Proving social media ROI is one of the biggest challenges for social media agencies. How can you prove that all your efforts are bringing in the big bucks?
Read onto to discover how Digital Butter, a digital agency, sought and successfully found a robust tool that could help them gather all the data needed to prove the ROI of social media.
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Digital Butter
Digital Butter is a digital marketing agency based in Durban, South Africa. It offers comprehensive social media and marketing strategies to national and international clients.
Key takeaways
- Digital Butter used Agorapulse to scale affordable without sacrificing any features.
- Engaging with its audience from Agorapulse has helped Digital Butter’s clients increase sales by 300%.
- Within a few months, Digital Butter grew its clients’ audience by 70%.
- Digital Butter cut the time it spent creating social media reports in half and now provides its clients with crystal-clear information.
Challenge: How to Prove ROI From Social Media
Proving ROI from social media is one of the biggest challenges that agencies face, regardless of the types of clients they manage, according to the Agorapulse’s State of Agencies Survey 2021 report.
For Robyn Mays and her agency, Digital Butter, clearly showing the value of their marketing efforts on social media has always been one of their main goals.
Robyn knew the importance of tying social media metrics to their client’s objectives. So, her agency began the search for a robust social media tool that could help them gather all the data needed to prove the ROI of social media.
The journey to the perfect social media management solution for Digital Butter took a detour, though.
At first, Digital Butter chose Buffer. It was a solid, respectable solution for streamlining its agency’s publishing process. However, as the digital agency started to scale up, it quickly outgrew Buffer’s capabilities, especially regarding reports.
Digital Butter needed a more robust social media management solution to manage their clients’ presence on social media—a solution that would help growing teams, not hinder them.
Luckily, the digital agency found Agorapulse, a tool that allowed them to scale affordably yet also get access to advanced features, such as social media reporting.
Agorapulse’s extensive but easy-to-use social media reporting was a game-changer for Digital Butter.
The agency could finally prove social media ROI to clients in a way customized to the clients’ specific areas of interest and goals.
Plus, Digital Butter could prove to itself that it was on the right track with its marketing and fix anything that needed a little tweaking.
“Most business owners end up wasting money on digital marketing that doesn’t work,” says Robyn. “But at Digital Butter, we believe that every investment deserves a return. That’s why we start by helping businesses create a clear message that allows their brand, website, social, and digital strategies to tell the same story.
“Doing so ensures they connect with their customers and grow their revenue for good. That’s why using a social media solution that provides comprehensive reporting is so important to us.
“We don’t just post for the sake of posting. There needs to be a strategy, and we need to be able to show a client a detailed report on how content has done, so we can improve/edit/adjust it.” (Robyn Mays, president of Digital Butter)
Solution: Turn (the Right) Data into Insightful Client Reports
To succeed on social media, you need to engage with your customers. You also need customers to engage with your content.
From reading the key takeaways of this post, you might already be expecting to find a recipe or magic formula to replicate these results.
Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for social media marketing. You can’t determine what’s actually working without analyzing, learning, adjusting, and repeating the process all over again.
Digital Butter put this type of process into place, which led to astounding results.
“We’ve been able to achieve amazing results with our clients! So, instead of having theories, I can use data to demonstrate our successes. I like the fact that I can see that the more community management we do, the more reach the content gets, therefore, the more sales our client gets.”
Agorapulse’s social inbox means that no one at Digital Butter ever misses incoming messages. They’re all put in one easy-to-access, easy-to-use place: the social inbox.
“We do things a bit differently with David Hayward (also known as the NakedPastor),” says Robyn. “The NakedPastor community is what makes the brand and so the engagement needs to be genuine. We have David log in to Agorapulse himself so that he is able to do all community management in Agorapulse. This saves him time as he’s able to answer messages across multiple platforms in one place.”
The How: Easily Craft Strong, Detailed Reports That Tell the Story
By analyzing the correlation between engagement and sales using the reports provided by Agorapulse, Digital Butter can explain what really resonates with their clients’ audience.
