You Don't Need A Social Marketing Strategy

NOT LICENSED FOR DISTRIBUTIONYou Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbookby Melissa Parrish and Jessica LiuAugust 10, 2018Why Read This Report Key TakeawaysMost marketers use social media, but few can Social Is A Strategic Tool, Not A Panaceaquantify its value. In this report, we show how Social marketing is not a single channel that willbrands use social tactics to achieve marketing replace your entire digital marketing practice. Norgoals across the customer life cycle and how they is it just an advertising medium. Marketers whouse social insights to improve the rest of their plan ahead to use social tactics for particularmarketing campaigns. But social media can offer phases of the customer life cycle can showbrands far more than just marketing value — so measurable business success.we also explore how social technology helpscompanies transform for customer obsession. Social Technology And Insights Improve More Than Just MarketingThis is an update of a previously published report; Social marketing produces insights that makeForrester reviews and updates it periodically for all marketing programs better, from informingcontinued relevance and accuracy. brand personas and brand voice to supplying content and insights for creative strategies. And marketers help their customer service, human resources, product, and sales colleagues use social media to achieve their goals, too. Social Media Helps Companies Meet The Challenges Of The Post-Digital World Brands must be human, helpful, and handy to stay relevant in the post-digital world. Social technologies and applications offer companies a mechanism through which they can demonstrate post-digital’s three tenets — authenticity, empathy, and inclusivity — while solving customer problems and becoming faster and more dexterous.forrester.com

For B2C Marketing ProfessionalsYou Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbookby Melissa Parrish and Jessica Liuwith Brigitte Majewski, Miriam Oesterreich, and Peggy DostieAugust 10, 2018Table Of Contents Related Research Documents2 You’re Doing Social Wrong Build A Case To Show Social’s Value To Marketing And The Entire Enterprise2 Social’s Sweet Spot Is The Marketing Four Steps To Add Social To Your Marketing Department Strategy Thriving In A Post-Digital World Use Social Tactics To Achieve Marketing Objectives Share reports with colleagues. Enhance your membership with Use Social Skills To Augment Other Marketing Research Share. Functions5 Social Expands Business Success Beyond Marketing6 Social Will Pervade Your Post-Digital TransformationRecommendations7 Develop Five Core Competencies To Achieve This Vision9 Supplemental MaterialForrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA+1 617-613-6000 | Fax: +1 617-613-5000 | forrester.com© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®,Technographics®, Forrester Wave, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research,Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or distributingis a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing PlaybookYou’re Doing Social WrongMost marketers use social media. Forrester forecasts that, worldwide, marketers will spend $62 billionon social media advertising in 2018.1 This enthusiasm for a marketing channel must mean that it works,right? Not necessarily: 34% of CMOs can’t show the impact of social media on their businesses.2So what’s going on here? Simply put, social media stumps marketers. First, they had unrealisticexpectations of social media, hoping it would be the key to unlocking massive profits in the digitalage.3 When that didn’t pan out, they shifted 180 degrees to believing that social media’s only use wasfor advertising. Although it’s true that Facebook’s primary business value is as an advertising platform,it’s a mistake to infer that advertising is social media’s sole opportunity.4 It’s time to shake off thatthinking and realize that: ›› Social media is a lot more than a single channel. “Social media” refers to the gamut of social networks, blogs, ratings and review features, photo and video apps, online communities, and more — each with its own marketing use cases. Expecting the entire category of social media to have one linear strategy and result is as flawed as expecting the same outcome from the internet at large. You don’t need a “social marketing” strategy; you need marketing that uses social tactics and technology strategically alongside other channels to achieve your goals.5 ›› Social media’s value is in putting people first. Marketers know that customer obsession is as much about empathy and emotion as it is about data.6 While you can and must measure the ROI of social marketing on a per-program basis, the bigger opportunity is in its ability to put your company in unfiltered conversation with your audience; here, your brand can demonstrate its authenticity, empathy, and inclusivity. As Katy Keim, CEO at LQ Digital, puts it: “All the data we’ve gotten from digital has made us numb. What social is phenomenal at doing is making us hear what customers want and what they do. That’s where the value sits if you want to develop better products or services.” ›› Marketers pioneer using social media, but your whole business can benefit. Once marketers learn how to use social’s high-transparency tactics to achieve business goals, they can socialize the subsequent customer insights and underlying technologies to help other teams achieve their goals. Cory Edwards, Adobe’s director of corporate communications and social media, agrees: “You don’t need a social standalone strategy. You need to have social applications for respective business functions. That’s how businesses will realize the full benefit of everything we call ‘social.’”Social’s Sweet Spot Is The Marketing DepartmentIt makes sense that marketers were the first to tap social media: Social technology was developed toallow people to get what they needed from each other instead of from traditional institutions — andanywhere people gather, marketing will follow.7 But social marketing went awry when marketers stucksocial on an island, expected it to replace all of their higher-cost marketing channels, and relied solely© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbookon vanity metrics to track its success.8 Get back on track by focusing on how social tactics can helpyou achieve your marketing objectives and then incorporating knowledge you’ve gained from social toimprove the rest of your marketing.Use Social Tactics To Achieve Marketing ObjectivesIn conjunction with other marketing channels and tactics, social tools can help you achieve your goalsacross the customer life cycle in a measurable way. But this doesn’t happen by accident. Marketershave realized that to achieve success, you must: ›› Plan, then launch. Forrester uses the POST method, which you’ll find in the