The Relationship Between Social Media and Revenue for Multi-Location Businesses

This post was originally published in MarTech Cube. 

Proving return on investment (ROI) is often a challenging task. Ask marketers who struggle to prove how their efforts impact the bottom line. Marketing metrics tend to track traffic and leads rather than revenue. An increase in those metrics will eventually lead to an increase in revenue, but it’s helpful to know how individual marketing tactics contribute to increased revenue.

Social media plays a massive role in consumer purchase decisions. For instance, 76 percent of U.S. consumers have purchased a product they saw in a brand’s social media post. While social media is essential, it is often scrutinized more than other marketing tactics because it has so many trackable metrics.

No matter the reason, multi-location marketers are constantly  trying to figure out how to prove the ROI of social media efforts. While this blog focuses on social, if you’re interested in determining the ROI of your business’s comprehensive localized marketing efforts, our Guide to Localized Marketing ROI can help!

Rethink the Type of Content You Share

When it comes to what you’re posting, there are two factors you must consider: the type of content and where it’s published.

For content type, SOCi found that videos perform even better than regular text posts or posts with photos. According to our research,  Facebook posts with videos have twice the correlation with engagement as posts with photos. 

The other factor to consider is where geographically you’re publishing your content. It’s essential to publish local content that speaks to your target audience. Localized content performs 12x better than non-localized content. 

In addition to videos, when planning content at the local level, your business locations can share various types of content, including: 

• Special promotions or discounts that are happening at their location.
• Positive reviews from local customers.
• Pictures of live or virtual events happening at local stores. 
• Current events that are happening in their local areas.
• Ways the franchisee is giving back to the local community. 

Download our Localized Social Content Guide for additional inspiration about local social content.

Determine Which Social Metrics Matter

The key to measuring social ROI is understanding what social media can and cannot do for your business. Social media exists in the middle of the sales funnel and should be evaluated accordingly. 

Earning a new follower — which you can consider as a soft lead — means your business has a potential new customer, but there’s still work to get the consumer to convert. Therefore, when measuring the ROI of social, consider the number of soft leads social is driving and how those soft leads will result in revenue.

You can also look at the metrics that your social content receives. Are clicks your goal? If so, you can add UTM codes to your links to better track click-through rates (CTRs). What about increased reach or engagement? Regardless of your goals, it’s crucial to establish baseline benchmarks, set goals, and create monthly or quarterly reporting to see if you’re attaining them. 

If you’re stuck on which metrics your multi-location business should measure, check out our 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report! 

The report measures how leaders in localized marketing perform in the three areas of localized marketing, including local social. The social metrics analyzed in the report can be a good starting point for your business to start tracking.

In terms of ROI, improved metrics can help boost your revenue. If you look at conversion rates and see more people filling out a form you shared on social media, these increased leads will move into the sales funnel and ultimately make your business more money.

Reviews on Social Platforms and Their Effect on Revenue

When measuring social ROI, consider how the lines have blurred between social media and review platforms. Facebook lets consumers post reviews — now called Recommendations. There is a connection between reviews and revenue. 

More than half of consumers have passed up a business due to its ratings and reviews. Similarly, only 53 percent of consumers would consider using a business with less than four stars. 

If your multi-location business isn’t managing its online reputation on Facebook, you’re likely missing out on potential customers, ultimately impacting your revenue from social media. 

Our Multi-Location Marketer’s Guide to Online Reputation Management has everything you need to know to successfully manage your business’s online reputation on Facebook and other local search platforms. 

The Unquantifiable Effects of Social Media

While most marketers prefer to point to hard data when defending the ROI of social media, some value from your social media marketing efforts can’t be quantified. Brand familiarity, word of mouth marketing, and top-of-mind awareness are all critical drivers for consumers’ purchase decisions. Social media can impact all of these decision-making factors..

One way to analyze the indirect nature of social media’s effect on revenue is to examine how consumers use social media. It’s a general information tool — research shows that 3 out of 4 consumers say they discovered a new local offering based on recommendations and posts on social media.

Marketers understand social media’s effect on overall brand awareness and visibility, but it’s challenging to express that revenue impact directly. The bottom line is this; customers use social media to make a purchase decision; if your business isn’t using social media to engage those customers, know that your competitors are.

Find A Social Solution That Fits Your Needs 

As mentioned, there’s a correlation between a successful local social strategy and revenue. The next challenge may be finding a solution that helps your multi-location business manage its local social efforts across locations, but SOCi is here to help! 

SOCi Social enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at the enterprise and local levels. 

With SOCi Social, you can publish to all major social networks to amplify audience engagement. The tool also allows you to analyze account, group, or location performance to ensure that your content is getting the most engagement — helping you further determine your ROI. 

For more insight into how SOCi Social can help your business optimize its local social strategy to ensure you get the most ROI, request a demo today!