Social selling is utilizing social media to drive business conversations and eventually convert those into buyer action. In our latest articles, we already covered how companies can harness the power of social selling by creating a program that mobilizes salespeople and arming them with the tools needed to reach the right buyers with the right message at the right time.

We also explained how social selling can increase your return on investment and help you revolutionize your digital marketing approach, and how to craft a social selling business case to revolutionize digital marketing. In the last part of our ROI special, we want to show how different social selling tactics can help you achieve the best possible results with your program to ensure you use it to its full potential.

Measuring results through analytics 

To pinpoint which social selling tactics work best for your company, you need to measure your results attribution. Simply put, results attribution allows you to determine which social selling tactics – and subsequent client interactions – contributed to your marketing goals. The process extends beyond your social media channel and encompasses your whole marketing funnel. It pulls metrics from the entire customer journey to identify the channels and messages that inspire potential buyers to take action. 

The ROI of a social selling campaign measures revenue, while attribution measures impact. Results attribution tells you the value of the various points of your marketing channels. It allows you to better connect with potential customers by painting a picture of how they came to buy from your business. 

Fair warning, painting this picture is not easy if you don’t have a large amount of data accumulated over a long period of time. However, it is worth a try! After all, you can’t calculate the return on investment unless you can pinpoint how your social selling program contributes to sales. 

Attribution modeling

Attribution modeling is how you can assign value to a customer’s points of interaction with your brand that led to a purchase. The models work backward from the purchase to identify and assign value to all the interaction points within the marketing funnel. 

Models help you understand if your social strategy is working, what stages in the journey are most or least significant, and where you should focus your marketing efforts. There are three broad types of modeling, so let’s take a look: 

1. Single source. Single source attribution models assign all the credit to one touchpoint, usually the first or last touch. 

• The first touch attribution model credits how the customer first heard about you. It pinpoints the top of the marketing funnel.

• The last touch attribution model does the opposite of the first touch and credits the customer’s last interaction before making the final purchase. 

• Multi-touch. In the multi-touch attribution (MTA) model, each contributing channel for the entirety of a customer’s journey is given credit for contributing to the final conversion. The detailed nature of the MTA models makes them very challenging to track. The right tools need to be in place to track and analyze touchpoints that range from ads and social posts to webinars and e-newsletters. There are many MTA models, but here are two basics. 

• The linear multi-touch model gives equal weight to every interaction point. It assumes every touchpoint is equal to the next, which is typically not the case. 

• The U-shaped model gives 40% to the first touch, 40% to the last touch, and 20% to everything in between. This semi-weighted modeling recognizes that the first and last touch is most important to the customer, but everything else still counts.  

• Weighted multi-touch. Weighted attribution models give the most accurate depiction of the customer’s journey because they are tailored to your organization’s goals. This algorithmic model weighs each touchpoint differently based on your desired criteria. While this model is the most accurate, it’s also the most difficult to set up and might not be possible without the help of an expert. 

Three attribution tracking tool:

Setting up an attribution model for your company might not be feasible at this moment, but that doesn’t mean you should give up. There are accessible tools that you can utilize starting today. 

1. Surveys are simple and effective tools for those just getting started. For every lead generation, include a question that asks how they heard about you. 

• Bitly link shortening is a conversion and tracking tool that takes a long link and shortens it to a unique one. If you want, you can pay to have a branded one, so every short link generated has your company name. 

• Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) allows you to add tags at the end of a URL to track where the link click came from and if it’s associated with a particular campaign. UTM tracking in social media is essential because it gives you more information on which networks to credit.

Do the best you can.

A closer look at the different models exemplified why tracking attributes can be challenging. Still, it’s worth the effort. We recommend implementing a few attribution tracking tools and focusing on measuring KPIs instead of jumping into attribution models. 

As you establish goals for your social selling team, those KPIs can change. The more campaigns you run, the more data you accumulate, and the more experience you get with interpreting that data, the more efficient your social selling team will become. 

Are you up for introducing attribution tracking tools or models into your marketing strategy? What KPIs is your company currently measuring? Leave us a comment on LinkedIn to let us know.