Digital Butter uses Agorapulse’s Power Reports to create different custom templates. The agency can share the exact information their clients need to know to clearly understand what’s working.
For example, they can create detailed reports with only the metrics they want to see and even organize those metrics depending on their clients’ objectives, like engagement or reach.
Along with using the main metrics available on each social media platform, Digital Butter also leverages the option to create Label Reports for their content. This helps them understand what types of posts have a bigger impact on their audience.
“We use labels on our posts to analyze what types of content are bringing more engagement and ultimately driving more sales. So, for example, we can say sales were much higher because we posted many more of this product versus another product. We use this report quite intensively. Sometimes, we don’t even wait for the end of the month.” (Robyn Mays)
Agorapulse’s social media reports can be customized. Digital Butter can create specific reports to show each client what they want to know about what’s working and what isn’t in regard to their social media efforts.
These easy-to-understand but detailed reports let clients dig deep into trends and team performance, as well as see what content performs best.
All that information helps not just their clients but also Digital Butter. Equipped with this valuable information, Digital Butter can create highly targeted social media content strategies for clients.
Don’t Forget to Be Social
When you’re working to create a successful digital marketing strategy that meets client expectations, it’s important to be strategic and know how to precisely interpret social media data.
After all, it helps you create content most relevant to your audience.
But we can’t forget that engagement is still a key ingredient of social media success. Like every other relationship, communication is a must. If your audience is reacting to your content, they are proving that it’s valuable to them!
So, to foster this relationship, continue the conversation with them.
This idea was clear to Robyn and her agency from the beginning. Luckily, they chose a platform that allowed them—and their client—to reply to conversations on social media. While they managed many conversations, their client also had the opportunity to engage directly with the community without missing any comments or messages.
“We use Agorapulse’s workflow management by scheduling and assigning posts to David for approval and comments,” says Robyn. “This makes it a lot easier to get content out as we don’t need to work in docs or anything like that.
“We do go one step further on this though as we actually let David log in to Agorapulse. In that way, he is able to do community management on his own, and he also assigns posts to us. This keeps everything off email and is just a lot quicker” Robyn said.
Outcome: Less Time Spent Creating Reports and More Time for Strategic Growth
By setting up an efficient reporting process that proves social media ROI to their clients, Digital Butter now has more time to focus on helping their clients grow.
A successful example of this is Digital Butter’s client David Hayward, a well-known South African artist.
“For this specific client, we have been able to organically grow his audience by about 700% in just a year. We have focused on engaging with his audience, analyzing the content that resonates with his audience, and adjusting our strategy regularly. We’ve managed to streamline our social media processes. The reporting has allowed us to check monthly and evaluate what we did that worked and what didn’t. We constantly adjust the time of scheduling based on Agorapulse.”
In Conclusion
Once Digital Butter began using Agorapulse, the social agency immediately began to see results, both in time spent on social media and in growing a client base by 700%.
The ability to streamline social media management, publishing, and reporting has helped Digital Butter run a smoother, more efficient business.
“Digital Butter has been able to scales its revenue using social media because we’ve focused on two key elements: building community and efficiently creating relevant content,” says Robyn. “It’s what makes the difference between likes and love.
“The audience is everything. They make up the community, which makes the brand what it is. Understanding them—the content they need—and building genuine relationships with them has been one of the main reasons the company has becoming successful.”
“Using Agorapulse’s advanced reporting, analytics, and workflow management has enabled to help clients continue creating authentic content like they have for years, but in a more scalable way. We’ve used insights to understand what content resonates with the audience and performs best on each platform, and then we’ve done more of that. This approach helps us to be flexible, proactive, and reactive all at once.
“Going forward, we will continue using Agorapulse’s reports to understand what people really want, as opposed to assuming we know what they want.”
Ready to start proving your social media ROI to your agency clients? Start your free trial with Agorapulse here!
