Everyone wants to know that their marketing ideas are working. I get asked all the time, “How can you show Return on Investment (ROI) on social media and networking?”

The answer is that you have to work tracking systems into your efforts. I’m always surprised at how many businesses fail to ask their prospects, “How did you hear about us?” If you don’t ask the question and put a system in place to track it, you’ll never know which efforts are working and which aren’t.

This basic question is critical to tracking your efforts. You can ask it in a number of ways.

Do you have a list of standard questions you ask prospects? If so, add that one to the list.

Do you use on-line surveys in your business? If so, add that question to the survey.

Do you use social media? You can create posts that are designed to track ROI. On Twitter, you can send out a tweet that says “mention this tweet and get something special.” On Facebook, you can tell people to “say you saw us on Facebook and get something special.” The “something special” doesn’t have to be a huge discount. Showing a tweet doesn’t take much effort, but we’ll do it even if the gain is relatively small. A discount is a discount. Experiment and find the one(s) that work best.

Anyone else have ideas to share? Please talk about them in the comments. On Monday, I’m going to write about what to do with the information once you have it.

Tags: Networking, Referrals, social media

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 7:51 am and is filed under Referrals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.