Achieving Social Performance by Hootsuite

REPORT

Achieving Social Performance How to deliver the revenue growth CMOs demand with social media

Executive summary

Marketers are under pressure to attribute ROI to social programs as they fight for budget alongside established revenue-focused channels like paid media, email, and search engine marketing. To succeed, marketers must elevate social from a tactical channel to a growth engine. This involves creating a long-term vision of how social will transform their organization—as well as delivering data that shows social is converting audiences and driving revenue along the way.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CMOs know social media matters, but marketers must work harder to prove its value.

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RECOMMENDATION 1

To achieve the reach needed to inspire and influence purchase decisions, social advocacy should remain your top brand-building priority. Every organization knows about advocacy; few give it the strategic priority it demands, especially as Facebook’s pivot to a “privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform” will continue to push out corporate content in favor of ephemeral interactions with friends and close networks.1 RECOMMENDATION 2

Move from ad-hoc social promotion tactics to structured campaigns.

Advocacy gives you compelling data to present to CMOs, showing that social is driving product consideration. But don’t stop there. Use social advertising to expand beyond your loyal social audience, increase market penetration, and deliver the conversions CMOs expect. Most social teams have adopted ads as part of their content amplification toolbox. But ad-hoc post promotion alone won’t deliver success. A planned, structured social campaign strategy can help you expand your target, run targeted ads at scale, and optimize your spending.

RECOMMENDATION 3

Take small steps to solve social attribution.

Attribution still has a long way to go for every channel, with only 36.4% of companies able to prove the impact of marketing spending.2 Mature channels like TV and digital advertising use a combination of complex statistical models, expensive technology, and evolving best practices—but even then, data can be directional at best. However, you can help CMOs understand social attribution by borrowing established models from paid media teams, as well as integrating social data with omni-channel approaches to better demonstrate the impact of social marketing on financial and customer outcomes.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Put advocacy—not chasing algorithms—at the center of your content strategy.

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which brands they thought were masters of social they likely would have replied with brands such as Red Bull, BuzzFeed, or the Dollar Shave Club. Back then, marketers were misled with a popular myth that went something like this: “Advertising is dead—and to reach consumers, you must think like a media brand, attracting an audience with a never-ending drumbeat of organic and viral content.”

IN THE LAST DECADE, IF YOU ASKED A CMO

But as we enter the next decade of social with 2020 around the corner, it’s clear that simply publishing content on social media and using traffic and shares as metrics for success will not be enough.

CROSSROADS

Social media is at a crossroads

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5

CMOs are under pressure to deliver measurable growth

CROSSROADS

In the past, CMOs saw their role as the organization’s chief storyteller. In recent years, CMOs have also been tasked with identifying and mapping new routes to revenue. Many companies—including Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Uber, Lyft, Beam Suntory, Taco Bell, and Hyatt Hotels—have eliminated the CMO role, replacing it with titles such as “chief growth officer,” “chief experience officer,” or “chief commercial officer.”3 According to the CMO Survey, increased acquisition of new customers, increased purchase volume, and increased cross-selling are the top business drivers CMOs are focusing on in 2020 and beyond. With these expanded responsibilities, CMOs are under pressure to do more with less. As a result, social marketers will face more scrutiny and less patience for social metrics with unclear links to show that social strategies are driving real business outcomes.4

Attribution is holding back social transformation CMOs know social is a critical part of building brands, customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer service. However, as the authors of the CMO Survey note, executives need better data to justify investments in social—which has “led companies to prioritize search engine optimization and other paid digital media over other digital expenditures.”5 While CMOs are prioritizing the established channels they know best, they understand that social can build compelling competitive advantages if executed properly.

