In the fast-paced noisy world of social media marketing, every agency can claim to be the best. Practically, doing this is just as easy as writing a few lines of text within your social media business page or agency website. However, most people in charge of outsourcing social media work are usually interested in the proof of expertise beyond static texts on a page.
Among top considerations that influence outsourcing decisions are the following –
- Can I trust you to get me what I want?
- Have you gotten such results before?
- Is your price affordable within my current budget?
Your answers to these and other related questions will affect how your brand is perceived while pitching social media services to new prospects. And that is where analytical performance reports come in. Here we’ll list the valuable reports you can use to increase conversion during pitches.
At the end, you’ll learn how to go beyond where many of your competitors stop. This will increase your authority and confidence to answer the question—what is in it for me?
SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT REPORT
If you’ve been in the marketing space for a while, you have come across the concept of ‘know, like, and trust’. The basic premise is that it takes multiple touch points for someone to trust you enough before becoming a client. Remember, people, not companies buy from real people. This fact holds true, especially in the B2B niche markets.
So, in order for people to get prospects to know them and their brands, many business people recognize the need for active social media engagement of their target audience. Interestingly, it helps to build brand awareness among strangers and existing fans while at the same time reinforcing your value propositions.
From the foregoing points, having social media engagement reports makes your pitching to prospective clients more likable. But first, people in your target audience have to know you and your agency brand. While it is up to your prospective target clients to determine which engagement metrics are valuable to them, below is a sample of the data points that could come into social media engagement report.
- Reach – this is a measure of visibility of your content among new and existing fans. If no one sees your posts, the ROI on creating them will be below average or flat zero.
- Shares – when people share a piece of content, this metric stands as proof of relevance, interest, and resonance.
- Comments – this is another clear sign of engagement. Sometimes, it comes as questions from prospective customers or clients.
- Mentions – proactive monitoring of brand mentions and other relevant keywords in your niche is a competitive strategy in itself. It’s also good for brand reputation management.
- Audience growth rate – if your content is valuable among new audience segments, it will definitely convert a percentage of these people into new fans. With metrics you can give comparative view of social media audience growth over daily, weekly or monthly period
Best tools for social media engagement reporting
SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC REPORT
Engagement is good. But real traffic is better. It becomes even more valuable when the traffic from social media is highly targeted. At this point, I want you to understand that all website visitors are not created equal.
Even right now as you a reading this, many people in charge of outsourcing social media marketing in your target niche have this common question in their minds – what will I get out of hiring this agency instead of all others? Having a report that proves your expertise in generating targeted traffic from social media will give you an edge in such contexts. Perhaps, if someone cares enough to visit your website, landing page, or blog post after seeing some social media links that also becomes a proof of effectiveness.
Some of the most valuable traffic related metrics include the following –
- Total traffic volume – shows the total volume of traffic generated within a specified period of time. This metric serves both online and offline niche markets.
- Traffic source – probably you’ve been very active across different social media channels. Use this data point to show highest and lowest performing social media traffic sources.
- Growth rate – shows a measure of targeted traffic growth rate you were able to achieve in the past. Growth in this dimension impacts a lot of other business goals.
- Organic search traffic – while it may seem like SEO traffic is different from pure social media strategy, social signals influence search engine ranking in different ways. If you can be able to show a measure of organic search engine traffic before, during and after social media campaigns in your reports, that will be a perfect hook in your pitch.
Best tools for measuring website traffic
LEAD GENERATION REPORT
If you have read up till this point, congratulations is my word for you. The interesting part is that most of your competitors stop at reporting only engagement and traffic metrics. But what good are these metrics if they don’t generate quality leads that contribute to customer acquisition, real sales, and bottom line ROI? After all, if a company should spend money to hire your social media marketing agency, you should be able to justify the spending.
Looking at these points noted above, Hubspot revealed in their State of Inbound Report 2017 that proving ROI is still a big challenge among marketers and their managers.
While it is not easy to measure and report the volume of leads generated from social media marketing campaigns, a combination of tools makes this possible. Learning the basics of conversion funnel tracking could help a lot here. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at key metrics that can be reported in this regard.
- Total leads – show the total number of leads generated over a specified period of time. This is how a stranger or prospective client can gain insight into what is possible by hiring your social media marketing agency.
- Sources of leads – most businesses differ in many ways. Indicate the best and worst performing social media platforms in terms of lead generation.
- Growth rate – if you are leveraging your traffic to leads conversion data, you should be able to make constant improvement which will impact the growth rate. At the tail end of the funnel, your client is likely to have a way of measuring conversion on social media generated leads
Best tools for measuring leads
CONCLUSION
At the end, perfection isn’t the goal. Don’t even aim for that. If you do, you’ll be stuck without making progress towards your next social media pitches.
One important fact worth reiterating at this point is that stopping where every other agencies stop will make it hard for prospective clients to differentiate between you and them. So try as much you can to go beyond vanity metrics and focus of how to impact ROI.
Having reached this stage, you now have a foundation to do just that. So with a visual representation of your past performance, you’ll be positioned to increase conversion rate on your next pitches.