How to use social selling to get the ROI you desire

Social selling is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, allowing them to build relationships with customers and prospects more directly and personally. Still, many business owners wonder if social selling is a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers, building solid relationships, and ultimately getting the Return-on-Investment (ROI) you desire. 

To get you expert insights and much-needed details on the topic, we spoke to Milan Ruzicka, co-founder, CEO global, and CEO Europe of the social selling company ReadyForSocial. His mission is to create the best possible analytics for his clients. Since Milan likes to pay special attention to the analytical part of the business, he is the ideal candidate to share fascinating insights into the matter and take you through the essential costs and ROIs of social selling. Read our key takeaways below. 

First, what does social selling cost? 

The first part of calculating the cost of social selling is figuring out what you want to achieve with the program. Some companies wish for slightly better employee advocacy, with people posting positive thoughts about their work but nothing more. On the other hand, some companies have thought through account-based sales and marketing strategies and want to interlink social selling with their other marketing activities. These companies would employ completely different social selling strategies, meaning they would invest differently based on their needs.  

Even if the company fell in the middle of this spectrum, other factors are still to consider. First, salespeople must be trained on why they should care about social media and how to represent the company and themselves. They need to have a steady stream of something interesting to say. If you want to project thought leadership, you must spend time researching and thinking about where the clients' industry is going. Second, you want to determine how your social selling program is going. It's not ideal to blast content and hope something is coming back. You want to measure, report, and analyze. So, you bundle that together between the analytics and the sales support, and you realize you need a platform. There are plenty of them in the market.   

With these factors in mind, we can calculate a ballpark number. "From our experience, if you count all these costs in, it's probably somewhere between $100-200 per participant per month." Milan further explains, "It's going to be way less if there are 1000s of salespeople in the program. And it's going to be on the upper side of that range if you're looking at just a small program."  

How can you measure a social selling program’s result? 

Just like calculating cost, measuring results also starts with your objective. Continuing our previous example, we want salespeople to project leadership, promote a brand, and start conversations. If this is the case, then the first thing you need to track is participation. So ask yourself how many salespeople are trained and actively participating in the program. This participation drives the volume of content you can push out and drives the audience to see the content.   

Another critical question to ask is, what are the numbers they should see? "In our experience, we see that if you have a long-term, active user base of people who are driving your brand on social media," Milan states. The statistics are "somewhere in the range of 40-60% participation among your sales force." That is a sizable number, so keep it in mind when thinking about designing the program.   

You should also consider your social selling tool's impact on the market and how active you want your salespeople to be. A factor in this is how many networks you can actively play on in B2B social selling. Remember that LinkedIn and Twitter are the most important ones. There are additional local LinkedIn alternatives if you have holdings in Europe. While some salespeople participate actively, rationing content on a profile is good. While an active user is essential, posting multiple times a day or every day of the week can cause an oversaturation of content that doesn't reach anyone. To avoid this potentiality, it is essential to plan exactly how many posts you want and how many days you want your team to post. "Four posts per week, that roughly equals 200 posts a year, and that's a good number," Milan states. "And you can create this interesting flood of content, which is reaching your existing customers and prospects and helping you to start conversations on both sides of that coin—even your existing customers can come back to you for more business if they see that you have a new idea or capability they didn't know about."  

The last thing used to calculate results is engagement. Content pressure fulfills a particular purpose: to engage the audience. Typically, in such a program, you measure how many likes and comments people leave with the content your people are sharing and the clicks you get. Links often lead to your website, generating new traffic and starting the customer journey on your digital property. "To give you a number to think about," Milan states, "roughly 400 relevant engagements per seller per year is good. That means some of those posts will just fall completely flat because it's not something that the audience is interested in, or it's just the wrong day. And others will do really well. The rule of thumb we use is two or more relevant engagements on each of your posts, and you're probably doing well."  

How do you handle distributing to the right audiences with your clients? 

There are three ways in which you can go about measuring relevant engagements, and not all of them are necessarily practical. The most solid, reliable, and scalable solution is a CRM integration between the main social network, LinkedIn, and your company. You need to be running one of the few systems LinkedIn has deemed as worthy of this integration, which, by now, is just Dynamics, and maybe Salesforce.  

The other way to deal with it is some approximation, which is reliable but less robust than a CRM. "In my company, we deployed it in trial a few years back. Until we get really solid CRM integration, I think it's a good beta. It helps clients to get the information they need with a good degree of precision," Milan states.  

There is a last option, which applies to specific cases where you design your social selling program with a limited target customer audience in mind and go with account-based sales because then you know who your prospects are. Humans must review the content, look at who engaged with it and provide some overviews. One way to do so is by having a junior person in your organization or an intern look through the posts of participating social sellers. That way, they can identify potential clients and prospects from the engagements on a post and figure out if the target audience is seeing the posts. While you don't have to look at every piece of content, it is important to look at a sizeable amount, as the more posts you look at, the stronger your assumptions and approximations will be. 

Lastly, let's not forget that content typically leads to your landing page. You can capture that incoming traffic and authenticate it with some degree of precision. While this could be considered another field of measurement, the metrics of landing page traffic can differ from those of social selling. 

What does attribution mean in social selling, and how do you measure it? 

With attribution, we are moving from solid ground with lots of good hard data points to a field of speculation. Sadly, this means you can't calculate the return on investment. Doing so requires you to pinpoint to what degree the social selling program contributed to winning an opportunity next to all your other marketing activities. This procedure can be hard to calculate unless you have an extensive data set over a long time.  

Milan recommended not to worry too much about attribution when starting a social selling program. Instead, he advises focusing on something else. "You want to see the KPIs I've talked about before: the participation of salespeople, the eyeballs on the content, the engagements, the increase of their networks, conversations going on." He continues, "as you get more experienced with it, you will start to accumulate the data." 

Then it's time to look at your baseline of regular performance campaigns. Milan suggests asking yourself, "how does that integrate with your other marketing messaging? And you can play with attribution."  

What kind of ROI can people expect from social selling? 

After all these factors, we are left with one question: Is there a hard ROI in social selling? Milan explains that we typically see the ROI fall somewhere in the 5x and 8x range when doing the calculations, which is significant. Another way of looking at it would be to think of how difficult it is to create a marketing campaign that gives you $5 or $8 back for every dollar you invest. Still, the programs are not necessarily good for companies that are doing smaller deals.  

Milan continues that his company has seen the best ROIs with clients with six-figure contract values. That's your sweet spot. It's the area your content marketing and social selling can play well together and help you address those buyers and win deals. We typically see social selling programs enable clients to get two additional deals per year from each rep.  

If we put it all together, social selling has a hard ROI, Milan explains. It just takes a lot of calculation and speculation to figure it out. To run a successful program for a long time, you must pay attention to many details and data. In addition, Milan says, "having somebody on your team on your vendor side who can really spend time and understands how these things work together and can go through the data is priceless because people will find new ways to improve the program for you."