Social media seen as tool to accomplish key strategic objectives for the company 100% 88.2%

Feb 2018 60.1%

50%

64.7% 55.5%

Feb 2019

59.2%

45.6% 32.6%

28.7%

28.7%

29.0%

35.3% 21.8%

33.6% 16.6%

40.8% 25.6% 13.5%

17.2% 10.2%

8.3%

13.9%

0% Brand awareness and brand building

Acquiring new customers

Source: The CMO Survey

Introducing new products and services

Retaining current customers

Brand promotions (e.g., contest, coupons)

Improving employee engagement

Marketing research

Identifying new Identifying customer groups new product you currently and service don’t target opportunities

Improving current products or services

Improving customer `service*

Social media spending is expected to rise by 73% over five years from

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11.4% to 19.7% of marketing budgets. And social’s role in accomplishing key strategic objectives has soared in the last year:

(up from 45.6% in 2018) 60.1% report using social for acquiring new customers (up from 32.6% in 2018) 55.5% report using social to retain current customers (up from 28.7% in 2018) CMOs clearly understand that social is where customers and competitors are headed. But attribution must improve in order to elevate the strategic priority of social in the organization. CMOs need to see data on both short-term results (conversions, sales, revenue) and long-term strategic benefits such as sharper customer insights, brand building, and improving customer and employee engagement.

When paid media teams ask for budget, they’re armed with data on brand lift, ROAS, and LTV metrics. TV spends can be justified with multi-channel attribution and marketing mix modeling. Social must also fight for its piece of the budget pie. We must work harder to gather, report, and analyze the hard data and conversion metrics that CMOs prize.

Consumers—and social metrics—are harder to track Consumers now share less on public feeds, while accelerating their use of 1:1 messaging apps

While CMOs are demanding harder data from social marketing teams, consumers now share less on public feeds, while accelerating their use of 1:1 messaging apps. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Stories continue to climb in usage, and traditional social metrics such as likes have been removed in seven test countries for Instagram.6 With less content sharing and consumption happening in public feeds, if you’re using native networks to demonstrate results, your data sources are quickly drying up. The rise of private communication on social channels also challenges traditional approaches to social marketing. Expect to see less success with using social for content distribution and more emphasis on spreading content via micro-influencers, connecting 1:1 with customers, and creating value in private messaging contexts.

CROSSROADS

88.2% of CMOs report using social to build brand awareness

It’s time to elevate social from a tactical channel to a growth engine enduring, customer-centric brands. Social is the heart of modern customer engagement. It’s a strategic investment that delivers business advantages far beyond short-term lifts in sales.

While CMOs are tied to revenue targets, short-term thinking can also hamper the broader performance of companies. With the rise in data and measurement technology, it’s easier to optimize for tactical wins (such as a spike in sales due to a sales promotion) rather than longer-term investments that build lasting brand equity, customer happiness, and true differentiation.

Social touches every stage of the customer lifecycle and successful social media strategies lift all channels in the marketing mix.

In this light, early adopters of social were right to think bigger than just conversion metrics. Because social touches every stage of the customer lifecycle, it has broad value to companies for brand building, customer and employee experience, and unparalleled customer insights. This means that it’s short-sighted to value social based on only direct conversions, as successful social media strategies lift all channels in the marketing mix.

For example, search and social—both from an organic and paid perspective—work together in the customer purchase journey, with Forrester finding that 56% of consumers use both channels in complementary ways to drive customer awareness, consideration, purchase, and ongoing engagement.7 Facebook has been shown to prime audiences to drive higher responses to TV advertising. And campaigns that use a cross-channel approach with social and other forms of marketing activity produce higher ROI. That said, marketers must connect the dots and show how social is not only building brand awareness or offering customer support, but also driving tangible cost savings and lifts in sales. Marketers must both create a long-term vision of how social will transform their organization—as well as deliver data that shows social is converting audiences and driving revenue along the way.

CROSSROADS

At Hootsuite, we believe in the transformative power of social to build

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These three strategies—while not new and flashy— are what’s driving results for our customers.

In fact, one of the biggest distractions for social marketers is the never-ending lists of new innovations. We recommend caution ahead, as CMOs are increasingly frustrated with the lack of accountability in social. Focus on improving what you’re already doing rather than chasing quick tactical wins with the latest feature innovations from social networks.

