You`re Doing Social Wrong - The Simply Measured Blog

You’re Doing Social Wrong:
The Problem with Social Marketing,
and How to Fix It
Introduction
There’s a saying at the Simply Measured office that I want to take hold in every
marketing team around the world:
“Ignoring analysis is the quickest way to make a bad choice.”
Social marketers are, by and large, members of the creative class. We got into
this line of work because we love to develop creative strategies, campaigns, and
content, but that doesn’t mean we need to fear data.
In this ebook, I’m going to make two assumptions:
• You have goals for social media
• You want those goals to align with the rest of your marketing team
Assuming those two things are true, this guide will help you identify how data
and analysis can make social media the connective tissue of your entire marketing
organization.
What we’ll cover:
• Why data and creativity are not enemies
• How to use data to make the creative process better
• How to use data to demonstrate real value (read: ROI)
Let’s dig in.
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Stop Separating Data and Creativity
When I started working at Simply Measured almost four years ago, I wasn’t at all
what I’d call a “data-driven” marketer. My decisions were based on gut feelings, and
in my previous marketing roles, I’d been mildly successful as a result.
I was a talented writer, had good intuition, and could quote Drake. I was way too
strung out on confidence (I promise that’s the last time I’ll quote Drake).
I thought I had all the answers, but I wasn’t testing or measuring against that
intuition, so while I thought I knew when something worked or didn’t, I had no idea
why, and I didn’t even have a complete idea of what “working” was.
For the first several months I was at Simply Measured, I was doing what you could
call “maintenance marketing.” I created content and social campaigns with the main
purpose of maintaining a brand presence in the space, but I didn’t understand how
to grow that presence other than “do more.”
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Do More Than “Do More”
This is an endemic problem in the content and social marketing space. So many
times, our answer is “do more.” If we create more content, the charts will go up and
to the right, right?
But then things stall, and we don’t bother looking for the reason why. Many times,
we just brush it off as a fluke.
Ask Yourself:
Why Did You Post That?
Why? Because we
constantly pit creativity and measurement against each other. On the surface, data seems like a natural enemy to creativity. Creativity, by definition, is something
that innately comes from our imagination. It’s original. It’s not spawned from a test
tube.
This has hindered all of us; not just as marketers, but also as creators. If you were
a comedian, and you wrote a joke, and it kills, wouldn’t you try to mimic that
response? Does that make it less creative? And what is a successful joke? Is it
someone laughing, or is it someone laughing enough that they buy a ticket to your
next show as well?
Creativity shouldn’t be blind, we just happen to be in an industry where it has x-ray
vision and that can be terrifying because we don’t always understand it.
Quit Fearing Data
Big data is a big monster under the bed, threatening to swallow our time and
bandwidth whole. It scares us because we forget that data analysis is a supporting
function, meant to enhance our creative process by informing it.
The creative process isn’t a straight line. It’s cyclical. We conceptualize, create, finish
a project, analyze (and over-analyze) how “good” it is, and then start a new one.
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When a painter does an impressive oil landscape of a Tuscan village, they don’t
paint that same scene over and over. They make note to reiterate a few key aspects
and components that were successful, learn from the mistakes, and start something
new, with that knowledge in tow.
If you’re a creator, in any capacity, you never just STOP making things. The goal is to
make them BETTER than you used to.
Marketing programs are no exception to the creative process, but just like a
painting, if you don’t analyze what you can improve, you’ll keep painting the same
stick figures over and over.
Inform Creative Decisions With Data
Data should compliment your creative process, taking some of the legwork off your
plate so you can focus on being more creative. Analyze content types, topics, and
tone by measuring consumption, sentiment, and conversion to determine how
your creative is landing with your target audience. Once you do that, you can start
analyzing how it impacts the bottom line, which brings us to our next section.
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What Is Wrong with Social ROI Today?
Measuring activity metrics like reach, engagement, and share of voice is widely
accepted in social marketing today. It’s a solid starting point to quantify and
optimize content and creative. But that’s really just that — a starting point.
These metrics are rooted in an assumption that engagement is valuable. We make
this assumption because we fundamentally believe that social media is an important
part of the buyer’s journey. But, we haven’t proven this assumption. In every major
survey of social marketers, “Social ROI” is still cited as a top challenge.
Social ROI isn’t just about assigning dollars to social media, it’s about answering
the next order questions. How do we connect social engagement to site traffic,
conversion, customer lifetime value, and loyalty? How do we leverage social signals
to drive marketing actions through our entire marketing process? How do we
identify the people who truly impact our business via social media?
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There are two ways that marketers can get off-course when it comes to ROI:
1. They over-simplify ROI, thinking that buyers interact in a linear fashion
2. They over-complicate ROI, creating complex algorithms that assign numbers, but
do little to express value
Both of these options can get us in trouble. True ROI measurement is complicated,
but not for the sake of being complicated. To measure and attribute value to social
performance, we need the full scope.
The Right Way to Think About Social ROI
Social ROI is a problem because it’s not easy to solve. And it’s not easy to solve
because we’re thinking about it wrong..
“The ROI problem” is an impossible problem to solve until we solve another
problem: attribution.
The focus on ROI before attribution is a fundamental disconnect in the way we
operate as marketers, and one that will continue to get in our way until we learn to
address it.
