Every digital marketer knows that good traffic doesn’t always translate to high conversions. Unless the leads are guided into a system nurturing them throughout the process, they don’t stick around. As a result, all of the likes and shares amount to nothing.

That’s a big waste of marketing money. How big, you ask? According to The Content Factory, the average cost of outsourcing social media services ranges between $200 and $350 per day, or $4,000 to $7,000 per month.

Further, The CMO Survey revealed that social media spending had tripled between 2009 and 2016, reaching 11.7 percent of total marketing budgets.

However, despite almost 80 percent of marketers using at least one channel to promote their businesses, only 48 percent attribute any return on investment to social media, according to the DMA.

The question, therefore, is: Why are so many marketers gaining so little from what’s supposed to be one of the most effective marketing channels ever? If you are one of them and want to answer this question, you need to evaluate your social media strategy.

Use the following three steps to find out why your social media strategy may not be working:

Determine where your leads are coming from

The first step in optimizing your ROI is to determine the source of your leads. Some companies don’t know where their leads come from. They see the increases and drops in lead numbers but don’t know what’s causing the fluctuations. They might assume it’s because of a particular event, and they could be partially right. But the truth is much more complicated.

To accurately attribute inbound leads to their sources, marketers assign codes to specific pages so that they can track the leads and then sort them according to the sources. This allows marketers to optimize each source individually, capitalizing on the strengths of the campaign and addressing its weaknesses.

“It’s easy to manage sales leads from social media using the various automation tools,” said Tiziano Motti, whose success getting elected to the European Parliament was the subject of the book Sono Come Te, Dammi Fiducia, which in English translates to “I’m like you, trust me”—the successful slogan of his election campaign.

Motti, without any prior political experience, beat all odds and got elected into the EU Parliament using social media marketing.

Motti warns, however, that not all tools give deep insights. “The average web analytics tool reports on metrics such as hits, clicks and bounce rate, which don’t offer much in showing what your site is really achieving,” he says. To see more meaningful data and attribute leads, Motti suggests that you look at detailed stats of your visitors. These include locations, page views and conversion details. This data will enable you to tailor your site to a specific objective.

Evaluate your keyword strategy

Your keyword strategy should extend beyond the usual search-engine-optimization efforts and include your social media activities. Speaking from personal experience, Texas-based automobile accident attorney Patrick O’Hara said, “if you’re losing social media leads, maybe you should look into your keyword strategy for clues about why it’s happening.”

Your social media leads might not be materializing for several reasons. For example, your blog content and the keywords you use there don’t match your social media postings and the keywords and hashtags you use on that channel. Or your social media keywords don’t match your audience or your service. Or perhaps you don’t use keywords in your social media posts at all.

O’Hara suggests that you do the following to improve your social media keyword strategy:

• Post rich, interesting content.
• Incorporate keywords in your social media posts.
• Use link shorteners, especially on Twitter.
• Focus on keywords that drive conversion, and use every keyword with clear intent in mind.

Evaluate your conversion funnel

“No social marketing campaign will succeed without a well-designed and clear conversion funnel,” Motti said. “If you have your keyword strategy well lined up with your target audience and your conversions still don’t improve as expected, maybe you should check again to make sure your conversion funnel is built for your campaign structure.”