Social Plus: For Marketers Tired of Siloed Data
Start making the most of your marketing data.
Integrated marketing isn’t just a buzzword. It’s an absolute necessity for marketing teams that want to win.
It’s been a while coming, but businesses are finally capable of using data to fuel their marketing, research, planning, and measurement. However, each of these functions are traditionally siloed, sitting within different teams and dependent on a variety of different tools.
Posing more risks than just frustrating a marketer, data silos inherently limit the scope of results businesses gather from their data. This can lead to the wrong conclusions about their markets, their brand, or their customers.
"Data is a key transformation tool for all departments. It has become a core way of working ... I can’t imagine a marketing function without this capability, attitude, and infrastructure."
This is the next phase of data-driven marketing that companies need to break into.
With tools like Vizia automatically pulling data from across your company’s tech stack, data silos can be a thing of the past.
What’s more, in order to deliver a seamless end-to-end experience for the customer, marketers need to have a single view of that customer. They need to understand the journey and how data can help optimize it. But for the end experience to achieve this, the internal process must mirror the same unity.
We could write multiple guides on the merits and benefits of an integrated strategy – in fact we’ve already written one.
So in this guide, we aimed to look at actual examples of key data integrations and, more specifically, how social data gives context to other data sources that are vital to marketers.
This for a number of reasons:
- Social media is a critical data source. It’s a touch point in the large majority of customer journeys and is the world’s largest searchable archive of unbiased data.
- When approaching an integrated marketing strategy, it’s often helpful to start with a baseline made up of data you understand. This creates a foundation that can be repeated with other data and processes.
- Marketing data is essentially an extension of consumer behavior, and by humanizing that data it’s ultimately far easier to understand and action. The more we understand the data, the better the outputs will be.
In doing this, we dive into four specific data integrations, share real-life company examples, and offer tips for implementing these integrations that any marketer can start using today. Explore each of the four sections:
1
Title Social + Sales
Do your customers indicate their holiday purchase intent on Twitter before going along to your Black Friday sale? Did your hashtag campaign in Texas increase revenue coming from that region?
In other words, if you could easily map how your customers discuss your brand on social media to sales, what would you learn?
"84% of C-Level executives use social media to make purchasing choices."
As soon as social media started to grow up, the applications for sales became evident. Social selling has taken on a life of its own – a quick search on Google makes that pretty clear. Sponsored advertisements, how-to blogs, guides, and even consultancies… It’s a micro-industry in itself.
From research to real-time alerts, social listening has a big part to play in social selling. But that’s not the only application of social and sales data.
Combining social media with sales data is key to providing tangible ROI to marketers, and customer conversations online can add a much needed context to sales figures. Using tools that can make this analysis simple help marketers quickly see the value of their work, as well as help sales departments easily spot fluctuations in their sales with social data, like in the following example.
To examine the comprehensive effect of patriotism on the US car brand Ford, AOL conducted research using social data from Brandwatch alongside several other data sources, including sales data.
"To think that Ford is moving its small car division is a disgrace. It’s disgraceful. It’s disgraceful that our politicians allow them to get away with it. It really is."
The car manufacturer has always been classified as a true American brand and a patriotic one at that. However, when Ford made the announcement to move its small-car production to Mexico, then Presidential nominee Donald Trump made his views known.
This lead to a significant increase in negative conversations around the brand as many joined Trump in voicing their outrage.
When this social data was viewed in relation to sales data, it was clear the brand health issue in September 2016 was followed by a drop in unit sales the next month.
Even accounting for the possibility of seasonality didn’t completely explain this dramatic dip in sales.
Not only did the the announcement have a negative effect on actual revenue, one must think of the residual effect and how difficult it might be for Ford to change opinions and win back their prospective customers.
Situations like these are often unavoidable. However, having this data means that efforts can be made to soften the impact before it’s too late.
Sales data can play a significant role in real-time marketing by adding key context to sales data and other sources. Being able to understand the actual effects of your activities is crucial in showcasing marketing ROI.
