Unless you've spent the last 3 years living under a rock, you will have noticed the boom in popularity of social media websites and, subsequently, social media marketing.

Even the biggest social media sceptic is beginning to come around to the idea of asking his Facebook friends to 'like' his business page, promoting his products and services to the followers that he has built-up on Twitter and networking round-the-clock on LinkedIn.

Times have changed.

Social Media marketing slots nicely into the Lead Nurturing process required to suit the needs of today's buyer. It gives you – the business – the opportunity to build relationships and engage with, rather than sell to, the masses in an informal setting.

But while businesses of all shapes and sizes have begun to both understand and embrace the benefits of using social media to promote their business, the vast majority have no idea if their social media strategy has been a success.

For example, while 93% of B2B marketers confirmed that they engaged in some form of social media marketing, a whopping 75% admitted that they do not measure the ROI of the social marketing programs they use.

Though utilising social media marketing isn't selling, it is still a hugely influential marketing tool and as such it seems crazy that so many marketers are happy to commit time and manpower to it without having any idea whether it's working or not.

Think about the content you're sending out. The absolute minimum requirement from social media marketing is that it increases visiting rates to your website.

Is it doing this? Do you know if it is doing this?

CRM will provide you with the answers to these questions.

An all-conquering CRM package can often seem an overkill for smaller and medium-sized businesses, but there are smaller, cheaper alternatives that provide you with the monitoring tools to tell you if your social media strategy is working, or if you're wasting your time.

It can be difficult to fully ensure that the information that you are sending out is useful to your audience. But by measuring the success – or lack of – you are ensuring that you always stay one step ahead; sending out more of the things that people respond to and sending out less of the stuff that they don't.

Simple.

At Contact Edge CRM, we specialise in Microsoft CRM, which helps businesses find creative ways to engage with customers.  And by accurately tracking how the first engagement was initiated, it is easy to determine which elements of your marketing strategy are working.

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