After the explosion of social media marketing avenues and the rise of access to it, many marketers were faced with some hard questions. Once the excitement of the new media and the fascination with new platforms and technologies leveled, it was time to separate the wheat from the chaff.  The question, or series of questions, continues today: So what? What did it get us? How much did it cost us? What’s our return on investment (ROI)? Does it justify our efforts and forward our goals?

Without solid ROI measurement, executive support and therefore funding can be very difficult to sustain. In Hootsuite’s 2018 Social Trends Survey, 56% of respondents said not being able to prove ROI makes it difficult for them to be successful using social media. Forty percent of those also reported struggling with knowing which metrics are important to track.

Fragmented metrics and absence of clear connection to marketing goals continue to frustrate marketers, but we’re now seeing shifts in measurement objectives. These shifts will prove to be crucial in the coming year to determine the place social media holds in the overall marketing plan. They include measuring beyond content performance and considering the customers’ stage in their consumer life cycle. This strategy goes beyond implementing a content plan and opens up a whole new marketing discussion.

At Global Marketing Solutions, we have these discussions every day. Among our team. Among our clients. Among our vendors. We are digging in, day in and day out, doing the research, measuring the results, tweaking the plan. Do you have the in-house resources to keep all those balls in the air and analyze the results? If not, call us. We love working with clients to put social media marketing plans into place, to implement them, and to evaluate them against our clients’ overall marketing goals.