We’ve based our recommendations on what’s working with our customer base, as well as insights gathered from our Social Maturity Benchmarks, an internal database of 500+ enterprise organizations in 12 industries with data on how they’re adopting, expanding, and measuring social media.

THREE STRATEGIES

To deliver the data and results CMOs expect, focus on advocacy, ads, and attribution

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How leading organizations drive business results with social

THREE STRATEGIES

Hootsuite ranks organizations in five distinct stages of social maturity: foundational, tactical, strategic, leading, and transformative.

According to our benchmark data, the average organization sits within what we call the Tactical phase, which we define as customers “coordinating social media marketing activities across teams through the use of technology.” Our aggregated data over time shows a clear correlation between an advancement of social maturity and an increase in return on investment in social.

Hootsuite’s Five Stages of Social Media Maturity HOW DOES YOUR ORGANIZ ATION R ANK?

Request your free assessment and benchmark your social maturity against 500+ organizations in 12 industries. Each assessment is customized to your organization and includes practical recommendations. Contact us to learn more.

Foundational

Tactical

Strategic

Leading

Transformative

Developing social media marketing capabilities such as publishing, engagement and reporting

Coordinating social media marketing activities across teams through the use of technology

Executing multiple social media use cases and measuring the impact on departmental objectives

Driving business outcomes through the integration of social media use cases across the organization

Differentiating customer experience and achieving enterprise-wide business objectives through social media

In our experience, organizations see clear business value from social

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once they reach the Leading stage. In this stage, organizations are driving tangible business outcomes by integrating publishing workTHREE STRATEGIES

flows and measurement technology across the organization. When social publishing is standardized in large organizations, data becomes cleaner, easier to unite with other systems such as Adobe Analytics and CRM systems, and more visible among executives, giving social the credit it deserves.

Reaching the Leading stage in social maturity can significantly improve social performance and ROI. In our analysis of benchmark data from 500+ organizations in 12 industries, organizations can expect a 42x lift in brand awareness, 6.2x increase in customer engagement on social channels, and a 32x increase in website traffic.

With tangible business benefits now visible from social, adoption in the organization tends to surge with a 238% increase.

To begin moving the needle on social maturity, marketers are taking a more programmatic approach to their social media. The most effective strategies integrate employee advocacy programs with core marketing initiatives, build formal social ad strategies, and track social programs against clear business goals using website conversion metrics from social channels.

Increasing Social Maturity to ‘Leading’ Significantly Improves ROI

42x Brand Awareness

6.2x Engagement

Based on Q1 2019 aggregated data from Hootsuite’s Social Maturity Assessment

32x Website Traffic

238x Org Adoption

1.

Organic content amplification used to be the primary value of social marketers. But as reach has consistently dropped, many marketers struggle to know how they can drive value beyond traffic and shares.

At the same time, organizations are becoming more open and connected. Employees use networks like Workplace by Facebook to share ideas; sales teams connect with leads on LinkedIn; HR teams monitor chat apps like Blind; support teams are adapting to the speed of messaging apps; and marketing teams are using user-generated content and reviews from customers.

While brand-published content has a place in the purchase journey, customers place a much higher value on 1:1 interactions with friends, peers, and family. The opportunity for social marketing teams: Increase the strategic priority of advocacy and demonstrate how peer-to-peer engagement works in tandem with the other digital and traditional channels in your marketing mix.

ADVOCACY

Put advocacy—not chasing algorithms— at the center of your content strategy

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Stop chasing algorithms and start building advocacy Facebook says its main goal is to “prioritize posts from friends and family over public content.”8 And LinkedIn reports that on average, an organization’s employees have ten times more combined followers than the organization itself.9 One-to-one engagement is a reliable path to influence sales. A study

by Forrester found that the main driver of awareness for customers in social media was the activity of their social connections. As Forrester found, “eighty-one percent of customers who credit social media for making them aware of a recent purchase report it was either the passive action of seeing a friend’s post (52%) or actively asking their connections (27%) about a product or service they are interested in.”10

Social directly influences purchases

85% 43% 38% Source: Forrester

of customers use social channels for discovery and consideration or purchase. of customers were influenced by a company’s social post when shopping, and 30% report they were influenced by paid social ads. of customers use online reviews to research brands, products, or services they’re interested in buying.

