15 Action Items For Social Marketers in 2017
15 Action Items For Social Marketers in 2017
In our 2017 State of Social Marketing report, we uncover some interesting insight from the
shared experiences of marketers from all over the world. By leveraging these key findings, we
developed 15 helpful tips for social marketers to make the most of what is left in 2017.
This guide will connect the results of our survey with actionable steps you can use to enhance
your social marketing strategies. From using social data to determine which paid ads are
most effective, to using listening tools to identify your brand’s influencers, this guide will be a
resource to enhance your social efforts.
• Agencies are pushing for results from social more than brands: 73% of agencies set
goals for either web traffic or conversion goals, while only 57% of brand marketers do. This
indicates that social marketers at agencies have stronger goal-setting (and goal-achieving)
baselines than social marketers within the brand environment.
• Social ad spending is increasing, and 59% of social marketers consider ads "very
important" to their strategy: However, a mere 31.6% of marketers set web traffic and
conversion goals to justify social's business value.
Almost half of respondents reported analytics software as their most-needed resource:
However, less than a quarter claim they have the budget necessary for analytics software.
• More than half of brands say that influencers are vital to the success of their social
programs, specifically for extending brand reach: However, over 76% of brands say they
have no dedicated budget for influencer marketing. Brands are saying one thing and doing
the opposite in this category, whether due to unsubstantial resources, lack of expertise,
or both. A potentially business-harming disconnect is happening here, as influencer
relationships—when identified and grown properly—can provide great ROI for brands.
• Social is definitively a marketing function, and ROI is definitively our #1 challenge:
The percentage of social media teams that live within the marketing organization has
grown from 49% in 2015, to 63.2% in 2016, to remaining relatively stable at 64.7% in
2017. Meanwhile, 61% of social marketers grapple with determining ROI in 2017—the
same percentage as 2016. The lack of major flux in either of these categories tells us that
marketing departments own social media by and large, but are failing to understand how it
contributes to the bottom line.
The journey toward a successful 2017 can be broken down into three essential phases:
identify, build, and analyze.
Identify
First, begin by performing a complete internal analysis of your business. In the
identification phase, you will need to identify:
Build
Next, start building out your social marketing plan. In the build phase you will focus
on creating:
Analyze
Finally, after you implement the plans you’ve built, you will need to analyze:
The first phase is critical in the journey toward social marketing success. The identification
phase enables you to take a thorough look into your current practices and strategies and
reflect on what works, what doesn’t, and what has yet to be done. This phase includes eight
action steps marketers can take to inform their future marketing strategies.
Measuring ROI continues to be a struggle year after year, and this year a large number of
marketers also report that tying social to overall business goals is difficult. Here is a more
robust list of what marketers say are the biggest challenges they face in 2017.
58.7% Combined
Measuring ROI 61.4%
57.3% Agencies
15%
Publishing Content 12.7% Brands
16.2%
24.3%
Developing Social Media Strategy 15.7%
29%
33.6%
Tying Social to Business Goals 35.5%
32.5%
23.9%
Tracking Results in a Centralized Dashboard 23%
24.4%
17.6%
Understanding Performance Across Social Channels 17.6%
17.6%
25.9%
Securing Budget and Resources for Social 30%
23.7%
14.6%
Monitoring Competition 16.7%
13.5%
8.6%
Integrating Social Tools 9.8%
7.9%
12.2%
Collecting Social Data 12.2%
12.2%
24.4%
Using Social Data to Inform Strategy 20.8%
26.3%
17.3%
Aligning Strategy Across All Social Channels 18.5%
16.6%
If you identify one of your biggest challenges as generating traffic and leads, start
brainstorming how you can utilize the resources you have to increase traffic and generate
more qualified leads. For instance, if you have one person within your team who is creating
most or all of the content for social, a simple solution could be to expand to other members of
your team for guest blog posts or a Twitter take-over. This will provide fresh perspective and
give the audience a change of scenery. You may also discover some hidden talents of your
colleagues who can provide unique social content.
If you identify one of your biggest challenges as generating traffic and leads, start
brainstorming how you can utilize the resources you have to increase traffic and generate
more qualified leads. For instance, if you have one person within your team who is creating
most or all of the content for social, a simple solution could be to expand to other members of
your team for guest blog posts or a Twitter take-over. This will provide fresh perspective and
give the audience a change of scenery. You may also discover some hidden talents of your
colleagues who can provide unique social content.