A recent campaign run by Co-op, a Brandwatch Vizia customer, shows the exact impact this can have with their recent Halloween campaign. As a popular convenience retailer, Co-op knew that in order to succeed during this seasons, thousands of employees needed to be aligned and informed with the most up-to-date data. And importantly, not just one data source.
"We're sharing real-time social media conversation topics and trends alongside the latest from our Halloween marketing campaign as well as site traffic and the percentage of the week's sales attributable to our 4.5 million strong membership base. It's powerful to have simple to understand insights about our work, displayed beautifully where we work."
2
Title Social + Search
As mentioned in the introduction, customer and marketing data is an extension of consumer behavior. This is also true in the context of search and social data.
This concept is contextualized by Sophie Moule, head of marketing at Pi Datametrics:
“People don’t interact with your brand or service in one dimension, so by only looking at one data source to analyze audiences, you instantly limit your understanding of them. With different data sources combined, for example search and social listening data, you can see when trends align…but perhaps more importantly, you can discover differences in customer behavior, which will help you execute more intelligent strategies to reach your audiences with the right content, through the correct medium.”
We behave differently across each of our digital touch points. On social media, we’re emotive. We lead with our hearts, scream, shout, get into heated debates, spill our souls, give advice, love and laugh.
Now spin this around to Google search where we often lead with our heads. We have questions we want the answers to, and while we may go on a tangent, it’s mostly directed and to the point. Already, this paints a very broad picture of the same person.
However, on social there’s nowhere to hide. We’re tied to our names, handles, or avatars so we’re always acting under a certain degree of scrutiny. The opposite can be said for Google, where we have the full privacy of a search box.
Combining these data sets provides a contextually rich snapshot of your customers and market, giving another layer of practical insight.
People don’t interact with your brand or service in one dimension, so by only looking at one data source to analyze audiences, you instantly limit your understanding of them.
So how can these data sets practically and positively drive marketing efforts?
There are countless cases – trend monitoring, campaign analysis, consumer research, advertising strategy, website optimization, etc.
Take the airline industry, for example. By having access to real-time search and social data, there are multiple aspects of the customer experience that can be optimized, yielding a high return with low investment.
- Monitor the locations people are searching for. This information can then be used to optimize the website to serve relevant content to visitors, to create agile advertising in order to capitalize on destination demand, and even to offer special deals to encourage conversions.
- Analyze the popular search terms in the industry, especially those the brand is ranked poorly for. Use this information to create SEO driven content in order to improve rating and capture demand.
- Look at the common customer customer complaints or enquiries received on social media, which can be easily managed via support content. Use this information to inform keywords and free up time for customer support teams.
Brandwatch Vizia helps brings this data together in a way that makes it easy to understand and action. With these two datasets in one platform, being able to spot insights and quickly distribute results can help drive a data-driven mindset as well as real-time agility and responsiveness.
Accurate attribution is the top priority for most digital marketers, and Vizia gives you real-time insights into the all-important relationship between search and social.
3
Title Social + TV data
There’s been a lot of chatter about the health of the TV industry in recent years, and this is especially true in the context of social media. Are online streaming services slowly eating away at TV’s core audience? Maybe, but it’s not over yet.
Even though digital spend surpasses TV, average daily viewership still tips in TV’s favor. This alone cements TV as a key medium for reaching consumers. Additionally, it spans all age brackets.
While some may argue that social and TV are competitors (they certainly are battling for share of attention) they are also highly complementary mediums.
First, TV is a key touchpoint on the customer journey and attracts high viewership numbers – ranging from 10 hours (18-24 year-olds) to 50+ hours (65+ year-olds) a week. This leads to potentially high-impression activities, however the inherent difficulty is that it can’t be measured easily. Estimates are helpful but there’s no way of knowing for sure.
Clever brands are finding the opportunity in this chasm by leveraging the relationship (and eternal struggle for attention) between social and TV. From an advertising point of view, hashtag campaigns are the perfect example of this.
Encouraging audiences to engage in the moment, and on social media, can give the brand an indication of the sentiment and impact of an advertisement. It also crosses the divide between the two channels and drives added engagement for the brand on social.
