How To Track Your Offline Impact From Social Media

In our last post, we covered how to measure your social media ROI for online conversions. But what about businesses whose customers convert offline?

Businesses often question how much impact social media campaigns are having on their bottom line – primarily because they are not properly tracking their online to offline conversion value.

With social media, as with any other form of digital marketing, the impact on your offline business is very much quantifiable and measurable – it simply takes a little bit of knowledge and a few quick tactics in order to efficiently and effectively track your online to offline conversion value.

In this post, we will provide you with tactics, methods and best practices of tracking the offline impact of your social media efforts.

Utilize Social Media Insights & Analytics

This sounds obvious, however, many businesses are not even checking their social media insights or analytics, or if they are, they are treating the analytics similar to PPC or SEO – which is a mistake.

Most social media channels have built-in analytics to track engagement and performance of your campaign. Some social media management platforms come with sophisticated data collection features that show if your social media contributes to conversions.

There are methods for tracking your offline impact that are being driven by your social media, including discounts and tracked phone numbers which we will discuss shortly.

Don’t Overcomplicate ROI Tracking

Track Referrals Simply

A tried and true way to find out where your customers came from is to simply ask them!

For example, if you were a restaurant, your host/hostess can say “thanks for joining us today, how did you hear about us?”

Keep it simple and write their response next to their names. Have your host/hostess bucket their responses into 5 categories: Social Media, Search, PPC, Referral, and Display (if you are still using it…).

You also have the option of going deeper by tracking specifically where they came from (Facebook or Twitter). Either way, at the end of the month, you can tally up your responses and calculate your gross revenue from social media and measure the return.

If you tracked by social network, you can see which networks are generating a return and which aren’t – adjust your efforts and spends accordingly.

Social Media Offers & Discount Codes

Facebook Offers

Facebook Offers increase sales by reaching existing and new customers with a relevant offer. Facebook does a great job of tracking offer claims through their Page Insights.

If your local business Facebook page has at least 50 likes, you can create an offer such as 25% off an entire purchase. Your Facebook Fans will claim this offer to be redeemed online or offline.

To redeem in-store offers, customers must show their email confirmation – giving you the perfect opportunity to record and track that conversion and value.

While likes and social engagement are great, the main focus here should be on the redemption of offers (not just offers “claimed”). You’ll need to attribute your offline sales to your social media efforts in order to gauge your return. This can be easily done by creating a unique code to your offer such as “Facebook25”.

At the end of each month or at the conclusion of the campaign, look at the discount section of your sales spreadsheet and calculate the gross revenue of all conversions that used the discount code “Facebook25”.

Now you will be able to assign a monetary return on your social media efforts.

Discount Codes

Let’s say you don’t want to create an ad and just want to give back to your fans. Discount codes are an effective way to gauge social ROI. Create promo codes and coupons that can be found exclusively through your social media networks.

When creating a post with a discount, be sure to follow Facebook’s new promotional guidelines or your post will be rejected and removed from your page.

Here’s an example of a promotional post with best practices:

Track Phone Calls

Another way to gauge your social ROI is by tracking phone calls. To measure this, insert a unique phone number on your site based on what social channel your visitors came from. Customers who come from Twitter will see a different number than those who come from Facebook, however, each number will still redirect to your main business line.

While there are various call tracking options that can follow phone call data of multiple phone numbers, we recommend consulting with your SEO team/specialist before implementing this strategy.

At the end of your campaign, trace phone calls back to the social media source that converted the lead to a successful transaction and calculate the return.

For example, if you know that for every 100 calls you receive from social media results in 2 offline sales, and the average sale is about $75, then for every 100 calls you make $150. This means you can attribute $1.50 per call from social media. That’s not bad at all.

More importantly, you can now compare this to other lead sources/costs as well as have a starting point to begin optimization to reduce your cost per lead (phone call).

Taking the time to understand your social media ROI will help improve future campaigns and recognize the power of social media interaction for offline customer acquisition.

SOCi is the next generation social media marketing and management PaaS (platform-as-a-service).

With its proprietary Content Discovery Engine and Instant Insight scoring algorithms, SOCi empowers digital and local service providers with a content-driven social platform, built specifically for scalable, efficient client management. Have a question? We love to help! https://www.meetsoci.com/contact