Use Social Data to Improve Your Social Marketing Maturity

For Marketing Leadership Professionals January 5, 2015

Use Social Data To Improve Your Social Marketing Maturity Continuous Improvement: The Social Marketing Playbook by Kim Celestre, Nate Elliott, and Allison Smith with Mary Pilecki and Collin Colburn

Why Read This Report

A brand’s data capabilities, which include the ability to use customer insights (CI) to inform social and nonsocial marketing programs, are key to advancing social marketing maturity. But few marketing leaders know how to convert their social data into meaningful insights that help them win, serve, and retain their customers. In this report, Forrester discusses how your social data can improve your overall social marketing effectiveness — and describes the actions you can take today to get started. This report replaces an earlier report that was formerly the continuous improvement report for this playbook. marketing leaders are missing the social data opportunity Despite the enormous volume and easy access of social data, few marketing leaders convert that social data into social intelligence, which Forrester defines as the consumer and business insights derived from social media channels and used to drive business strategy and answer business questions.1 In recent interviews, marketing leaders communicated that a lack of social data capabilities was a primary reason for delayed social marketing maturity. The chief marketing officer (CMO) of one technology brand states, “Social generates a tremendous amount of data, which also delivers many challenges.” These challenges include the following:

■ Most marketers don’t have the ability to analyze social data. Seventy percent of marketers indicate they use social listening or monitoring tools that provide them access to valuable social data.2 But access to social data provides little value if there are no resources to review it, analyze it, and convert it into meaningful insights. Marketing leaders who try to fill this resource gap also struggle to recruit skilled employees who can tackle the analysis of social data. This is a problem that won’t be solved overnight. The need for marketing analytics professionals is rapidly surpassing the supply of skilled talent. McKinsey & Company predicts a shortage of 1.5 million of “data-savvy” managers and analysts by 2018.3

■ Agencies’ use of social data remains inconsistent. Marketers without direct access or ability to analyze social data often turn to their agencies or vendor partners for this information. But while many social media agencies offer their clients listening programs, most other types of agencies don’t — and systems rarely exist for sharing social data among a client’s digital marketing agencies.4

■ Most listening platforms are ill equipped to inform marketing strategy. While many listening vendors promote their ability to assist marketers, most simply don’t know how to translate social data into effective marketing programs. In fact, we found that just three of the 11 best-in-class vendors in our most recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation of listening platforms were able to provide deep strategic marketing insight.5

Headquarters Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02140 USA Tel: +1 617.613.6000 • Fax: +1 617.613.5000 • www.forrester.com For Marketing Leadership Professionals Use Social Data To Improve Your Social Marketing Maturity 2

Use Social Data Now to mature your marketing While their peers struggle to make some sense of social data, smart marketers find innovative ways to use social intelligence to make their campaigns more effective. In fact, social intelligence is the ultimate indicator of social marketing maturity. All 12 marketing leaders we interviewed for this report confirmed that data capabilities are a significant area for improvement and that these capabilities are critical for advancing social maturity.6 You can start leveraging social data across a wide range of marketing channels to:

1. Develop messaging and content. By monitoring trends across social media channels, you can inform the content of your social media programs. For example, Nissan UK posted a tweet about the Royal Family with an image of its new seven-seat X-Trail sports utility vehicle only 7 minutes after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announced they were expecting their second child.7 How? Nissan and its agency spotted a trend of royal baby rumors on social channels months before the announcement made it official. This proactive approach allowed Nissan’s agency plenty of time to create a special image to take advantage of the moment.

2. Source and refine creative. Social data can inspire creative across many channels. For instance, a brand selling car parts and service noticed that its customers’ conversations on social channels were primarily about tire models and performance, so it created banner ads to promote its tire services. And increasingly, marketing leaders are curating social content to learn more about how their customers adopt their products. More than 50% of social marketers curate social content to generate customer insights.8 And vendors like Offerpop and Percolate are helping marketers capture permissions from user-generated content (UGC) creators so content can be repurposed in marketing email campaigns.9

3. Inform your media buys. Monitoring and tracking customer sentiment and conversations across social channels provides priceless social data that can help you make better media buys. For example, while working with a big consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand on a marketing campaign, Compass Lab Services discovered that the brand’s customers had more affinity for a certain mass-market retailer than for its competitors. After quickly digesting this unexpected and powerful insight, the CPG brand decided to allocate more of its co-op advertising dollars to that retailer with the highest affinity.10

