It’s incredibly easy to find so-called Social Media Marketing services in the current digital landscape. People toss around the terms “engagement,” “brand awareness,” and “follower growth” like balls in a ping-pong match. While these terms are well known to most people, the majority of business owners, marketing agencies, and professionals tend to approach social media services the same way they did eight years ago. Social Media is constantly evolving. This means the scope, approach, and execution of social media marketing services needs to adapt to changes in the social media industry.

Social Media Marketing Services that Produce ROI

Great social media marketing services will generate ROI, whether it be quantitative or qualitative. Services that provide benefits for your company justify your investment. The hard part is finding an agency that knows how to market on social media without wasting your company’s resources.

There are only four social media marketing services your business needs to adopt to achieve successful ROI:

1. Build brand affinity – Instead of building brand affinity, most agencies focus on audience engagement.
2. Maximize reach – Most agencies measure reach, but don’t strive to amplify it.
3. Gain consumer insight – Very few agencies conduct custom consumer research.
4. Increase sales – It’s essential to the success of your business to tie social media marketing efforts back to revenue.

1. Build Brand Affinity

The first thing that might come to your mind when you see brand affinity listed under social media marketing services is brand loyalty. While the two are related, there’s a distinct difference between them—lifetime customer value. Brand loyalty is more habitual than brand affinity. A customer who gets their gas at the same corner station every day after work is demonstrating brand loyalty, while the person who chooses their gas station based on their contribution to environmental preservation is showing brand affinity.

Differences Between Brand Affinity and Brand Loyalty:

• Brand loyalty lacks a connection between the customer and the brand that will produce an emotional or personal appeal.
• Brand affinity creates a strong personal or emotional connection between the customer and the brand.

Social media marketing services that focus on building brand affinity work to establish an audience of brand advocates for the client. This is much more valuable than simply building an audience or increasing social media followers. If all you want is a large social media following you can plop down $100 and walk away with thousands of followers who don’t give a damn about your brand. Vanity metrics are useless. Brand affinity will establish an audience of followers who are highly qualified and passionate about your brand.

2. Maximize Reach

Maximizing your reach on social media puts your brand in front of a larger audience of qualified prospects who could eventually exercise brand affinity. The beauty of building brand affinity is that your audience naturally begins to maximize the reach of your business because they genuinely enjoy the content you share. Social media marketing services would be incomplete without the ability to amplify a company’s reach.

Ways to organically optimize reach:

• Share content that piques the curiosity of your audience.
• Use unique, authentic content to surprise your audience.
• Build excitement with content that entertains your audience.
• Optimize all shared content with keywords, hashtags, shortened links, and compelling copy.
• Research optimal posting times and frequency so your content is seen by the maximum number of followers in the shortest period of time.

3. Gain Consumer Insight

Most agencies claim to provide social media marketing services that encompass audience research. What the vast majority of agencies fail to offer are methods for acquiring original consumer insights that will produce data which can be used to find actionable marketing opportunities.

Consumer insights aren’t easy to collect, but they are well worth the effort. It requires the agency or brand to interact directly with consumers through custom surveys, quizzes, focus groups, and interviews. The amount of time it takes to conduct and review the research for valuable insights can take weeks or even months, depending on the scope of the project, size of the audience, and goals of the business.

Actionable Consumer Insights Commonly Discovered:

• Potential for new product lines or services
• Improvements in products or services that consumers want to see
• Lucrative audience demographic breakdowns

4. Increase Sales

Ah, we’ve finally arrived at the almighty dollar. Marketing always comes back to revenue. Social media marketing services should strive to drive revenue by supporting marketing efforts. Some agencies make it sound like driving sales with social media is a breeze. That’s not the case. It takes a comprehensive social media marketing strategy backed by expertise and hard work to begin influencing sales.

Methods for Increasing Sales with Social Media:

• Produce social media ad campaigns that target audience-brand interactions
• Support in-store and online promotions across social channels
• Offer exceptional customer service that can serve as social proof
• Build a brand experience that attracts positive reviews and interactions
• Team up with relevant influencers who have access to qualified prospects

Keep in mind that selling is a social process. Your brand needs to be personable and communicate efficiently with the audience.

A brand that is focused on building brand affinity, maximizing reach, gaining consumer insights, and increasing sales will generate valuable ROI for the business. Together these four social media marketing services can be used to implement a compelling brand story on social media.