in building that channel, example being, LinkedIn & Twitter followers, which by the way also helps your SEO.

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Content is King, Timing is Queen :

Step 3 of the process of optimizing #ROI on your #SocialMediaMarketing spend is Content Marketing. Based on the right resources invested into research, and choosing the right social media platform/s to be actively present on, you have all the relevant data and most importantly pain points, to work in the direction of brainstorming to create a content mix, a content calendar and the best times/frequency of posts.

Since my earlier example was more B2B, this one would be more B2C, so let’s say you are the Marketing Lead/Owner of an e-commerce driven Ladies Fashion Brand based in India, your demographics are females in the 20-40 age group, first you invested the right resources into research, then you picked Instagram and Facebook as the channels you want to focus investments on.

What's next? You either just went ahead and posted pics of your fashion garments at random, and expected the world to just rush to your site and buy it like right now.  Because you think no one else is offering what you are? Or, you spent at least a month doing the following based on data gathered from the first two steps, Brainstormed with internal and/or external team/s, to create a content mix, content calendar, produced the content, evaluated it, revised if needed, then figured out based on data what would be the best frequency and timings to publish these well thought out pieces of content that would resonate with my demographics and slowly build the brand up, from the stage of awareness, to trust and respect, to the eventual goal of sales, and customers being brand ambassadors.