ADVOCACY

Social advocacy should be your top brand-building priority. After all,

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Everyone knows about advocacy. But Hootsuite’s study of over 9,000

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B2B and B2C marketing leaders found that just 30% of organizations run customer advocacy initiatives and less than one-quarter use employee advocacy or social selling.11 Not only do social networks prioritize customers’ posts; those posts also have a bigger impact. That’s why our customer Georgia State University asked students to use social media to promote the school’s commitment to innovation. The result: 6,500 shares through Hootsuite Amplify, 2.4 million social impressions, and an improved reputation.12 Similarly, our customer Meliá Hotels used Hootsuite Amplify to generate employee advocacy—and drove 61,000 social posts and 142 million impressions in 2018.13 Advocacy can be directly linked to top-line revenue growth. Our customer Amway, for example, provides each of its distributors (called Amway Business Owners) with personal retail websites (for example, amway.com/[distributorname]). This gives Amway a simple and centralized way to track the individual distributor’s ROI from social selling tactics.14 As Amway knows, social is essential for inspiring purchases, especially when products are recommended by like-minded peers. But tracking that last step to purchase can be opaque if customers leave social networks to convert on websites. With individual websites for thousands of distributors, it’s much easier to track these vital conversion metrics and better understand how social is directly increasing revenue. It was this investment in social selling programs and ROI measurement savvy that led to Amway being able to specifically attribute its 2018 sales growth increase to social selling in their annual report.15

ADVOCACY

Just 30% of organizations run customer advocacy initiatives and less than one-quarter use employee advocacy or social selling.

2.

Social marketing teams first adopted ads to overcome dwindling organic reach. But now, ads must become an integrated and programmatic part of how you reach and convert customers on social.l.

Social advertising can deliver the conversions CMOs demand.

According to a Forrester survey, social ads drive customers towards the purchase funnel more effectively than other digital ads.16 And PwC reports 37% of people start purchase journeys on social networks— more than any other digital channel.17 But while many organizations occasionally boost organic social posts, only 53% run social ad campaigns.18 And ad-hoc post promotion won’t deliver success; to get real results, you need a planned, structured social ad strategy that intelligently connects to the rest of your social strategy, advocacy efforts, and other channels such as email and paid media.

AD CAMPAIGNS

Move from ad-hoc tactics to structured ad campaigns

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To drive growth, expand beyond your loyal followers plateaus, it can be hard to find profitable new audiences. In 2018, Facebook removed third-party data brokers from its targeting options.19 Now advertisers report that Facebook’s lookalike audience targeting has stopped performing too.20 Savvy organizations look beyond native ad platforms. Social agency Absolute Results used Hootsuite Ads to test different audiences for their clients and drove 28% more conversions at 55% less cost per lead.

Organizations say targeting specific offers to precise audiences drives greater ROI. That’s why our client Visit West Hollywood used Hootsuite Ads to run hundreds of simultaneous creatives. The result: They doubled site traffic and nearly tripled hotel nights booked, all at a 20% lower cost per click and with 75% less ad management time.

Similarly, when our client Tax Act A/B tested social ads, they doubled clicks and cut cost per acquisition in half.

How to build your organization’s measurement framework At Hootsuite, we guide our customers through three stages, helping them create a framework to measure the value of social media.

1. DEFINE

2. MEASURE

3. PROVE

What do you

Is social moving

Did you hit

want social

you towards your

your business

to solve?

business targets?

goals?

Learn how to apply these questions to your measurement challenges—including real-world examples from eHarmony, Unilever, AccorHotels, and Grupo Expansión—in our short book.

AD CAMPAIGNS

It’s easy to advertise to your social followers. But when that strategy

3.

