Social Media Lead Generation and ROI

One big topic we all hear is: “What is the ROI of social media?”. I agree with @CSPenn that ROI is a financial measurement period, end of story. I won’t get into “does the discussion of ROI for social media have value or not”;  @DMScott covers the "what is the value of putting on your pants in the morning" side very well. Your manager will probably cover the other side. Since my manager has a lot of influence on what I do, I try to accommodate.  Metrics  I keep a lookout for metrics that can help me prove the value of social media. Recently, I was talking to two of the campaign managers I work with on the topic. I laid out a plan and template for that team to promote events including webinars and also collect metrics. While explaining it to each separately they both told me that for recent webinars, they used social media promotion and had good results.  In both cases they used a blog post and a post on LinkedIn pointing to the blog and one to Twitter . In one case there was a high single digit percentage increase in webinar registrations. In the other it was low two digit percentage bump.  For this team, webinar registrations are lead generation because to register for a  webinar you need to fill out a registration form  including your contact information and, of course, the topic of the webinar clearly indicates which topic interests the person. 

ROI
The ROI is fairly easy to calculate. Investment equals the time to write the blog post and do the LinkedIn and Twitter post. It takes me 10 – 20 minutes to write a webinar announcement blog post because most of the text is already written on the web page, so it is mostly copy and paste exercise. The LinkedIn post, for me, is a sentence or two with a link to the blog post. So on the high end 1 hour of time.  What is your blogger’s fully burdened rate? Fully burdened means salary plus all the benefits - vacation, medical etc. 

If the person is you a rule of thumb is 1.5 times your salary in the US. Another way to get the answer is to ask someone in finance “what is the average fully burdened rate for the department” that the blogger reports into.  Your return is (average cost of a lead) x (number of leads). To make sure you are including only leads from your effort you need to use a custom URL. If you have a web analytics tool, like Omniture, you can get a URL with a JumpID that the tool will track for you. If not you can use a URL shortening service like Bit.ly that will count clicks for you (look at my post A bit.ly surprise, not in a good way for some tips).

By the way, get one unique URL for the blog and one for each other place you post so you will know which posts are working the best for you. If you find most are coming from LinkedIn, for example, maybe you can skip the blog post and just post in LinkedIn with a link to the registration page. 

Here is an example:
Average fully burdened rate for a person in the blogger’s department is $125,000 per year. There are 2000 working hours in a year (assuming 2 weeks vacation and 40 hours per week) , so 125,000 / 2000 = $75 / hour.  If your average cost per lead for all leads is $40 per lead and you are sure 50 leads came from your social media work, then you have ($40/lead x 50 leads) $2,000 in return. Return ($2,000) – Investment ($75) is $1,925 or as ROI% (2000-75) / 75 = 2567%. At first I thought this was a math error but if the return were $150 that would be 100% and our return is more than ten times $150.

Source: Michael J Procopio, digital marketing remix | Online  http://digitalmarketingremix.com/