How to Optimize Social Media ROI Using Oktopost [VIDEO]

Nothing is more important than knowing the time your team is spending on social media is generating leads and profit. Tracking is essential to optimize social media ROI.

Because Oktopost integrates seamlessly with third-party CRM and marketing automation systems such as Salesforce, Marketo and Act-on, leads generated on social media go directly into the top of your sales funnel.

When it comes to the bottom line, follows and retweets are not the most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track.

They may or may not impact lead generation or sales. By creating a method to determine which social media touches are generating leads that convert, Oktopost can be used to focus activities where they count.

Go beyond measuring social media interactions and focus on sales wins instead.

Assign Monetary Lead Values

In the past, there was no way to project or measure the value of your team’s actions to your bottom line. The expanded Oktopost Social ROI feature now includes the ability to assign a monetary value to each type of lead coming from your social media posts.

Using tags to differentiate between types of leads, each source can be assigned a different monetary value in your choice of currencies.

“It’s not enough just to look at the number of leads, you must also find out who the leads are and if they will convert into paying customers (a.k.a. ‘closing the loop’).” ~ The Importance of Closed Loop Reporting

Over time, Oktopost will reveal which sources generate the most qualified leads. For example, someone filling out a contact form for your latest white paper may end up being worth $40 to you while another lead downloading a case study could be assigned a worth of $20. Participants in a webinar might be worth $80.

How To Measure Social Media ROI

Easily measure which of  your social campaigns is providing the highest quality leads and best value. These new metrics are displayed in the Oktopost Social Dashboard including total social value in the currency of your choice.

(See the furthest right small graph in the center of this screen capture):

As you can see in the image of the Oktopost Social Dashboard above, the visuals are similar to any analytics dashboard. See an overview of the entire campaign at a glance by organizing activities into campaigns. Click into each campaign for detailed metrics.

Reduce Labor Costs

Now  it is possible to know which social media platforms generate leads your team can close. Once you know that a particular Facebook group, for example, consistently provides actionable leads, it makes sense to make it a priority.

If another group fails to provide qualified leads, it can be removed from your social media strategic plan.

Accurately measuring where your social leads originate saves staff hours by eliminating activities that are not driving sales. Team members can either focus on the most productive areas or reassigned to reduce social media management costs.

Integrate to Fill Your Sales Funnel

Never run out of leads by integrating all your social activities and using them to fill your sales funnel in Salesforce, Marketo or Act-on. Get insights with every social touch your sales team can use to close the sale.

• Salesforce.com

Leads generated by social media activities are synced between Oktopost and Salesforce.com. Detailed information on the source of the lead is added to ‘Leads’ or ‘Contacts’ in Salesforce.

Get maximum value from Salesforce by giving your sales team more information about each lead. Details pulled from Oktopost appear in Salesforce reports, providing accurate social media ROI statistics and metrics from “source to sale”.

• Marketo

Oktopost also integrates seamlessly with Marketo to provide details on which social shares on which platforms generated the lead.

By connecting LinkedIn profiles with leads, your sales team receives a wealth of information including each potential buyer’s background, work experience, and title.

Marketo supports setting up workflow triggers to catalog leads into social media buckets.  Sorting leads by title can surface high value sales targets with decision-making authority.

• Eloqua

Enrich your social selling by discovering which social platforms, profiles and social media activities each lead engages with by integrating Oktopost data with Eloqua.

Leverage this data to identify the hottest leads most likely to buy. Oktopost’s social lead scoring allows you to segment and prioritize leads.

• Go To Webinar

Integrate Go to Webinar with Oktopost to identify both buyers and new advocates for your brand. Measure what is working to get stronger results from every dime spent in social.

Convert More Leads

Enhanced Lead Insights increase conversion rates. With one click, your sales team can access each social media account a lead has used to interact with any content your team has shared.

This provides even more insights your sales team can use to increase the number of wins.

By leveraging third party integrations, social activities can support your sales team by showing them which leads are most qualified. Funnel the hottest leads into Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua or Act-on.

“By syncing Oktopost with your CRM platform, you can find out details like the name, email address, company, and job title of every lead generated through social media. This will enable you to follow up on initial interest shown through social media and execute more targeted marketing campaigns.” ~ Closing the Loop on Social Media Lead Generation Part 2

All of the data collected by Oktopost is synced into the third-party CRM or marketing system, supporting your sales team’s efforts to remarket and follow-up to turn those leads into sales.

Segment your social media leads into smart lists, and use them to create unique landing pages and e-mail nurturing campaigns. What really matters is converting leads; all the leads in the world are worthless if sales doesn’t convert them to paying customers.

Amplify Your Reach to Fill Your Funnel

What could be better than converting more leads? How about a powerful new method for filling your sales funnel by amplifying your reach?

