In a recent webinar, search marketing and social media experts from Covario and Dell addressed a number of key issues and best practices relative to enterprise brand engagement with their customers through social media platforms.
A highlight of the session included two live polls of the digital marketing participants from around the country, who responded that “driving sales” is the No. 1 goal of their social media programs; and that social media programs in their respective organizations are primarily funded through a “stand alone social media budget” (with the “search budget – paid or organic” coming in a close second).
Covario CMO and SVP Craig Macdonald shared insights with Loyalty 360 about their findings…
One of the key questions we always get is “what is the value of our social media program” and/or “how can we measure the effectiveness of our social media program?” In our survey, only 35% of the respondents said that their organization uses sales as the metric by which they are measuring success. This sounds high however, if they are doing so, then measuring ROI is straightforward. For the 65% that say that their goals include driving engagement, driving brand awareness, driving friends, or driving impressions – the metrics for ROI are fuzzy. ROI can be measured in a couple of ways – understanding that direct tracking is not going to be possible.
- The first is whether loyalty can be ascertained through engagement by correlating social media engagement statistics – which are VERY measurable – with key performance indicators of brand loyalty. Our clients are starting to conduct analytics to find statistical relationships between social media platform engagement (outside of customer support programs) and customer satisfaction surveys, online surveys, and online engagement.
- Second is whether social media data can be predictive of branding goals – i.e., brand awareness surveys or benchmarking brand mentions on social platforms versus mentions of competitor brands
- Third is trying to use statistics to see if the measurable aspects of social media are driving alignment with key sales statistics at a campaign level.
Also, there is a known relationship between social media metrics – specifically +1’s, Facebook Likes, and Twitter Tweets with organic search results. Google and Bing have indicated that they are starting to use these social signals in their results, which can then be used to understand better how social drives web results. Much more will be done in this area in 2012.
Actually, we’ve been seeing more and more social media marketing spend coming out of search marketing budgets, so we’re a little surprised that stand alone social media budgets nudged out search budgets as the leading source of funding for social media programs. This seems to indicate that there’s still a fair amount of testing and experimentation taking place with social at the enterprise level.