FOR: Interactive Marketing Professionals Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game by Nate Elliott, November 21, 2012 KEY TAKEAWAYS Avoid The Temptation To Oversimplify Your Metrics Blended single engagement metrics may look appealing -- but they re overly simple and risk undermining your measurement plan. The first problem? They re fatally circular in nature, often reflecting nothing more than the biases of the vendors that create them. The second problem? Engagement is only ever a means, not an end. Measure Social Marketing s Value By Whether It Supports Your Customers Journey If your social programs are designed to appeal to customers at a specific stage of the customer life cycle, the success of each effort can only be defined by whether it guides customers to the next stage: from discovery to exploration, from exploration to purchase, from purchase to engagement, and from engagement back to discovery. Think Of Social Marketing As A Board Game Use site surveys and web analytics to measure whether discovery drives exploration. Use web analytics and ad tags to measure whether exploration drives sales. Use surveys to measure whether engagement drives discovery. And finally, use attribution tools and marketing mix models to tell your CEO if you won the game. Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA Tel: +1 617.613.6000 Fax: +1 617.613.5000 www.forrester.com
NOVEMBER 21 2012 Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game Performance Management: The Social Marketing Playbook by Nate Elliott with Christine Spivey Overby, Jennifer Wise, and Elizabeth Komar WHY READ THIS REPORT You ve no doubt heard the question: How do we know that social marketing drives sales? But just as not all TV spots or billboards are intended to drive direct response, not every social marketing program is designed as a sales trigger. To measure the success of social marketing indeed, of any marketing tactic you need to think of your customers journey as a board game like Monopoly. Then follow three simple steps: 1) identify which stage of the customer journey your social marketing program is designed to support; 2) measure whether your social marketing efforts have moved your customers to the next stage of their journey; and 3) count how many times your customers pass Go so you can collect $200. If you keep your customers moving around the board, eventually you ll win the game. Table Of Contents 2 4 Avoid The Temptation To Oversimplify Your Metrics Measure Social Marketing s Value By Whether It Supports Your Customers Journey Think Of Social Marketing As A Board Game Use Site Surveys And Web Analytics To Measure Whether Discovery Drives Exploration Use Web Analytics And Ad Tags to Measure Whether Exploration Drives Sales Use Surveys To Measure Whether Engagement Drives Discovery Notes & Resources Forrester interviewed seven vendor and user companies, including 360i, ComBlu, Gregory Pouy, icrossing, iperceptions, Synthesio, and We Are Social. Related Research Documents Power Your Brand Ecosystem With Social Media June 29, 2012 Social Media Metrics That Matter June 26, 2012 6 RECOMMENDATIONS Attribution And Media Mix Tools Tell Your CEO If You Won The Game 7 Supplemental Material 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 2 AVOID THE TEMPTATION TO OVERSIMPLIFY YOUR METRICS Social marketers have access to hundreds of metrics so it s no surprise that many social sites and vendors are pushing simplified single engagement metrics that blend a number of social data points. The problem? These blended metrics are overly simple and risk undermining your measurement plan: They re excessively reductive. Not every marketing program has the same goal or serves the same purpose. Just as some of your media buys build the long-term value of your brand and others are designed to boost short-term sales, so can social marketing do a variety of jobs. Single metrics just can t capture the breadth of what social offers. They re fatally circular in nature. You already know that simply counting fans and followers is no way to measure the success of social marketing. 1 But you may not realize that most single engagement metrics are built primarily from such unsophisticated data points. The result is a group of tools fundamentally biased by their own inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. They re a means, not an end. Engagement is a tactic, not a metric. If you re lucky, your customers will want to engage with your brand or company. But engagement is their goal, not yours. Your goal is to use that engagement to drive customers toward actions that create value for your company. Measure Social Marketing s Value By Whether It Supports Your Customers Journey Rather than reduce all your social measurements into single metrics, you need a measurement process that more precisely links social programs with marketing and business objectives. To do so, measure success based on where each social program fits into your customers journey. For instance, our customer life cycle model consists of four stages discover, explore, buy, and engage and social marketing can support your customers at each stage (see Figure 1). 