How to Communicate Social Media Results: Data Analysis and Storytelling

Your boss is asking you to prove the ROI of your social media or digital marketing work. And you launch on a mission to demonstrate social media results. You show data and more data, yet, your boss is still asking, “but, where are my results”?

It happens more than we’d like. And generally, it’s not that there isn’t social media ROI (or digital marketing ROI), or no data to measure. The culprit is usually one of the following:

1. Your audiences don’t understand the role of marketing data when measuring ROI.
2. The data is not presented in a convincing way. You can’t just report numbers, you need to interpret them to tell compelling business stories.

What is the role of marketing data in measuring ROI?

Marketing is an expense. You will start seeing returns for this expense after you’ve been doing good marketing for a while. Often, a year or two. But even then, the effect is delayed. Expecting marketing to give instant and clear ROI is not realistic, for many reasons:

1. Getting people to become familiar with you takes time. Unless your business has a striking name or you just became the most talked about item on the news, it’ll take time for people  to remember you. They won’t buy your product if they don’t even know who you are. So, first, you’ll have to invest in being known, and there’s no immediate financial return to that.
2. No one buys at first contact. It takes 7-13 or more touches before someone buys.
3. You can’t and shouldn’t attribute sales to just one marketing tactic or channel. For three reasons:
   1. Have I mentioned it takes 7-13 touches before someone buys?
   2. Different channels and tactics address the needs of a customer at different points in their buying journey.
   3. 67% of online shoppers made purchases that involve multiple channels.
4. You have to invest in a first buy before you can get a second. It’s cheaper to get an existing customer to buy rather than a new customer. The probability of selling to a new customer is between 5 and 20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60 and 70%.

Given these facts, ROI should be measured for combined marketing efforts not by channel. There will be marketing impact indicators by channel, and it is important to measure these (more in the next section). In parallel you must measure overall ROI changes and watch for changes there (ideally, watch for an increase in overall ROI).  

How to use marketing data to tell business stories

Let’s look at this second reason that makes it hard to convince your boss that your marketing is working. It takes work to tell stories with data, stories that show progress toward business goals. If not presented well, all the data in the world won’t be enough to show business impact.

1. Know what the data means

Truth is, too many marketers can’t show results because they don’t know what the numbers mean. For example, what does it mean if your engagement numbers are high? Does it mean that people see your content? Or does it mean that they read your content? Is there even a difference? Or is it that they “like” a “post.” And what if they liked your post? What does that mean?

Every time you catch yourself saying, “our engagement numbers are growing,” stop and ask yourself – so what? That’s the difference between reporting data and doing an analysis. You have to go beyond just spewing numbers, and actually think through (analyze) what those numbers mean.

What does your digital marketing data mean in relation to your objectives?

Here are some interpretations that may help:

You can see more data points and interpretations in our earlier article on social media data analysis.

2. Translate data into stories

• Use graphs. Graphs show how your numbers change over time. You’ll be able to point to peaks and show trends. Stories have timelines, and so does your data. So make use of timelines to show why and how the numbers have grown and what you expect will happen next.

• User percentages. Percentages give context. And contexts are necessary to tell compelling stories. For example, the volume of visits to your website is not as revealing as what these visitors do on the website. What percentage of those who visit convert? What percentage of visitors visit more than one page?
• Illustrate. There are many options out there to help you graph and created images to make data more visual – from excel graphs to PowerPoint, Canva, or if you use a Mac, check out the Toolbox for iWork, which includes infographics templates.

3. Know your audience and customize your report

Do they understand marketing? Are they good with math? Are they detail oriented? Why do they care about the ROI? Do they have to make a case to their bosses?

You may have to start with a discussion on what data points matter and why. For example, while your executives may want a direct dollar value tied back to your marketing, you will have to explain that before you can sell, you have to have “visitors” to your digital “shop.” So your job as a marketer is to get those visitors to the “shop.” There, a sales mechanism, such as a salesperson, will close the deal.

If you know your audience you’ll know what associations to make to get them to understand. If they’re into baseball, remind them that the majority of a baseball game is spent trying to get players to bases. Once in a while you have a home run, but that’s a very small percentage of the game time. If you were to measure the ROI of each hit and play you may come up empty. It’s the final game score that matters.

Prepare for each scenario:

• The mathematician: make sure your math is perfect. If you are bad with math, ask for help.
• The auditor: they’re highly detail-oriented, so make a list of all possible questions and thoroughly answer them. Invite others to ask questions so you can get a wide range of possibilities.
• The executive: keep it short, focus on significance, conclusions and projections. Answering the “what does this mean to the bottom line” question is very important.
• The manager: if they care about ROI only to please their boss, prepare the tools they need to show their boss positive news. An in-depth, actionable presentation, with access to raw data may work best.
• The expert: they may not need much storytelling. Show them your process and discoveries in great detail.
• The novice: keep it simple and explain why you are focusing on the points you’re trying to make. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.

The digital marketing and social media ROI questions will still cause you some pain. My hope is that by focusing on teaching your decision makers what marketing data is relevant, and presenting your data in more compelling ways, you’ll have more productive conversations about the results of your work.

What have you found works in helping people to understand digital marketing data?