Social media has gone from being a useful tool to help companies reach their audience into an essential component of any marketing campaign. But a lot of iGaming operators are left wondering how it helps their bottom line. It’s estimated that in 2016 social media will account for 20% of overall marketing budgets, according to a recent CMO marketing survey. However that same survey found that only about half the companies which use social media see an impact for their efforts.

What Are Possible ROI Channels For Social Media?

Enough operators are stumped over social media ROI that some key strategies have emerged from experts in the field. The first thing to determine when seeking your social media ROI is deciding on what kind of returns you want.

Examples of these can be:

• Increasing social media followers/ brand awareness
• Driving traffic to your website
• Converting customers

How To Evaluate Costs

After determining your goals, calculate the investment. Add the salaries of the employees managing social media + the time they allocate to running the social media channels + the cost of the tech needed.

Now that you have the cost, what’s the payoff? This is where the goals you set come into play.

What Are The Returns

If for instance you want to increase awareness, you can calculate the financial benefit of that increase. To do this, start with some research into how many people who are aware of your brand go on to convert, and also look at how much they deposit on average. One breakdown of this formula comes from the social media management tool Falcon Social, where they look at an example of “awareness value”.

A Sample Calculation

Here they use the example that about 5% of the people who know a brand actually convert. And when they do, these customers makes purchases which results in about $50 profit. So they calculated this awareness increase in dollars by taking a brand’s present market size of 500,000 people, the increased awareness of 10,000 people (or 2%), the amount of people who then make purchases (5%) and the profit from each purchase ($50). So for this brand the ROI would be the employee and tech tool cost against a $25,000 profit.

Image courtesy www.financeformulas.com

So, if this company spent $15,000 on employee hours and technology to generate this 2% awareness increase, then $25,000 of increased brand awareness would equal an ROI of 67%.

Tips For Launching Into ROI Initiatives On Social

• Not all “likes” and “follows” are created equal. Seek out a quality audience which is engaging with your content.
• Social media can be a potent force for customer loyalty and retention. Don’t forget to add value to your feeds for your existing following when you launch into campaigns.
• Experiment! Social media thrives on change so don’t worry about alienating your audience when you launch into new campaigns.

Looking at social media assets as having measurable value clears away some of the hesitation you may feel about investing in it. Determine what the goals of your brand’s social media presence will be and start calculating the payoff of different strategies and campaigns.

Want support with your social media channels? Get in touch!