You must set your executives’ expectations when it comes to social attribution. Persuading executives to invest the time and budget to build a working social attribution model isn’t easy; some executives say it’s hard to divert social spending from execution to measurement.

But it’s worth the investment: Research by Neustar found organizations that invest at least 10% of their budget into measurement are three times more likely to significantly outperform their goals.21 Social attribution can’t be solved in a day—but here are two practical approaches that have worked for our customers.

ATTRIBUTION

Take small steps to solve social attribution

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Borrow attribution best practices from established channels In large organizations, simply establishing best practices for UTM codes and campaign tagging can go a long way toward giving executives a clearer view of social’s impact. For example, our customer Grupo Expansión used Hootsuite Impact to track organic and paid social activity across 70 employees and 17 magazine brands. The result: better social workflow and improved ability to measure success.22 Next, work with analyst teams to start building an attribution model. You can borrow and apply attribution best practices from established teams such as your paid media team. Adobe, for example, built an econometric attribution model using Hootsuite Impact, Adobe Analytics, and Salesforce.com to compare social’s results to other channels.23 Similarly, Casey Hall, former director of social media communications at Thomson Reuters, worked with an in-house analyst team to build models to measure social performance. For social selling programs at Thomson Reuters, Hall helped their European pilot demonstrate an 18x return on investment compared to the cost of social selling programs. With employee advocacy, he was able to show that 3,000 participants led to 100K customer engagements, including clicks back to the website.

How to unite social and website conversion data WITH HOOTSUITE IMPACT,

you can confidently

Plus, you’ll discover the specific actions you need

measure and demonstrate that your social media

to take to increase revenue and marketing impact

investments are paying off.

from your organic and paid social media content.

Now you can accurately track the complete social

Request a demo or ask your customer success

conversion funnel all the way to the business

manager about Hootsuite Impact.

metrics that matter to you—including purchases, sign-ups, and email acquisition.

ATTRIBUTION

With employee advocacy, he was able to show that 3,000 participants led to 100K customer engagements

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Hall also helped to unite social data with other digital data. “We

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wanted to make it part of the entire data mix that we were using in marketing,” says Hall. “We used Adobe Analytics and brought the CID code into our social publishing, so now we could track all the way down to the post ID what traffic was coming into our website, where it was coming from, and start to see the value of social traffic when it came to downstream performance.”

Hall used Adobe Target to create unique experiences, personalizing social media to help generate higher quality customer engagements.

These efforts paid off, showing that social generated the longest time on site of any digital channel, beating out paid search, email, and organic search.24

Expand beyond social tracking for a true customer view In addition to using established attribution models, it’s important to remember that the reason why social media is notoriously hard to attribute back to revenue is that social touches multiple stages of the purchase journey from discovery to conversion.

In other words, if you’re not connecting social data to other channels, you’re missing the complete story of social’s far-reaching impact on customer buying decisions.

A smart approach we’ve seen is from Travis Chambers, the CEO and founder of the social video agency Chamber Media. The agency drives incredible growth from social channels. But Chambers is also wise to the fact that if they only look at internal data from social networks (such as the Facebook pixel), the value of their social content will be at best underreported—and at worst, credit will be stolen from lower-funnel channels like organic search, email, and pay-per-click advertising.

“Marketers make the mistake of looking at the Facebook pixel with a microscope,” says Chambers. “But to understand the impact, you can’t look at social as a separate revenue channel. The truth is it influences all revenue channels. You need to also analyze the impact of social on Amazon sales, retail sales, website orders, YouTube traffic, and lifts in branded searches. We look at the holistic picture.”25 Remember that social’s strength is uniting your organization around modern customer engagement—not trying to prove the supremacy of social over other marketing channels.

ATTRIBUTION

if you’re not connecting social data to other channels, you’re missing the complete story of social’s farreaching impact on customer buying decisions.