2 If your social programs are designed to appeal to customers at a specific stage of the customer life cycle, the success of each effort can best be defined by whether it guides customers to the next stage: When your customers are discovering, track whether social encourages exploration. You can t create discovery without reach and word-of-mouth marketing can offer that reach. But measuring reach alone isn t enough; if the customer journey ends with discovery your marketing plan has failed. To gauge whether social marketing programs focused on this part of the life cycle succeeded, you must determine whether they drive customers to explore your offer in greater detail. When your customers are exploring, track whether social drives purchases. Owned social communities and detailed customer reviews can provide your customers with the depth they re seeking when they explore your products. But again, simply supporting your customers needs
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 3 isn t enough; you must measure whether social tools targeted at this stage of the customer life cycle create sales. When your customers are engaging, ask whether social creates new discovery. After customers buy, they may engage to learn more about using your products or to seek customer service and your Facebook and Twitter accounts are natural magnets for such engagement. But customers engagement alone doesn t define your success. To measure success at this stage of the life cycle, track whether you drove new discovery either by helping your engaged customers to discover additional offerings or by using them to create discovery among their friends. Figure 1 Measure Success Based On Where Each Social Program Fits Into The Customer Journey Discover Explore Engage Buy 80721 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 4 THINK OF SOCIAL MARKETING AS A BOARD GAME Figure 1 is based on Forrester s customer life cycle but it doesn t matter whether you use our model or another one. No matter how you visualize your customers journey, winning at social marketing is like winning at the board game Monopoly. If you move your customers from one square to the next, eventually they ll pass Go and you ll get to collect $200 (see Figure 2). Figure 2 The Social Marketing Measurement Game Discover Explore? The Social Marketing Measurement Game? Engage? Buy 80721 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 5 Use Site Surveys And Web Analytics To Measure Whether Discovery Drives Exploration Marketers often launch word-of-mouth programs to create discovery. But measuring success isn t easy: While vendors like Visible Measures and Omniture can track the reach your viral campaigns create, few offer solutions for measuring whether those campaigns drove customers to explore your products. Two strategies can bridge this gap: Surveys can record inspiration for site visits. The website surveys you might use to gauge users satisfaction can also capture users inspiration for visiting. For instance, iperceptions clients often use surveys to ask users why they visited the site. An increase in users who say that their visits were influenced by family and friends or by social media sites shows that viral programs are driving exploration. Referrer data can show an increase in searches, as well as visits directly from social sites. Web analytics can tell you what pages your site visitors came from even what keyword they searched if they came from Google. Kimberly-Clark was able to attribute 1.7 million site visits for its new Kotex brand to word of mouth on social sites with Twitter. Likewise, if Sony used viral marketing to help customers discover its new line of headphones, an increase in traffic from Google searches for the new brand name could tell it that word of mouth was driving exploration. Use Web Analytics And Ad Tags To Measure Whether Exploration Drives Sales Customer reviews, corporate blogs, and on-site communities can all offer your customers the depth they need when they re exploring your brand. To gauge the success of these programs, don t just study whether customers used that depth measure whether that depth drove increased sales: Chico s maps engagement with user reviews to increases in sales. In 2011, the US fashion retailer Chico s worked with Bazaarvoice to implement social content such as ratings, reviews, and questions on its product pages. Rather than simply measuring customers use of these reviews, it links that use to sales and has found that for one of its brands, customers who explore this deep social content convert at a 200% higher rate than customers who don t. 3 You can do this yourself using ad tags or analytics tools. Lion Brand Yarn measures whether its blog drives increased conversion rates. The online yarn seller s blog offers knitting patterns and tips designed to turn browsers into buyers. And it works: The company measures the traffic from its blog to its commerce site, and has reported that users who visit the blog are 41% more likely to buy and that their order value is 39% higher than average.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 6 Use Surveys To Measure Whether Engagement Drives Discovery If your social programs are targeted to users in the engage stage of the life cycle, brand surveys should provide an easy way to determine whether a marketing program has created discovery. 