What Working at a Social Media Company Taught Me about ROI. Through personalized blog content, a weekly Twitter chat and contests the marketing team hoped to both inform and retain students. One of the first questions I asked our marketing team was, “What are we doing to educate our customers?” Unlike myself and the three other marketers from my meetup, the team had an answer. To help uncover ROI, we focus on three analytics that illustrate social’s impact beyond marketing–product development, customer retention and referrals. Social provides an engaged focus group for research and development. Furthermore, if there isn’t a solidified feedback funnel, the social media team loses its opportunity for attribution. Throughout my time at Sprout, I’ve learned that social is a front line to customer retention. Your sales and marketing teams should work to collaborate and track increased retention among customers who engage with your brand on social. Sprout has taught me that organizations need to understand that social marketing impacts everything from brand awareness all the way through product development. Because, regardless of what business you’re in, it’s the customer journey that will have the most positive impact on your bottom line.
For the past four years, myself and three other marketers have met frequently to talk shop. We’ve celebrated a variety of milestones together — promotions, an engagement, our children’s birthdays. What had originally begun as an opportunity to learn from other professionals, has grown into a valuable friendship.
While we’re all marketers, we each come from different industries. In the winter of 2014, I worked at a B2B software company. At the time, the other men and woman were involved in manufacturing, recruiting and higher education. On paper, our backgrounds were similar. As senior leaders, each of us had experience in recruiting and building cross-functional teams, implementing strategy, growing and retaining markets. One of the only significant differences we encountered was how each of our organizations approached social media marketing.
One week, over a drink, hummus and chips, Maureen began to tell us about a new initiative that was being proposed at the university where she worked. They had planned to launch a specific Twitter handle targeted at freshmen and transfer students. The goal was to help new students become more acclimated and increase involvement in extracurricular activities during their first semester. Through personalized blog content, a weekly Twitter chat and contests the marketing team hoped to both inform and retain students.
“Are you guys doing anything to educate your customers?” Maureen asked.
The table grew silent. Myself and the men in manufacturing and recruiting shook our heads.
“No.”
At the time, the B2B software company I worked at saw social as one of two things: an extension of its existing customer care efforts or an advertising channel. Whether it was a response to a negative inquiry or an announcement about an offer, everything we published was reactive or promotional. We weren’t proactively doing enough to retain customers or encourage brand loyalty. Looking back, this was a huge oversight that caused our ROI to suffer.
Social doesn’t have an ROI problem; it has an attribution problem.
Shortly after that meeting, I left the software company I was at and became the chief marketing officer at Sprout Social. Still, Maureen’s question stuck with me. One of the first questions I asked our marketing team was, “What are we doing to educate our customers?” Unlike myself and the three other marketers from my meetup, the team had an answer. I knew I had a lot to learn.
Working at a social media company taught me that social doesn’t have an ROI problem; it has an attribution problem. Rather than a direct pipeline to profits, marketers need to think of social as a building block that has the power to support, inform and accelerate nearly every aspect of your business.
To help uncover ROI, we focus on three analytics that illustrate social’s impact beyond marketing–product development, customer retention and referrals. So, how do we do that?
Social provides an engaged focus group for research and development.
Social democratizes and diversifies the feedback loop for brands. It widens your focus group from a small subset of people who have the time and willingness to give feedback to a large group of engaged customers who are invested…
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