HOW TO: Back Your Social Media Marketing Plan With Numbers

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Like any other marketing strategy, a social media marketing plan must make financial sense before implementation.

And as always, measuring success is tough. So, often, marketers would just take the convenient way out by eliminating projections and ROI measurement in a proposal.

The end conclusion is often a “NO” as management couldn’t see how it would improve revenue growth. This could be avoided if we knew how to use numbers to support our plan.

Backing Up Your Plan With Numbers

1. Identify the goals of your social strategy: What’s the plan for? Is it for awareness building, direct selling or customer service? We need to identify these goals clearly to be able to measure them accurately.

2. Explain the communication flow: Explain how your social strategy would help to achieve the goals you set. Drawing out a diagram could help explain things better.

3. Explain measurement methods: Link the right measurement methods to your goals. If your social strategy aims to build brand awareness, tracking brand mentions and sentimental ratio would be essential. The key here is to measure what matters.

4. Identify success: Put value to success. Say 100 brand mentions per week and a 14:1 sentimental ratio. This figure should grow as time passes.

5. Assumptions & revenue: While building brand awareness is the goal, we must not forget that revenue growth is still the ultimate business goal. Unless you use coupon codes like Dell, it is almost impossible to measure revenue growth accurately.

A possible solution would be to create a correlation ratio between media impact and revenue growth. For example, every extra brand mention earned is equivalent to a dollar increment in sales. For a start, you could only assume the correlation ratio. The true ratio will surface and become more accurate as you collect more data through the implementation of your plan.

6. Churn out numbers to project performance: With assumptions, a performance projection is possible. This will provide the management with a clearer view of the performance expected. Try not to be overly gung-ho on the projections. It’s often better to under promise and over deliver.

Now, with numbers backing your plan, it makes your social media proposal so much more convincing.