Instead of trying to be a hero, be a helper. Work together with estab-

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lished and respected teams such as paid media, email marketing, and website optimization. Help them achieve their business goals. And

This collaboration benefits both teams. As Forrester found, 58% of customers report using social and search together to research and buy products.26 This synergy presents new opportunities for marketers to build holistic customer journeys that deliver the right content in the right context.

Finally, while you can teach your peers in paid media, email marketing, and website optimization about social customer engagement, they can teach you which metrics matter most to your CMO. Start collecting those data points from your social programs, too. You’ll learn the metrics and reports that your CMO values, helping elevate social’s role from a tactical channel to a critical part of the company’s growth engine.

Next steps: Benchmark your social strategy against industry peers

Related resources to increase your attribution acumen

Use Hootsuite’s Social Maturity Assessment

In this book, you’ll learn how Hootsuite builds mea-

to benchmark your organization’s technology,

surement frameworks, including real-world best

strategy, and measurement practices against

practices from eHarmony, Unilever, AccorHotels,

500+ organizations in 12 industries. See how

and Grupo Expansión.

your organization compares by requesting a complimentary custom assessment, including personalized recommendations from an expert at Hootsuite.

Contact us to request a custom assessment.

Demystifying Social ROI: A brief guide for CMOs.

Take the course. Learn ROI measurement from experts in the field with Hootsuite Academy’s Social ROI and Value Analysis online course and certification.

Book a custom workshop. Improve the impact of your social efforts with a clear measurement framework—including relevant KPIs that help you prove your ROI from social—with a custom workshop and guidance from Hootsuite’s services team.

Acknowledgements Research and analysis: James Mulvey Design and art direction: Eric Uhlich Editor: Curtis Foreman

NEXT STEPS

then track how social is contributing.

Endnotes

20

Facebook. A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking. 2019.

14

Forrester. Justify Your Social Media Programs

By Methodically Measuring Them. 2019.

2

The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights Report. 2019.

15

Amway. Amway Reports Sales of $8.8 Billion USD in 2018. 2019.

3

Ad Age. Why more brands are ditching the CMO position. 2019. See also: Deloitte. CMOs and the spark to drive growth. 2019.

16

Forrester. Forrester Analytics: Social Media Advertising Forecast, 2018 To 2023 (US). 2019.

17

PWC. Global Consumer Insights Survey 2018.

18

Hootsuite. Social Media Barometer 2018.

4

The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights Report. 2019.

5

The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights Report. 2019.

19

AdExchanger. Facebook Kills Off Third-Party Data For Targeting. 2018.

6

Facebook. Second Quarter 2019 Results Conference Call. 2019.

20

7

Forrester Consulting and Catalyst. Why Search + Social = Success For Brands. 2016.

Marketing Land. Advertisers seeing dwindling results with Facebook’s 1% Lookalike Audiences. 2019.

21

Forbes. Underinvestment in Measurement and Advertising Spend Stifles Long-term Business Growth, According to Neustar’s Marketing Accountability Report. 2017.

22

Hootsuite. Case Study: Grupo Expansión.

23

Adobe Customer Story. Thomson Reuters unifies customer experiences.

24

Hootsuite. Future of Social: New York. 2019.

25

Hootsuite Blog. Viral Videos are Dead, Says Creator of the Decade’s Most Viral Ad. 2018.

26

Forrester and Catalyst, Part of GroupM Connect. Why Search Plus Social Equals Success. 2016.

8

Facebook Newsroom. Bringing People Closer Together (2018) and Building a Better New Feed for You. 2016.

9

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. The Real Value of Your Employees’ Social Media Reach. 2017.

10

Forrester and Catalyst, Part of GroupM Connect . Why Search Plus Social Equals Success. 2016.

11

Hootsuite. Social Media Barometer 2018.

12

Hootsuite. Case Study: Georgia State University.

13

Hootsuite. Case Study: Meliá Hotels International. 2019.

Ready to see how Hootsuite can help your organization achieve social performance? Request a custom demo at hootsuite.com/enterprise

ENDNOTES

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