There are a common set of challenges that can arise when measuring the ROI of a social selling program. At last month’s Hearsay Summit, Corinna Graham-Reilly, Senior Marketing Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance joined us to share her experience with finding and sharing the value of Liberty Mutual’s program – from selecting KPIs that matter and validating growth to secure buy-in. Here are three helpful considerations when creating an ROI roadmap for your social media program:

Adjust your program’s goals by its phase of maturity

As programs mature, the way you measure and communicate ROI will, and should, change. In the early stages, for example, activating participants and ensuring field-wide adoption are key to growth, but it’s logical to move beyond these basic activation metrics as programs move forward.

In the latter stages of maturity, program managers should look at KPIs around outcomes and effectiveness, such as engagement rates or network growth of participants. As agents and advisors build their social media maturity – e.g., by leveraging custom content and practicing social reciprocity – program admins can start tying business outcomes back to those efforts.

An early focus of Liberty Mutual’s program was getting their agents to participate regularly in the program. Now in a later stage of maturity, Corinna’s team is more focused on how the content they provide is performing within the program and on social media. To gauge the efficacy of the content in their library, they look at the number of publishers, to understand how many agents are sharing the post, and the number of engagements received, to quantify how that content is resonating with the audiences on social. 

Use what’s available to tell the best story you can

Another way Corinna’s team measures the impact and ROI of their program is by analyzing their field’s social media behaviors, ranging from frequency of posts, types of posts, network growth, social maturity, interactions, responsiveness, and more. “We're trying to compare agents who are doing these behaviors with their business results, such as referrals, leads, new business,… to see what the story is here that we can tell around these various behaviors…and the types of business results that are happening.”

Comparing these social selling activities against business results has helped to illustrate the program’s value more clearly. For example, one analysis showed that the agents who were the most active in Liberty Mutual’s program averaged seven more insurance binds per month than agents who were not active in the social program.

However, without dedicated internal resources to help pull and compare the field org data with social data, it can be a struggle to quantify ROI. Corinna’s advice? Use the data that you have, to tell the best story you can. Even a basic story can be helpful in laying the groundwork for getting more resources in the future, to tell a more detailed and in-depth ROI story.

Communicate results with your team to inspire buy-in

Sharing your program’s ROI story helps to inspire buy-in as well as activate agents and advisors who may still be on the fence. “Our team has definitely found that one of the barriers to entry with being active on social media, in general, is some people are just having a hard time getting started.” 

To ease people into the program, Corinna’s team uses a hands-on approach to training: namely, an 8-week social media boot camp to help onboard small groups of agents. These boot camps cover more than program basics. On top of learning how to sign up and navigate the program, participants also see demos that give a deeper understanding of the different social channels. “We've found that at the end of those boot camps, … those 20 or so agents will become some of our biggest cheerleaders.”

Liberty Mutual has also found other ways to reiterate the impact of social selling, such as leveraging weekly field-wide emails sent directly from field leadership and sharing program outcomes during office huddles and regional meetings.

A huge thanks to Corinna for sharing lessons from Liberty Mutual’s program and their ROI journey with us! View this and other sessions from Hearsay Summit 2022 to hear how additional experts are forging a new path in financial services.