Using the Oktopost Advocacy board turns employees, partners, sister companies, distributors and influencers into amplifiers or your brand messages.

Control Your Brand Image

Control your brand image by having your marketing team create posts within a campaign. They pin select posts onto a board and invite others to share by adding their name and email address.

Participants can simply click to send your message to LinkedIn, their followers on Twitter and Facebook, and even into a huge group they are active in on Facebook your marketing team hasn’t identified or been active in.

Instead of just your marketing team promoting what you share, they can grow an army of free shares for whatever is most important to your team.

Anyone who connects one of their social accounts will be able to see the other messages, encouraging them to connect and share on all the other social platforms.

“The marketing team can create a library of pre-approved tweets, Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn posts for use in the campaign. Then, employees can log into Oktopost, select those messages they like the best (by platform) and either share them in real time or schedule them to post at a future date.” ~Measuring the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing

Use Campaigns to Track Your Results

Campaigns can be created in advance and will automatically be sent to that army when the first message goes live and fed to them consistently throughout the campaign – generating momentum that can send your message viral.

At the end of the campaign, related posts automatically clear from the sharing board.

Notify your Advocates when new content is shared. Oktopost automatically sends them canned messages reminding them they haven’t shared recently to make participation a habit. Leverage this untapped reach and maximize your profits.

B2B is not as naturally organically viral as B2C. Without advocacy, your social media strategy is incomplete. With it, you dramatically multiply your brand’s visibility to the exact target audience you wish to reach.

Incentivize Participation in Pushing Your Brand Message

Turn sharing your message into a game for employees with a reward for the person who shares the most or generates the most leads.

Spending a few thousand dollars on a trip to the Caribbean or flashy new tech can be used to generate tens of thousands of dollars of sales  per month or quarter.

You and every person your team recruits to share can see the number of shares and clicks, but not conversions, all the others are driving. By making this public, the most competitive of those involved will work harder on your behalf.

Measure Influencer Value

It is erroneous to believe that only people with tens of thousands of followers are your best lead generators. Niche influencers with only a few thousand followers can often drive leads who are ready to buy on their recommendation.

Is it worth paying influencers to promote your brand, and if so, which influencers are worth paying? With Oktopost Social ROI metrics, know exactly whether they drive qualified leads or not.

Use Curated Content to Drive Even More Leads

Oktopost makes it easy to find relevant content created by thought leaders and other brands in your industry. Use your marketing team and army of advocates to push this content in addition to your own.

Sharing exceptional content can drive leads back to your brand. Oktopost can track where these leads originated even months later. Have your marketing team push 30% of your own content and 70% curated content.

By identifying which content generates leads consistently, your brand can create and share more of the same type of content to drive even more leads.

If your brand gets mentioned on TechCrunch, Forbes, The New York Times, or an industry publication, pushing that mention out through your advocates can generate leads indefinitely.

Demo of New Features [VIDEO]

This video explains the new features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_cALvbK1mc

Video Highlights:

• New user interface (UI)
• New Social Inbox
• Social Crisis Management
• Salesforce Social Insights
• Improved LinkedIn Integration
• Compliance Module
• Instagram publishing
• Improving the advocate engagement options to increase usage

Features explained in a previous video that is no longer available, but are most likely still part of Oktopost:

• Social ROI dashboard tracks conversions from webinars, social shares and participation in groups in the same way marketers have always been able to track sales from banner and ad clicks
  • put a monetary value on all inbound leads
  • measure which campaigns are converting best
  • how to set up the social ROI dashboard, conversion tags and conversion pixels
• Employee Advocacy Board: admin can invite users to connect their own Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts
• Reports: board reports reveal which team members are driving the most interactions and conversion
• Autoposter:
  • create message assets first
  • select profiles and pages
  • select up to 100 message assets
  • search for specific message assets by word
  • select queue or date and time
  • generate schedule to spread out post scheduling
• Enhanced lead insights
  • see where each lead has interacted with your creatives
  • one-click to see each lead’s social accounts
  • search leads to find individuals faster
• LinkedIn (as of May 12, 2015) and Facebook (as of April 30, 2015) closing their API – no more posting into groups
• Mobile responsive on all devices and tablets
• Better content discovery

Ready to Improve Your Social Media ROI?

We’d love to hear which of these new features you’re most excited to start using. If you’re not a user of Oktopost yet, take advantage of their free trial – no credit card required. Want to know more? Watch this Video Intro to Oktopost.

Disclosure: While I do not personally use Oktopost, I recognize they provide features no other social media platform provides. I researched and published this information to raise awareness for those who can benefit from using them, particularly B2B businesses.

NOTE: Updated 6/26/20 to add new features video. Originally published Aug 11, 2015.

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap

Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

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