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Increasing the ROI of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the latest buzz in the field of marketing. Total 1 million

links are shared on Facebook daily by its 1.31 billion monthly users which is more than one-

fifth of the world's population. Users spend 640 million minutes on Facebook each month.

Marketers all around are trying their best to leverage this powerful tool to increase their sales.But there are at least as many fails going on in the marketing social sphere as wins. J.P.

Morgan thought it could engage its consumer base through an enlightening Twitter Q&A

session. But it was hijacked by a storm of users furious with the bank for its perceived role in

the financial crisis of 2008. They were completely ignorant of what their brand represented to

the trolling masses of the Internet.

The problem is not with the effectiveness of social media but with the efficiency with

which it is used. We have excellent examples of how social media improved the sales

revenue and brand awareness. One such example is of a Start-up in India, Hokey-Pokey

which improved its ROI on social media marketing. Hokey-Pokey realized increases of 49%

in brand awareness, 83% in ROI and 40% in the sales revenue growth rate. So what is so

different about Hokey-Pokeyssocial media marketing that got them such great results?

Hokey-Pokey created a measurable social media strategy wherein it used three

metrics, called Customer Influence Effect (CIE), the Stickiness Index (SI) and Customer

Influence Value (CIV). CIE measures the influence a user has on other users in the network

in regard to conversations relevant to ice-cream. SI was used to estimate possible size of the

target market and optimal incentives for them by identifying the number of social media users

in the region who actively discussed ice cream and other relevant topics. CIV metric

measured an individuals influence on other customers and prospects. Another part of CIV

metric is CLV metric which measures the value that each individual influencer brings to thecompany through his or her own purchases. Hokey pokey followed a Seven-Step Framework

for Social Media Marketing given by MIT sloan management review.

First step was to monitor the conversations on the local media of relevant cities to

understand its potential to generate and influence purchase decisions. Hokey-Pokey took 6

months for this. Second step was to identify influential individuals who can spread messages.

Individuals were identified on the basis of CIE metric.Third step was to identify the factors

shared by influential individuals. Hokey-Pokey identified four factors: Activeness of the

customer on social media, number of connections and followers, how often the influencers

message is being retweeted, hash-taggedor shared and similarities and common interests

shared by the influencer and his or her network friends. Fourth step was to locate thosepotential influencers who have interests relevant to the campaign using the SI metric.

Fifth step was to recruit those influencers with interests relevant to the campaign to talk about

the companys product or service. This campaign helped to track and measure the positive

WOM of Hokey Pokeys offerings.Sixed step was to incentivize those influencers to spread

positive WOM about the product or service. This was done by giving Brownie Points when

their followers or friends made a purchase shared their posts on social media. These points

were redeemable for prizes and product discounts. CIE metric was continuously recalculated

to identify which customer kept the buzz alive.

At last the only thing remaining was to reap the rewards from increasingly effective socialmedia campaigns. Comments and conversations were related to the financial metrics in order

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to demonstrate the increase in buzz and monetary gains. Hokey-Pokey could identify the

influencers using the CIE (intangible contributions) and CIV (tangible contributions) metrics.