Another three months have passed. It’s your favorite time of year. You have to compile your quarterly social media report. You have to become a statistician, dig for numbers and try to prove ROI. To make your life easier, consider tying your B2B social media strategy to an inbound program tracked with a marketing automation platform.

By using social media to complement an inbound program, you can track the effectiveness of your postings. If you can show your posts are sending visitors to a landing page on your website, your strategy gains strength and validity.

A marketing automation platform can trace activity back to your social media post. You can see when a website visitor comes from your tweet, moves along the sales journey and ultimately purchases a product. You become your company’s social media hero! And you can prove ROI!

Of course, you want to balance your social content. You should include links and commentary about relevant, educational industry information. But the ultimate goal is to make inbound-related posts support or begin the journey that leads prospective buyers to your products and services.

Tips to measure your B2B social media strategy:

Identify goals: These could be increasing social media reach and driving more visitors to your website.

Establish benchmarks: Use historical company data of previous performance, or start fresh with your new inbound B2B social media strategy.

Calculate ROI: How was your time spent in relation to meeting your goals? For example, if one of your goals was to drive ten visitors to your website from Facebook this quarter, you can gather that information from your marketing automation platform. This technology enables you to calculate your conversion rate. It shows you how often people became leads after seeing your content. This data will show what posts worked and where you might need to tweak your plan.

Other key metrics to consider:

Attract visitors: Look at metrics related to how many people viewed or clicked a piece of content.

Increase visitors: Review your social sharing metrics (retweets, shares). These indicate the posts your audience engaged with the most.

All marketing tactics should be thought of as part of a larger whole, rather than separate pieces. By strategically integrating all marketing tactics, the marketing program becomes more effective and cost efficient. As a B2B agency, we developed B2B 360 Integrated Digital Marketing to meet this improved performance need. To learn more about B2B 360 and how it will benefit your business, download our free eBook: The Better Path to Top-Tier Tech Marketing.

Lisa Goetz is a public relations executive at Schubert b2b, where she primarily writes content and manages media relations. She brings 20 years of editorial and communications experience to Schubert b2b and holds a PhD in English literature from Duquesne University. When not in the office, Lisa likes to take excursions with her husband and hang out with her cat and a good book.