An excellent example of this was Airbnb’s #WeAccept campaign. During the 2017 Super Bowl, the brand launched a politically charged ad. Not only was the timing perfect, so was the message, sentiment, and intention. You can read about the full campaign here.
By leveraging the relationship between TV and social, Airbnb were able to leverage the large audience drawn in by the Super Bowl, while extending the longevity of the campaign by bringing the conversation to social.
Hit reality TV show Love Island experienced similar success by taking full advantage of second-screening and engaged audiences during the summer airing. Audiences were encouraged to use the hashtag, vote on the app, take part in competitions and generally share their opinions, all while watching the hour long show each night.
Another important way to examine social and TV is the large volume of conversation that happens around TV programs on social media. Fans and followers are increasingly vocal when it comes to casting, characters, scripts, storylines, and worst of all, cancellations.
Our recent analysis of the TV industry on social media showed the following:
People using hashtags trying to “save” TV programs from being cancelled were a tremendous driver of negative TV network conversations in 2018, with calls for the continuation of Shadow Hunters, Lucifer, Timeless, and Gotham rising to the top.
But, importantly, no alignment of television and social strategy is useful unless you can easily see compare the relationship between these two mediums, and analyze the similarity or difference between the two.
What does it mean if your brand is well liked on social media but is discussed poorly on TV?
The charts below show example comparisons between the sentiment and volume of brand mentions on social media and TV. Seeing both online and offline media mentions alongside one another offers unique insights that are greater than the sum of their parts.
This real-time data can give you an indication of the performance of your earned, owned and paid presence across channels. This is accentuated when you take an integrated approach to the data and view the channels in tandem, making spotting opportunities and risks easier. This is especially useful in the context of brand crisis – not having visibility on the mentions on TV leaves the brand open to escalating crisis.
Digital is overtaking TV’s role in our lives, but the existing relationship is something that should be leveraged rather than ignored.
4
Title Social + Web Analytics
Social media and web analytics as a pairing is an absolute no-brainer. In general, web analytics is one of the most important marketing data sources for everything from understanding traffic volumes, bounce rates, site and page performance – the list goes on.
In the context of web analytics and social specifically, the use cases vary depending on the level of expertise within the marketing team. The following video from Fairmont Hotels shows the level of impact that small changes and a more integrated approach can play.
One significant benefit of having an overview of this data is the light it sheds on the customer journey. This has been a theme throughout the guide, and for good reason. The more you understand the customer journey, the easier it will be to deliver an experience that engages and delights customers, ultimately leading to higher conversion and retention rates. Understanding how users interact with your site plays a pivotal role in this.
Is high volume traffic useful if there’s a high bounce rate? Have resources been focused on a channel that isn’t performing? What happens after users land on the website? Can the rest of their journey be optimized to leverage this engagement?
These are all questions that can be easily answered and make a significant and lasting effect on your marketing outputs.
Now for a question that we’ve all heard at some time, in some context: “How can you prove the ROI of social media?” The fact of the matter is that this question can be a tricky one, especially if you’re relying on social media metrics alone.
Only 23.3% of marketers are able to prove the impact of social media marketing quantitatively
Web analytics provide meat to the engagement and traffic you glean from social. If you are struggling to prove the ROI of social then focus on the metrics that clearly show the impact of social referral traffic.
However, as with all data, it’s not going to effect any change of perceptions if it is not shared. Web analytics help prove the impact of social media by adding weight and context to the data, but this insight needs to be shared in order for it to have any real impact.
Brandwatch Vizia has allowed Co-op to share beautiful data visualisations with thousands of colleagues right where they work, to help with their work. With our four colleague-facing screens we're helping colleagues understand topics of social conversation about Co-op, key metrics from websites and even surfacing sales data based on Co-op Member transactions in Co-op Food stores. Our aspiration is to learn more about what colleagues need to see on these screens and iterate more visualisations.
Siloed data will always exist in some way or another, but the more we do to combat it, the easier all of our jobs will be. Decisions based on gut instinct don’t cut it anymore and in order to make decisions that put customers and the company first, marketers need access to all of the pertinent data. Having an integrated approach makes this more accessible in the short term.