Report: Marketers Struggle Mightily with Social Media ROI

In what should not be a shock to any PR pro who has struggled with how to monetize social media channels, 60 percent of companies struggle to measure the ROI of their social media marketing, according to new research from social media analytics company Simply Measured.

"The State of Social Media Marketing 2015,” which took the pulse of 600 social media marketing executives, underscores several major challenges that social marketers face, and highlights the way these challenges shift as teams grow.

For example, despite the constant chorus in media and marketing circles for more integrated digital communications, the survey found that social media predominately reports to Marketing (57 percent), followed by Other (16 percent), Communications (13 percent) and Public Relations (9 percent). And for those enterprise companies in which PR and Communications is separate from Marketing, such a setup can be problematic for brands that want to get a better handle on their social media activities.

However, regardless of which discipline owns social media, companies continue to have a tough time trying to monetize their social channels. The more marketing turf battles that ensue regarding social media, the more companies will fall behind in the accelerating race for social eyeballs.

In addition to more half the respondents struggling to measure their social media marketing, tying social media activities to business outcomes (50 percent) and developing a social media strategy (48 percent) were cited as the top three challenges of cultivating a social media program.

What is more, only 22 percent of the respondents said social media data impacts the overall business, suggesting that PR and marketing pros have a difficult time making sense of the analytics that are inundating marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing is still relatively new for many companies, and a lot depends on how fast the C-suite wants to step up such efforts.

According to the survey, social media now represents approximately 10 percent of a company’s digital marketing budget. That will grow to 22 percent of the budge in the next five years, a 126 percent increase

As social media budgeting grows, brands and organizations will have to build staff accordingly. A majority of the respondents (65 percent) said that one to three people now work on their social team. About 15 percent of the respondents said they three to five people work on their social team while 5 percent of the respondents do not have a social team at all.