Are you looking to get more from your social programs in 2018? Do your current efforts feel like they're lacking in engagement and ROI? At their core, the building blocks of successful social marketing efforts often stay the same: Build a plan, align it to business goals, make sure you measure the things that matter, be judicious about your platforms, etc.

While tactics come and tactics go (Should we snap? What about chatbots?), the most common question I get is, how can I ensure efforts drive toward ROI? Social media ROI is largely a factor of two things: Conversion measurement and relevance.

Entire columns could be written on both topics, but today I want to share some easy wins to make sure your social efforts are relevant.

Driving Social ROI by Increasing Relevance

In all things digital, the more relevant content is, the higher the engagement and higher the resulting conversion.

If a social strategy doesn't start with segmenting membership by personas with goals and life stages, and aligning it to various product needs, ROI will suffer.

Sharing the same content throughout the social experience to everyone will reduce the ROI you'll be able to measure. All the metrics and analytics in the world won't matter, because conversions will be lackluster.

But how can we learn more about what our membership segments want, target those segments better and ensure success? Great questions! Let's unpack each one individually.

Uncover Membership Insights With Facebook Ad Data

Facebook audiences' top page likes reveal interesting data points for credit union marketers.

Facebook's ad insights can be a great place for your marketing team to start gathering data. The audience segmenting used to put together ad campaigns can provide a wealth of insights to your personas.

To get to this trove of data, we need to build an audience with existing knowledge about our member personas. We can pull the base information to get started with our targeting. Let's say we want to reach affluent millennials:

•  Young adult (born 1982 to 2000)
• A high wage earner (or has a high net worth)
• College graduate
• Interested in investing

Inside Facebook Audience insights, use a minimum of age, location and at least one behavior insight (scroll down past Pages to find these). This is where you can add things like income, family, travel habits, purchase habits, etc.

Facebook compiles the data from its own network and third-party data providers to give you a snapshot of what the audience looks like and what other behaviors they have.

From here, we can analyze the results to see if there are other insights our team could find helpful in determining content calendar and campaign planning.

Uncovering More User Insights

From our audience data, we do indeed find some interesting data points, including media consumption and social habits. In this example (see the screenshot on the previous page), we see that this particular audience likes the following things:

• Tasty, a food publication by Buzzfeed. (Could you mix in some food-related content such as dining on a budget or local hot spots? Do you have partnerships with any local establishments?)
• Favorite Retail is Amazon. (This tells us what kind of experience they want when they are ready to make a purchase decision – a fast and easy one. How can you simplify the call to action for them?)
• Favorite Actor is Adam Sandler. (Do you want to mix in some humor in your content?)

Assemble a group of people to review the insights in a team analysis. You'll get a variety of perspectives on what the various data mean and how it can translate into message and tactics.

Support Your Offline Tactics With Custom Audiences

It takes somewhere between six to 13 touches to make a sale. So next time you're planning your direct mailing efforts, mix up mediums. Stagger the touches by mixing in some social media ads to engage your members in another channel.

If you're planning a mail campaign, you've already done half of the hard work. Just build custom audiences off your list and stagger your messages over six to 10 weeks with the mail drop date smack in the middle. If you want to get really fancy, you can align an email campaign over it too.

Rethink Your Social Funnels

Credit union marketing teams can utilize Facebook Audiences to gain insights into their members' personas.

Finally, social funnels usually behave differently. Instead of receiving a direct response to drive someone into a loan application, get them to say yes to a piece of content first. Maybe they download a first-time homebuyer's checklist. That lets you create a remarketing audience that you can serve an ad to later that asks them to call and get in touch with your loan officers when they have additional questions.

If you've engaged the previous tactics, they may also be getting a first-time homebuyer flyer in the mail, which will increase the number of marketing touches to nudge them along their buyer journey and increase the overall likelihood of a response.

Relevance Drives ROI

The more relevant your efforts, the higher your measured ROI will be. If you can't tackle all of these elements, take it one step at a time, ease into it and see how one change, such as refining your content calendar with data and insights from your personas, affects engagement at the top of your funnel.

What steps do you take inside your credit union to ensure ROI? Shoot me an email with your experiences.