4. Identify influencers and brand advocates. Effective influence programs have always relied on marketers’ ability to find and motivate the most influential members of their audience, and social intelligence is a key tool for identifying those consumers. To drive awareness of a new Harry Potter DVD release, agency WGC Interactive mined hundreds of thousands of fans and identified and ranked the 43 most influential Harry Potter fans in the world. Using hundreds of metrics, WGC Interactive identified Harry Potter super-fans who had the greatest reach, syndication, and relevance and offered them exclusive Harry Potter content. The results? WGC reached 5,312,842 people through the 43 influencers and drove 452,638 clicks, for a 9.31% click- through rate (CTR).11

5. React to real-time opportunities and threats. Increasingly, social marketing requires marketers to be more responsive — and social data tells you where and how to respond to your audiences, especially in social settings.12 Lenovo Early Detection (LED) combines its customers’ social conversations with data from other digital sources to specifically address product quality and customer experience months before they would be discovered through support calls. This has helped the brand save several million dollars in warranty claims.13

Improve Your Data Proficiency With The Four P’s Of Social Intelligence Although becoming data proficient does not happen overnight, there are steps you can take now that will get your social marketing team closer to that goal. The best customer insights professionals know they need the four Ps (purpose, people, processes, and platforms) to successfully manage social data — and so do you.14 To make sure you and your marketing team get the best value from social intelligence, you must have:

■ Purpose for using data to improve your marketing programs. You need to keep your business purpose in mind: building more-successful social and nonsocial marketing programs that will help you achieve your reach, depth, and relationship objectives. For example, after a Greenpeace YouTube video about palm oil in Kit Kat candy bars, Nestlé found itself scrambling to deal with more than 200,000 protest emails, which led to a significant drop in its brand reputation.15 As a result, Nestlé built a digital acceleration team with the sole purpose of monitoring social conversations so it can quickly reach and respond to its consumers. The team monitors Nestlé brands in real time so the company can proactively address issues before they go viral. The social data the team captures helps shape its social media messages and responses.

■ People that have both marketing and analytics expertise. You need people who are marketing experts, not just number crunchers, to turn the raw data into marketing insights. Why? Marketing experts can uncover unique marketing opportunities that pure analysts are more likely to miss. For example, a marketer with an analytics background at a high-tech brand used Salesforce’s listening platform to monitor developers’ conversations on the brand’s beta version of a new application programming interface (API). The marketer noticed patterns in the developers’ feedback and sentiment and immediately distributed the data to the product marketing team, which translated it into actionable insights. This shaped the features in the next product update and the marketing messages the team created to support the product’s launch.16

■ Processes that facilitate data analysis and real time reactions. Build a formalized process for analyzing and using the data quickly. The opportunities you’ll uncover in social data will often be fleeting, and without an agile organizational structure and workflows in place, you won’t be able to react in time.17 Also, add a line to your media budget for such opportunities. For example, one global technology brand provides a social “slush fund” that is meant to support real-time social events and has set up automatic triggers that immediately release budget for paid media buys.

■ Platforms that are proven to generate insights out of data. You need to find the right technology platform — one from a vendor that has proven its ability to generate marketing insights out of its data. Although there are a plethora of vendors that offer listening and monitoring in their social marketing platforms, seek out those that can actually convert social data into actionable insights. For example, technology vendors Crimson Hexagon and Synthesio include social media monitoring and social analytics in their product suites that help marketers interpret social data and transform it into meaningful insights that help drive their social and nonsocial programs.

What It Means Marketers will Capitalize with smarter Social analytics Immature data capabilities will continue to be the Achilles heel for social marketing leaders. A lack of sophisticated measurement platforms and a low supply of employees with marketing analytics skills will be the two primary inhibitors for advancement. To overcome these challenges, we expect that social marketing leaders will seek creative ways to add smart analytics to their organizations. For those that work in organizations with customer insights teams, this will be a matter of creating tighter partnerships with their CI and market research colleagues to develop processes for converting social data into valuable insights. Others without CI teams will seek short-term training programs that help their social marketing employees learn how to better analyze the social data they gather from their social programs. We also expect a rise in the number of agencies that specialize in social intelligence to help fill brands’ resource gaps. Watch for brands that invest in these efforts: They will quickly become differentiators, leaving their analytics-deprived competitors behind.

Supplemental Material

Survey Methodology Forrester’s Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey was fielded to 66 Forrester contacts with knowledge of social marketing. For quality assurance, we screened respondents to ensure they met minimum standards in terms of content knowledge, job responsibilities, and budget insight. Forrester fielded the survey in January 2014. Respondent incentives included two complimentary Forrester reports. Exact sample sizes are provided in this report on a question-by-question basis. This survey used a self-selected group of respondents (Forrester contacts knowledgeable of social marketing) and is therefore not random. This data is not guaranteed to be representative of the population, and, unless otherwise noted, statistical data is intended to be used for descriptive and not inferential purposes. While nonrandom, the survey is still a valuable tool for understanding where users are today and where the industry is headed.

