While social media marketing services introduce unique and interesting channels to assist in lead generation help, every investment must be matched against clear performance objectives and accurately measured using business-impacting metrics such as sales and conversion events. With that said, these metrics must go beyond industry-standard numbers most businesses follow like impressions and clicks.

Marketing practitioners and executives must embrace and follow consistent search engine marketing management practices when investing in social media marketing. First, marketers must make sure that their business objectives are well email list defined. They need to clearly understand the fundamental goals that their organization needs to achieve in order to flourish. Next, marketers must define the inbound marketing objectives that will help in achieving the fundamental organization goals.

Then, they must determine the key performance indicators or success metrics and know that they will use to measure performance against their stated marketing objectives. Then, and only then, should marketers select a social media investment that helps drive their success metrics. Optimizing social media marketing and social media analytics is an iterative process. Marketers should not expect to get the entire methodology right the first time. Only when they continuously measure performance, optimize campaign elements, and repeat, can they ultimately fund the investments that provide the biggest returns for the organization.