How to Measure Social Media ROI for Your Salon

Over half of marketers struggle to measure their social media ROI.

After all, how do you measure your Return On Investment for marketing designed to boost customer satisfaction levels? Or brand awareness?

Not all of your social media activity gives you a value which can be easily measured in cold hard profit...

However, social media marketing is a vital activity if you want your salon to be successful. And throwing money into something which isn't giving you a good ROI is never a good idea.

Here's how to measure social media ROI for your hair or beauty salon:

Define your goals

“Everyone is on social media, so I need to be too” is not enough of a goal. You need to get specific about what you are aiming to do on your chosen platforms:

• Increase revenue – although increasing your revenue is likely to be your overarching objective no matter your goal specifically, revenue-driving is a set goal.
• Raising brand awareness – is a good reason to spend time and energy on your social media presence, even if it is difficult to measure.
• Grow your community – community building and customer service activities can give great returns.
• Ad spending – if you run paid ad campaigns on social media, figuring out whether you are getting the best ROI on your beauty and hair salon marketing is vital if you don't want to waste money.

Set your KPIs

KPIs are your Key Performance Indicators. These will be determined by the goals you've set:

For example, increasing your revenue might be a monetary value. But whatever your goal, KPIs should always be things with numerical values you can measure and track.

Some of the best KPIs for social media include:

• Contact form uses
• Email list sign-ups
• Free trials or vouchers used
• E-book or whitepaper downloads
• Product purchases

Of course, you should also be tracking social shares, likes, followers and other traffic. But these are not really vital if you aren't focussing on your brand awareness. Many experienced marketers will tell you that these are little more than vanity figures.

What good, measurable KPIs have in common is that they have numbers and can be tracked.

Track your conversions

Especially if your goal is driving revenue, you need to know what happens after a customer signs up or follows your link to your website. Do they convert into a paying customer?

Google Analytics is the way to find out. It's free and lets you set the actions on your site which you want to track and measure.

If you want to know the ROI of your digital marketing on social media, simply navigate to Conversions on the Social Acquisitions page. Click the “Set Up Goals” button to get started.

There are huge numbers of different options ideal for measuring any of the above goals you may have chosen.

Assign values

Tracking set KPIs is good. Knowing what each is actually worth to you is much better.

The way to get the best ROI in marketing of any kind is to know what you are actually getting from what you are spending. These are some of the best methods for doing so:

• Customer lifetime value – the amount each customer is worth to you over the course of their entire interaction with you.
• Average sale – on average, how much does someone spend with you?
• Lifetime value x conversion rate – multiply your lifetime value by your conversion rate to find out how much each visit to your site, email sign up or any other metric is worth to you.

Of course, if you are using paid ads, this will change how you look at your ROI.

Check your competition

Some brands are great on social media. They know that each customer is worth a certain amount over their lifetime, that they convert a certain percentage of website visitors and thus how much each click is worth to them. They can then plan their spend accordingly.

But even if your competitors haven't achieved the best ROI for beauty and hair salon marketing themselves, they may still indicate areas where you can stand out.