Through native analytics, marketers are able to gain a surface-level understanding of what’s
working on social from using native analytics, but often turn to more advanced analytics
solutions to gain deeper insight.
Using social listening solutions, you can easily identify influencers who are already talking
about your brand and sharing your content organically. These influencers can be utilized to
extend your reach or may be willing to produce unique content on behalf of your brand.
The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method is one we often use to create measurable
goals. Objectives state what you hope to achieve and key results list specific numbers that
you define as success. Here is what a possible web traffic and conversion goal could look like:
Increase traffic to our website Acquire 10,000 unique visitors to our website by end of Q2
You’ve completed your internal analysis as a kind of audit of the resources you have
available, those you still need, and the challenges you must overcome. You’ve identified your
influencers, set measurable goals, and identified a social analytics solution that is perfect for
your business. The second phase in your journey toward social marketing success is to start
building your plan out. This phase includes five action steps you can take to start construction
on your social marketing plan.
1. Begin building your plan in light of resources owned and resourced needed
When starting the process of building your social marketing plan, marketers should first
look at the resources you already have and can utilize. During the identification phase, you
identified the resources within your business or organization that have already been used to
implement your social plan. You also identified additional, external resources needed to fill in
some of the gaps within your social strategies. In light of these resources, start building a plan
that makes the most of the resources you’ve collected.
If your strategy requires more advanced analytics solutions, be prepared to share the reasons
why deeper analytics is such a necessary requirement. At this point in the journey toward
social marketing success, you have already explored various analytics solutions and identified
the solution that fits your business objectives and aligns with the goals you established in the
identification phase.
47.9%
Reach 49.5%
48.4%
29.2%
Content Type 27%
28.4%
18.4%
Voice 21.6%
19.4%
46.7%
Expertise in That 48.2%
Field/Industry
47.1%
23%
Number of
21.2%
Followers
22.4%
As you build your influencer persona, you might determine that your ideal influencer has a
strong presence on multiple social channels because your business has historically struggled
to connect the dots between platforms. Or, you may need an influencer that can extend your
reach and get messages out to niche communities that you’ve been unable to reach in the past.
74.1%
63.1%
47.3% 45.7%
35%
19.8%
9.1%
Company Budget
Digital Budget
As you build your marketing budget, keep in mind the resources you’ve identified as crucial to
your social strategy. Also recognize the capabilities of social networks to diversify your social
marketing strategy with photos, videos, gifs, and influencers - all of which have proven to
increase engagement and click-through rates on content.
Now you’ve completed the first two phases of your journey toward social marketing
success. You’ve identified your challenges, needs, and goals. You’ve also built out a robust
social strategy that enables collaboration between departments, utilizes influencers, and is
budgeted according to your goals and objectives.
The final phase is analyzing your efforts and reevaluating your social strategy. In this phase, there
are two action steps you can take to gauge the effectiveness of your social marketing efforts.
With Simply Measured’s Conversion Tracking solution, you can follow the path of a lead as
they move through the sales funnel into conversion. Conversion Tracking also places business
value on these data points so that you know the exact value of your social efforts. You can
also track the number of visits by each social channel so that you know exactly which social
network is providing you with the most traffic.
Conclusion
Throughout this guide, we’ve provided 15 action steps that marketers can take to optimize their
social marketing strategies. These action steps were developed from our 2017 State of Social
Marketing Report, which revealed that improvements still need to be made - including finding the
necessary funds to acquire the best social analytics solutions, setting appropriate goals to justify
the increased spend on social, and increasing the resources allocated to our influencer programs.
In order to make the most of your social marketing efforts, it is necessary that you repeat the
process of identifying, building, and analyzing on a regular basis. Social media is a dynamic
industry, and marketers need to keep up with the trends and best practices, making it ever
more valuable to regularly reevaluate your strategies.
We pioneered the practice of social analytics back in 2010, and we’re leading the revolution
of data-driven social marketing today, enabling brand and agency marketers to generate
actionable insights from social data. Simply Measured helps marketers improve results
by understanding total impact, from conversations (listening, competitive and influencer
analytics) to conversions (content share tracking, conversion tracking).
Thousands of marketers from countries all over the world trust Simply Measured for full-
funnel social analytics. Are you one of them?
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