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Use data from your social media campaigns to calculate return on investment
Track increased sales, new customers and growth of your brand that result from your online marketing campaigns.
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Optometry practices are adopting the use of social media, with Twitter and sites such as Facebook providing an inexpensive and controlled way to advertise, promote and brand their offices. Measuring the return on investment and effort placed in social media requires analysis of our marketing in a less traditional way.
Tracking the return on investment (ROI) of social media is more valuable when it integrates the measurement of the effect of social media with your audience and with specific objectives of your marketing plan. Defining the intent and expectations of your social media efforts is the first step.
Once you have defined your social media campaign intent, you can easily use the data to analyze the goals you set out to achieve. Look for trends and trace their origin. It is easy to measure the success of your social media efforts and determine if your goals were met by tracking the data on your website, email contacts, Twitter followers or Facebook likes for your practice.
Agustin L. Gonzalez
Marketing strategies provided by social media can be defined in three categories: higher sales, attracting new patients and growing your social reputation, or branding.
These strategies can then be linked to a number of metrics, such as engagement and participation, customer response to a direct sale or loyalty discounts that can all be initiated by social networks.
You can assess your ROI by tracking the number of comments or replies to Facebook wall posts that you place or receive. Place a piece of news relevant to your target audience and see the amount of replies that piece elicits. You can track those data as a percentage of the total number of followers you have on Facebook or Twitter.
You can also directly measure over time periods the number of email subscribers obtained via your social media efforts. Evaluate whether your followers are visiting your website by tracking the website visits and their origins.
In the case of optical sales, track your sales as a percentage of responders of total audience, or the number of people that linked or clicked to a sale as part of an email campaign.
Optometrists often provide a discount for eyeglasses in return for someone “liking” their office on a Facebook page.
All of these data can be easily used to help you calculate the ROI from your social media campaigns. It is easy to measure ROI by tracking data, but the data endpoints and strategy needs to be defined first.
Online solutions are available to help you in your online marketing campaign. Google Analytics and applications such as Hootsuite and PostRank can track Facebook and Twitter and are useful in this endeavor.
There are many statistics that you can evaluate and use to measure the impact of social media on your practice. It is easy to do and, with time, you can mix and match your strategies to help you increase both business sales and brand awareness.
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- Agustin L. Gonzalez, OD, is in private practice in Dallas, serves as adjunct faculty at InterAmerican University and is a member of the Primary Care Optometry News Editorial Board. He can be reached at AG@TXEyeDr.com.