Companies Interviewed For This Report 3M MRM//McCann Adobe Spredfast Bank Of America Sprinklr CA Technologies T3 Hyatt ViralHeat iCrossing

Endnotes 1 It’s no secret that social data — the often, but not always, unstructured data left by consumers online, including on social networking sites, ratings and reviews and forums — has reached epic proportions. Every minute, millions of consumers create and share billions of pieces of social content about companies, products, and services.

2 Source: Forrester’s Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey.

3 A primary reason for the lack of data analytics professionals is that the total number of college students who enter high-quality college analytics programs is lagging significantly behind demand. Also, colleges have only recently ramped up their programs in this area. This could be a very lucrative profession for those who take the analytics track. Source: James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, Jacques Bunghin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh and Angela Hung Byers, “Big data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011 (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_ technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation).

4 More than two-thirds of interactive marketers we surveyed use two or more interactive marketing agencies, and more than one-third use three or more. Source: Forrester’s December 2010 US Interactive Marketing Online Executive Panel Survey.

5 In case you’re wondering, when we published our most recent Forrester Wave on this topic, we said Converseon, Tracx, and Visible Technologies did this best. A couple of big names — including Salesforce’s product Radian6 and Sysomos — scored only 2 out of 5 on this criterion. See the January 22, 2014, “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014” report.

6 In a series of interviews, we asked 12 marketing leaders from a mix of global brands, agencies, and vendors to answer a series of questions on their social marketing capabilities in the four dimensions of culture, organization, strategy, and data. All agreed that data capabilities were a key area for improvement and also a key challenge they face when trying to advance their social marketing maturity. All of the marketing leaders told us that the ability to analyze data is a top capability for accelerating advancement to the next social marketing maturity stage.

7 This is one of my favorite recent examples of how social data can help opportunistic marketing leaders predict trends and proactively respond. Source: Kristina Monllos, “How Nissan Beat Everyone With a Royal Baby Tweet in Just Seven Minutes,” Adweek, September 4, 2014 (http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising- branding/how-nissan-beat-everyone-royal-baby-tweet-just-seven-minutes-160001).

8 Source: Forrester’s Q1 2014 Social Marketing Online Survey.

9 This report explains how social content curation platforms facilitate the capture, organization, and display of user-generated content and how vendors differentiate in an emerging and competitive ecosystem. See the August 4, 2014, “Use Social Content Curation Tools To Feature Your Consumers” report.

10 Source: Molly Glover Gallatin, “Five Marketing Decisions Social Media Should Be Shaping,” MarketingProfs, November 6, 2012 (http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2012/9447/five-marketing- decisions-social-media-should-be-shaping).

11 Source: WCG, “Influencer Activation for Harry Potter,” Forrester Research (http://groundswelldiscussion. com/groundswell/awards/detail.php?id=1183).

12 Marketing leaders must adjust roles and responsibilities to successfully respond to social data in real time. This means there needs to be two separate roles: one that is responsible for reactive monitoring and another that is responsible for proactive intelligence See the October 7, 2014, “Follow 10 Steps To Successful Social Intelligence Measurement” report.

13 Lenovo submitted this program for our 2014 Forrester Groundswell Awards. Although the program was not picked as a winner or finalist, the submission provides an excellent example of how brands are thinking about ways to capture social data and use it to proactively tackle product support issues. Source: Lenovo, “Lenovo Community: Customer Collaboration,” Forrester Research (http://groundswelldiscussion.com/ groundswell/awards/detail.php?id=106).

14 This brief provides customer insights (CI) professionals with a framework for planning and executing growth in their social intelligence practice — from early social monitoring to fully integrated insights. See the December 1, 2014, “Drive Toward Social Intelligence Maturity” report.

15 Source: Mark van Rijmenam, “How Nestlé Understands Brand Sentiment Of 2.000 Brands In Real-time,” Datafloq, September 13, 2013 (https://datafloq.com/read/nestle-understands-brand-sentiment-2-000- brands-real-time/378).

16 This report was inspired by my own experiences as a marketing leader at Sun Microsystems. It discusses how social data can be converted into actionable insights that shape product development. See the June 14, 2011, “The Social Tech Product Launch” report.

17 Marketing leaders must organize their teams and processes so they can react in real time to customer interactions on social media. Those that stick with traditional, rigid organization structures will be limited in their ability to advance their social marketing efforts. See the February 7, 2014, Staff“ Agile Teams For Social Marketing Success” report.

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