Demystifying Social Roi: A Brief Guide For Cmos
Demystifying Social Roi: A Brief Guide For Cmos
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ROI isn’t just doing
better on Facebook.
Boosting video views on Facebook or building a bigger
Instagram audience might win awards. But it doesn’t
(necessarily) correlate with higher revenue, lower costs,
80%use Facebook
20%
prove social media’s impact.
analytics tools.
The CMO Survey found that CMOs plan to increase their
spending on marketing analytics by 229% in the next three
years. Data definitely helps. But you need to know where to
look and what to measure.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Getting there: Why organizations stumble on social ROI 13
If you can’t Every year, the effectiveness of traditional
media declines. At the same time, the influence
of everyday experts—like customer advocates,
social adds to
“ 98% of digital consumers are
you’re at a
GlobalWebIndex, “98 percent
of digital consumers are
social networking.”
17
Every week or so, our value realization team
(the team at Hootsuite who help our enterprise
customers refine their measurement strategies)
gets an email with a version of this question.
Hello Hootsuite,
Our company is new to the world of social.
We want Hootsuite to help us prove to our
c-suite the return on investment for social
media. That way, we can hire a bigger team
and monetize social.
ROI question
it will be difficult to correlate this general activity back to
specific outcomes for your business.
To solve the ROI puzzle, you need to be specific about what These steps are:
you want to achieve with social media. define,
High
Prove
Measure
ROI of
Social
Define
rather than waiting draw a straight line between social activity and
direct revenue.
David Creighton,
director of value realization
and analytics at Hootsuite
31
Using social to turn
200
data into new revenue
As a publisher with 11 media properties,
Grupo Expansión had millions of followers
and mountains of valuable social data. With
Hootsuite, they were able to demonstrate the
real-world dollar value of social media.
65
differentiate in a
saturated market
With a little help from Hootsuite, eHarmony
found a match between social media activity and
new customers.
%
eHarmony optimized their social ads and
improved their customer service workflows
with Hootsuite, leading to an impressive 65%
increase in subscriptions.
We need an ROI on
resources and time
spent to show that we’re
earning subscribers.
eHarmony
23,000
profit health organization, they’re required to
respond to patients and need to make sure
that the public finds credible health advice on
social media.
95%
and kittens
Fairfax County—a local government in Virginia,
USA that serves 1.1 million citizens—uses
Hootsuite’s platform to unite 40 departments
on social media.
172
new customers
Visit West Hollywood, a tourism organization
in California, wanted to boost room bookings.
They used Hootsuite Ads (our social ad
management solution) to improve their
targeting and reach qualified prospects.
%
The result was a 172% increase in room nights
booked (compared to a previous campaign that
didn’t use Hootsuite Ads). They also reduced
their cost per click by 20%, helping them reach
a bigger audience at a lower cost.
+90%
For DaVita Inc, a Fortune® 500 company and
one of the largest kidney care companies in
the United States, their goal wasn’t to increase
revenue. Instead, they wanted to use social
media to educate the public about kidney
disease.
€900K
Most brands listen for social mentions of their products
and services. But Unilever wanted to look deeper and used
social data to uncover future growth opportunities for their
baking, cooking, and spreads businesses.
49
“
Of course, social media can be used to boost brand
awareness and sales. But increasingly CMOs are seeing the
value stretch far beyond a promotional role.
Marketing leaders You can use social data to act first on the next big product
are no longer just opportunity in your market. Or refine your risk management
workflows with better security and sharper listening tools.
the business, but In our recent study of 400 social media leaders (in
partnership with Altimeter), we found that brand awareness
business, financial
and operational
So how can you gain new
value from social across
the customer lifecycle?
success.
As you’ll see, social can
Gartner
“The State of Marketing 2016: What Gartner influence customers at
for Marketing Leaders’ Research Surveys Reveal.” each step of their journey
from awareness to advocacy.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 51
To what extent are you We have set established KPIs
that link social to these areas
Customer service 48 40 12 1
Brand reputation 45 42 12 2
Customer loyalty 41 43 12 3
Competitive intelligence 37 42 16 4
Employee advocacy 30 44 19 7
Source: Altimeter and Hootsuite, “Beyond ROI: Unlocking the Business Value of Social Media,” 2017.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 53
Awareness Awareness
Evaluation
10 million
AccorHotels, a hospitality brand with Acquisition
4,000 hotels in 92 countries, wanted to better
align with how modern travelers research and Engagement
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 55
Evaluation Awareness
Evaluation
Most brands focus on attention-grabbing Acquisition
tactics. But this misses a bigger hook: product
research in social channels. As the research Engagement
53%
firm GlobalWebIndex found, 40 percent of Advocacy
16-24-year-olds use social media to research
products.