Attribution has to Come Before ROI
Social media is a marketing function. Whether it feeds top-of-the-funnel brand
awareness, mid-funnel conversions, or customer satisfaction and lifetime value, we
can’t talk about Social ROI until we understand social’s impact.
Attribution is an issue for two reasons:
• Because it’s more complicated than connecting one channel to one purchase
• We are missing a massive piece of the puzzle
Let’s take a look at these two issues, and how they’re standing in the way of solving
“The ROI problem.”
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Attribution Issue #1: Complex Interactions
As marketers in a crowded, complex space, we can’t afford to give sole credit to any
one aspect of our marketing. If attribution were about limiting our activities to one
successful tactic, none of us would be talking about this because that would be easy
math.
The problem is that it’s more complicated than that. Attribution is not a straight line
from one touch point to the next, which is why it needs to be customer-centric, and
help marketing teams understand which touch points influence purchases.
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If we can identify which action moved a potential customer from one stage to the
next, and one activity to the next, we’re able to build an attribution model that
doesn’t single out one tactic that takes all credit, but rather one that helps us
understand which actions facilitate different parts of the customer’s journey.
This understanding will help allocate budgets, develop strategies and campaigns
that give our customers a more meaningful experience, and move potential buyers
through the lifecycle (or funnel, depending on your business model) even quicker.
Attribution Issue #2: Dark Social
Ever ask yourself, “What is this massive
segment of website traffic called direct?”
For the most part, social marketers are missing
a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to
attributing traffic, conversions, and sales to
social media, because we can’t see exactly
where a lot of traffic actually came from.
We call this lack of attribution “dark social” and its a bigger issue thank you’d think:
• According to RadiumOne, 70% of all social sharing is dark.
• According the The Atlantic, more than 50% of social traffic is dark.
• According to InsideSocial data, more than 50% of digital sales are dark.
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We don’t even know which traffic comes from social, so how can we prove the ROI
of our social media programs? Attribution is important, and not just for your peace
of mind.
“As a social marketer, you need to understand and measure the impact
your efforts are having on web and conversion metrics. You’re driving
site visits, signups, and sales. Without attribution, you can’t prove that
you are actually doing this and all of the credit goes to “direct”, so
you are unable to illustrate your true business impact by implementing
tracking and attribution tools.”
– Brewster Stanislaw, Technical Product Manager for Simply Measured
How Do We Fix These Attribution Issues?
There are three steps to consider when trying to solve this attribution issue for your
company, and these opportunities to connect the dots are critical if we want to
identify real ROI.
1. Identification
The first step is developing an attribution model is to identify this direct traffic and
dark sharing of your web content and site traffic.
Link shorteners are a good start, and Google Analytics UTMs shorten the gap, but
they’re not solving the whole problem, because users don’t always behave how you
tell them to. I don’t always use a share button, sometimes I just copy a link and send
it to someone. I don’t always Tweet that link, sometimes I text it, email it, or post it
to a private Slack group.
If you visit the Simply Measured website, you’ll notice a hash and a tracking code
appended to it. This allows us to see how this specific blog post is being shared
all over the place, even across dark social (if you’re a Simply Measured customer,
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contact your account manager to learn about this solution).
Cookies and other tracking mechanisms allow you to see return visitors, because
sometimes I look at a pair of shoes and then go about my business, but that doesn’t
mean I forgot about the shoe company, and it doesn’t mean I won’t be back. Partial
attribution is going to be a critical component of social activity in the years to come.
This is something we should all be focused on.
2. Communication and Integration
One of the reasons that the identification above hasn’t been addressed yet is
because of another problem. Social marketing programs are not aligned with other
digital marketing functions. They’re not aligned because social isn’t always viewed
as a viable marketing channel. It isn’t viewed as a viable marketing channel because
it isn’t aligned with other marketing functions…See the problem here? This is a cycle
that we won’t get out of until we take it on ourselves to make it happen.
We can’t attribute traffic correctly because we’re not partnering with our web
optimization team to identify where our “direct” traffic actually comes from. Work
with your web team to identify the dark traffic. This will make their program easier to
run, and yours more effective.
3. Alignment
Once you’re able to attribute social’s full impact on your business, you can align with
the rest of the marketing team, and focus efforts on the areas you have the greatest
impact.
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This map offers guidance on where to focus when leveling social up to broader
marketing objectives.
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Conclusion:
What’s Next for Social Marketing?
Today, creative is ignored for volume, and defining social media ROI is complicated
mainly because social is big.
As social marketing grows and becomes more sophisticated, we’re pushing to help
make your creative marketing more creative, and we do that by tying your earned,
owned, and paid social activity to other marketing functions. The way to do that is
through data.
This connective data is something we’re passionate about at Simply Measured,
and we’re working hard to lead the industry to solutions that enable you to do your
best work. When you can understand and measure the entire scope of a buyer’s
interaction with the marketing team, you’ll be able to not only measure social media
ROI, but validate social media’s impact on your business’s bottom line.
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ABOUT SIMPLY MEASURED
Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering
marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their
social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.
Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business
users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone
– not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to
deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting
tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a
marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful
solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.
Want to try Simply Measured?
Request a Demo TODAY
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