Can social media REALLY convert has been a long debate amongst businesses and agencies alike. After all, social media is about being SOCIAL – interacting with friends, sharing photos and staying up to date with family. It’s not the right space for brands to plug product benefits and sell their products.

Many businesses argue that social media can’t convert and become frustrated when their investment in social media only amount to a page with a few followers, comments and shares.

At Sentius we challenge this notion Social Media CAN convert and here’s why:

To begin, there are several misconception around social.

• Many agencies either don’t understand social media’s value to business, or are poor at communicating its contribution to business activities. It’s more than a numbers game: a page with thousands of LIKES can still have 0 engaged fans and 0 conversions.
• The definition of a conversion is more than just a sale. While we would love hundreds of sales a month coming from social, the desired conversion activity needs to be aligned to the particular industry and business at hand. This could be a new lead, email address, sales call, or online transaction.

Getting the Strategy Right

From the offset, the responsibility is in the lap of agencies to explain how social media relates to business activities. Are you seeking brand awareness? Do you wish to attract traffic to a particular store? Are you seeking to forge brand perception and identity in the marketplace? The objectives of the business must first be outlined, matched to desired conversion activity, and understood before any social media activities are undertaken.

Defining a conversion is critical. Here we’re reminded of the need to properly understand a business’ activities. A service orientated business could consider an enquiry, call or newsletter subscription as a conversion. These are expressions of interest in their services, but most importantly are measurable conversions.

Having established the business’ objectives and defining what a conversion is, it is then necessary to create an effective and targeted strategy to achieve these conversion goals.

Attribution is Everything

Where many agencies struggle, is how to MEASURE results. E-commerce analytics has the ability to track sales traffic by source and medium, which makes social media easily traceable. However what about the consumer who became aware of a brand, and actively engaged with it through Instagram, and then when chose to make a purchase searched the brand name in Google? It can also be difficult for a bricks-and-mortar retailer to connect foot traffic back to social media. This often leads to the potential misconception that ‘social can’t convert’.

Setting up analytics tracking that extends past last click attribution is critical, along with putting strategies in place to track the sources of in-store and phone traffic.

Sentius recently achieved growth in online sales for a retail client by 500% with the application of a targeted social media ads strategy. Already engaged in social media and e-commerce, Sentius applied a strategy employing customer profiling and segmentation and more focused targeting to build awareness and interest. Remarketing was then applied translate interested potential clients into online customers. The outcome was a substantial boost in qualified traffic via Facebook Ads, resulting in an increase in online sales.

To learn how Sentius can make you a social media believer, give Ember Mitchell a call on 1300 81 81 88.