4 But Facebook and Twitter make it hard to run surveys. Until the social sites offer better survey options or until canny survey vendors find ways to deploy effective invitations through the networks marketers must choose between two imperfect options: Post a survey invitation in a wall post or a tweet. This strategy is likely to yield a small and biased sample. After all, Facebook admits the average brand post reaches only 16% of that brand s fans and the EdgeRank algorithm it uses to determine which fans see brands posts means that your survey invitations would surely be biased toward your most loyal fans. 5 But despite the limitations, this is the best way to get frequent data on how your social engagement channels are driving discovery. Use broader brand tracking surveys. Most large brands run annual or biannual brand studies, and you can use them to gauge whether social engagement tools encourage discovery. For instance, the agency Marcus Thomas runs a Facebook program for a national packaged goods brand. In the marketer s next brand audit, the agency will study whether customers who are engaged with its branded Facebook page are more aware of all the brand s offerings. A positive correlation would offer directional evidence linking social engagement programs to discovery. RECOMMENDATIONS ATTRIBUTION AND MEDIA MIX TOOLS TELL YOUR CEO IF YOU WON THE GAME Measuring how well you move customers around your game board will help you make operational decisions and optimize social programs on the fly. But your CEO will still want to know how many times you passed Go. There are three ways to answer the question: Mix modeling is the best solution. If you want to show how a marketing investment affects sales, there s no better option than marketing mix modeling. The problem? Building a model can take months and cost millions and most modeling tools still aren t great at reporting on social media. But leading vendors like ThinkVine and SymphonyIRI are getting better and better at modeling social. 6 Measuring social isn t enough to justify the expense of a mix model its own, but if your company is already deploying a mix modeling solution, make sure it includes your social channels. Attribution tools provide a cheaper but more limited option. If a marketing mix model is too rich, then attribution vendors can also help you gauge whether social tools contributed to sales. 7 Unfortunately, these vendors specialize mainly in transactions that happen online, making them better suited to technology and software marketers than those selling packaged goods or big-ticket items.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 7 Coupons and unique identifiers are your last-ditch option. If you simply can t find the budget for a technology-based approach, offering coded coupons to your social fans can prove that they re buying. Remember, not every social tool is designed to directly drive sales and the discounts themselves will probably be as large a factor in redemption as the effectiveness of your social marketing strategies. But as always, some measurement is better than none. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Companies Interviewed For This Report 360i ComBlu Gregory Pouy iperceptions Synthesio We Are Social icrossing ENDNOTES 1 Why not? Because collecting fans and followers for its own sake doesn t fulfill any business objectives. Measuring marketing success is all about showing how marketing actions led to business benefits. Counting fans and followers is, on the other hand, a perfectly good way to measure the performance of your community managers. After all, their primary job is to create the social opportunity that represents the first step toward social marketing success. See the June 26, 2012, Social Media Metrics That Matter report. 2 And while social tools are unlikely to take the lead at every stage of the customer journey, they can at least play a supporting role throughout your customers relationships with your company, and at every layer of the interactive brand ecosystem that you build to support that journey. See the June 29, 2012, Power Your Brand Ecosystem With Social Media report. 3 To read the case study that explores how Chico s partnered with Bazaarvoice to increase conversations and ultimately drive sales, see Chico s achieves over 200% increase in conversion with Bazaarvoice Conversations, Bazaarvoice, January 31, 2012 (http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/case-studies/chicos-achieves-over-200-increase-conversion-bazaarvoice-conversations). 4 If you re not sure whether to use a test/control or a pre/post methodology, see the June 15, 2011, Use Surveys To Measure The Brand Impact Of Interactive Marketing Campaigns report. 5 One way around this limitation would be to pay Facebook to promote the post containing your survey invitation to a wider range of your fans. Facebook says that promoted posts can reach more than 90% of those who ve clicked the like button your branded page.
Win The Social Marketing Measurement Game 8 6 For more information on marketing mix modeling tools, see the September 21, 2011, The Forrester Wave : Marketing Mix Modeling, Q3 2011 report. 7 For more information on interactive attribution and the vendor landscape, see the April 30, 2012, The Forrester Wave : Interactive Attribution Vendors, Q1 2012 report.
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