In a recent business education webinar Head of Social Media at Easy Weddings, Emma Woythaler, shed light on the true value of social media for businesses, specifically within the wedding industry.
Emma shared invaluable insights into how wedding businesses can make the most of their time, energy, and money investments in their social media strategies. Here’s a summary of what we learned during this enlightening session.
In a recent business education webinar Head of Social Media at Easy Weddings, Emma Woythaler, shed light on the true value of social media for businesses, specifically within the wedding industry.
Emma shared invaluable insights into how wedding businesses can maximise their time, energy, and money investments in their social media strategies. Here’s a summary of what we learned during this enlightening session.
The Social Media Investment Conundrum
One of the biggest challenges wedding businesses face in social media is the uncertainty surrounding the Return On investment (ROI). It’s common to wonder whether the money and effort put into social media marketing are truly paying off.
In business, investments are the resources to improve a company, such as time and money. The return is the profit made as a result of your investments. ROI is generally defined as the ratio of net profit over the total cost of the investment — essentially, how much money you made back from your time and financial investment.
Social media ROI can be tricky to calculate because it doesn’t just refer to direct profit.
In most cases, social media marketing encapsulates areas like brand awareness, customer engagement, customer retention and acquisition. These areas are not so easy to measure in terms of direct monetary gain. As a result, we often rely on other social media KPIs and assign monetary value to these metrics to accurately calculate social media ROI.
Maximising Your Cash Investment
Emma shared some actionable tips on how to make the most of your financial investment in social media:
Know Your Objective
Determine your specific goals for social media advertising, whether it’s driving website traffic, generating inquiries, receiving direct messages, or other objectives. Tailor your ad campaigns accordingly.
Start Small, Then Scale
Start with smaller amounts and multiple ads instead of committing your entire budget upfront, Emma advised. Experiment with different creatives and messaging. Gradually increase your investment based on what works best.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket… If you’ve got $1,000 to spend for the month, don’t allocate the whole amount straight up. Perhaps put $150 into three different ads and test your creative, test your messaging, and put those up for a week.
“After the seven days, I go, okay, ad A and ad C performed well. Ad B, not so much, so I’m going to turn ad B off and add another $150 to split between A and C. And then at the end of the next five days, if ad C is outperforming, let’s keep going with that.
“Now I’ve got $700 left for the rest of the month, so I’ll put that towards ad C and keep monitoring,” Emma said.
Be Timely
Understand when your target audience is most active and interested in your services. Allocate a higher budget to periods when engagement is likely higher, aligning with seasonal trends or key events like engagement season.
Calculating ROI Without Direct Metrics
Emma also provided insights into how you can calculate your monetary gains from social media without direct ROI metrics. It involves understanding the user journey in three simple steps:
- Monthly Link Clicks (Y) lead to Inquiries (X), which ultimately result in Conversions (Z).
- If social media contributes to 20% of your total link clicks, attribute 20% of your conversions to social media inquiries.
- Calculate ROI by multiplying the cost of your service by the number of conversions attributed to social media, then divide it by your total investment (money or time).
For example, you’ve spent 10 hours a month on social media, equating to a professional rate of $2,000. I’ll add a financial advertising spend of $1,500 to get a total time + money investment of $3,500.
Then, if I get 1,000 monthly link clicks, resulting in 250 enquiries, that converts to 25 sales. This equates to a return of 5 conversions, or 20% from social media.
So, if my product is $5,000 and I multiply that by the 5 conversions from my monthly social media investment, I have generated $25,000 in income. Then I divide the $3,500 investment of my time and ad spend, so my actual return is 7.14 times my investment. That’s a pretty decent ROI!
6 Top Tips for Boosting Social Media ROI
Emma offered these 6 key tips for improving your social media ROI:
- Know Your Audience: Understand your audience’s preferences and tailor your content to their interests.
- Experiment with Content: Don’t be afraid to try new content ideas, but ensure they resonate with your audience. User-generated content is your BFF!
- Optimise and Tailor: Fine-tune your content based on when your audience is most active.
- Benchmark, Measure, and Track: Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and monitor your performance regularly.
- Learn from Insights: Dive into social media analytics to gain insights into what’s working and what needs improvement.
- Test: When in doubt, test it out!
Emma explores the key demographic for wedding businesses, and how to leverage social media metrics further, in this article: Maximising Your Social Media Potential for Sales Conversions — with Emma.
Final Thoughts on Social Media ROI for Your Wedding Business
Unlocking the full potential of social media for your wedding business involves understanding your audience, experimenting with content, and continually learning from your insights. By applying these strategies, you can enhance your social media ROI and strengthen your brand presence in the competitive wedding industry.
📽️ For a deeper dive into these insights, watch the full webinar below.
Emma shares more tips on content creation from her previous webinarInstagrtam Reels: How Wedding Suppliers Can Level Up on Insta.
Catch up on our business webinars you missed
Whether you’re a newer business, more established in the industry, or a sole trader or a larger business, there’s always something to learn from our wedding industry webinars.
You can watch the replay of this webinar and others in our Professional Development webinar resource centre, here.
Be sure to register for our next webinar and mark November 2 in your calendar as we present “The Wedding Trends to Watch in 2024”, with key insights from our annual business and couples wedding surveys. Register here.
If you aren’t yet online with Easy Weddings and would like to see how we can help increase your brand presence and help book more weddings, submit an online enquiry form, here, and we’ll be in touch.