of Instagram users follow their
Consider the retail brand Herschel Supply Co. favorite brands on the photo
They catapulted from a tiny retailer to global
brand by mastering Instagram’s aesthetic and video sharing network
codes. As Slate put it, Herschel’s brand became
“a global phenomenon, glimpsed wherever
hipsters dare to tread.”
44%
discover new things, get inspired, and buy.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 57
Are you ready Search Engines Social Media
As GlobalWebIndex
found, more and
more consumers
are skipping
search engines
and going straight 58% 60%
to social channels 30% 34%
to research products 46%
and services.
38%
54%
60%
57%
64%
Source: GlobalWebIndex
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 59
Acquisition Awareness
Evaluation
A few years ago, Pepsi canceled their Super Acquisition
Bowl ads and bet the factory on shareable user-
generated content. Their Refresh Project earned Engagement
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 61
Engagement Both Awareness
Facebook
Evaluation
Lysol wanted to know if their Facebook Acquisition
engagement contributed to real sales. Their
paid and
agency analyzed all Facebook activity in the Engagement
last 18 months. Advocacy
earned
Did Facebook drive sales? Not directly. But
Facebook engagement was still valuable.
activity had
As their agency Gain Theory explained, “both
Facebook paid and earned activity had a
significant direct impact on the path to purchase.
Paid had the greatest impact on ‘compare’, by
reinforcing the brand message to those core
target audiences already aware of the brand
a significant
and further along the path to purchase … there
was an indirect impact from Facebook paid and
earned throughout the path.”
direct impact
The attribution lesson? You can’t measure on the path to
purchase.”
social in isolation. You need a holistic digital
measurement model to see the connection
between your customer’s purchase steps.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 63
Advocacy Awareness
Evaluation
From customer communities to micro- Acquisition
influencers, brands know the power of getting
customers to (willingly) share and endorse Engagement
products. Advocacy
50%
public as more credible spokespeople than
government officials, board of directors, CEOs,
or financial analysts. It’s clear that with the old
of all global internet
sources of trust failing them, people are turning users are posting reviews
to a familiar source: each other.
online each month
GlobalWebIndex
“Brand Discovery, Insight Report Q3, 2017.”
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 65
Peers are now as
60 60 60
credible as experts
Percent who rate each spokesperson
as extremely / very credible.
48
46
43
37
35
29
Government Board of CEO NGO rep Financial Employee A person Academic Technical
official directors industry like you expert expert
analyst
Source: Edelman, “2017 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER,” 2017.
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 67
“
CMOs are asking
the wrong question.
The key to social ROI
It’s you.
can we prove Facebook “The reason why teams never come back to CMOs and show
is working for us?’ they social media’s value is because you’ve never told them what
the business is really trying to accomplish,” says Graham
teams to prove that But they don’t really know why video views or customer
engagement rates matter to the business. They just know
business objectives.
You can help by applying targets. “Tell your teams that they
need to grow awareness by 40 percent among a specific
customer segment. Or tell them that social is expected to
Graham Gullans, get 10,000 people at five events. These are all things that
director of customer analytics can be measured by social.”
at Hootsuite
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Social ROI: It's more than coupons or contests 69
“
Poorly timed posts
or ads during times
A few metrics
to guide you
To tell a true ROI story, you need new metrics.
of crisis can make Use the metrics on the following pages to build
a social strategy focused on business value and
events, potentially
Use real-time monitoring to correct false product
information on Facebook, detect early threats (such as a
potentially viral customer complaint on social), and lock
Forrester Research,
“The Forrester Wave™: Social Media
Management Solutions, Q2 2017.”
DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL ROI Tools to help you measure ROI in clear, tangible ways 75
We hope this little book clears up some
of the mystery around social media ROI. Say hello to
@Hootsuite
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Hootsuite’s Graham Gullans and David Creighton for their ROI
and measurement expertise. Their ideas and frameworks shaped this guide.
Special thanks to the IPA (for their excellent case studies) and GlobalWebIndex
(for their valuable data on social behaviors and trends).