Strategic Plan section of this playbook, to ensure that social marketing programs are strategic rather than driven by perceived competitive pressures.9 When you follow the POST method, you’ll understand how your audience interacts with brands on social media and then decide which marketing goals you can achieve by adding social features and networks to your strategy. Unilever discovered that its target customers consumed videos about how to use hair products from young women like them, so it gave up creative control in favor of an influencer program.10 ›› Know which social tools work best at which phases of the customer life cycle. If you’ve researched your customers’ social media behaviors, then you know in which phases of their journey they use which specific social networks and features. Using our Social Technographics® model, you’ll even uncover ways in which your audience is unique in its pairing of social media and customer life-cycle phases.11 In general, we find that social ads and word of mouth are great in the discover phase; onsite social features are best for the explore and buy phases; communities and chat work well in the use and ask phases; and brand presences on social networks are best for the engage phase (see Figure 1). ›› Bake in measurement. As part of your planning process, make sure to clarify: 1) what you want to accomplish and 2) how you will prove that you accomplished it. Planning ahead for measurement against goals is the only way to ensure that you’re tracking everything you need to. The goal of Unilever’s influencer program was discovery, so Unilever planned to compare brand lift from the program with brand lift from other discovery channels. The result? The social program tripled the brand life compared with traditional advertising.12© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing PlaybookFIGURE 1 Align Social Tools And Technology To The Customer Life CycleBrand presences on social • Social ads networks • In uencers • Advocates ENGAGE DISCOVER ASK EXPLORECommunities and chat USE BUY Onsite social toolsUse Social Skills To Augment Other Marketing FunctionsAs social marketers see results across the life cycle, they uncover consumer trends and develop skillsthat are useful outside of their social silo. Taking what the social team knows to the wider marketingteam is the next logical step for a brand’s social growth. When this happens: ›› Social insights and programs are embedded in creative strategies. Social media is most effective at the genesis of a creative strategy when it can illuminate underlying consumer emotions and behaviors. As Jim Rudden, CMO of Spredfast, explains: “What’s amazing about social is that I’m getting a window into the curated world of people. There’s never been a channel that lets you see how people feel in real time, letting you discover things you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.” Adam Naide, Cox Communications’ former executive director of marketing and social media, put this expanded application into action: “Originally, my team focused on direct response. Then we moved to the brand marketing team, and social is included at the inception of all brand campaigns.” ›› Social content becomes marketing content. Great content can come from anywhere. User- generated content can be effective outside of the social features where it’s gathered and displayed.13 The gold standard of this approach must be Apple’s integrated marketing campaign “Shot on iPhone,” which repurposes images and videos that users produce on the phone into TV commercials, billboards, print ads, and online content and advertising. Citibank, Mercedes- Benz, and other brands have had success with smaller-scale campaigns that started as Instagram influencer programs and blossomed into cross-channel creative.© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbook ›› Social personas become brand personas. Social personas are often more detailed than other personas because they leverage rich social intelligence. Savvy brands use these social personas to deeply inform their brand personas. VML, the agency that hamburger chain Wendy’s works with, created personas for the brand’s social playbook, which has evolved into a marketingwide blueprint. Wendy’s is now exploring how those social personas play out across all marketing and PR channels. Amy Worley, chief connections officer at VML, hopes to take it even further: “If this is the brand persona, it should be everywhere: customer service, eCommerce, even helping brands choose the next products to develop.” ›› Social voice becomes brand voice. The voice a brand adopts in social marketing is usually more real, down-to-earth, and human than the brand voice in other communications due to the peer- to-peer origins of social media. As customers respond to this conversational tone and perceived transparency, brands apply their social voice to more customer touchpoints. But this can take time, especially if the brand voice is a long-running standard. Gatorade, a brand that’s been lauded for its social marketing and mission-control-style listening command center since at least 2010, only started to use its social voice in other marketing programs in 2015. ›› Social brand health is an indicator of overall brand health. Brand sentiment, as tracked by social listening programs, has long been included as part of a well-rounded brand health assessment. But today, social networks and social intelligence platforms are taking their role in brand health more seriously with better tools to gather customers’ points of view and predict brand success. For example, in 2016, Twitter launched a tool that lets brands acquire customer feedback in Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) formats.14 And software platform Brand VO2 puts unstructured social data through rigorous analyses to produce a score to predict a brand’s future market share.Social Expands Business Success Beyond MarketingWhile marketing is typically at the forefront of social media application, limiting social media tomarketing limits its benefits for your business. Once you’ve mastered social for your own goals, helpthe rest of your organization harness the power of social to achieve their objectives. In companies thatfully embrace social media: ›› Customer care teams delight angry customers. The customer service use case for social media is well-known and has been reducing time-to-resolution for at least a decade.15 But more advanced organizations use social technology to not only resolve issues but also to delight initially angry customers. Rackspace now identifies complaining customers before they reach out to the brand directly — and fixes the issue before contacting the customer. The result? Surprised and grateful customers and a business upside — looking back at five years’ worth of data, Rackspace can see that more than 80% of formerly angry customers have not only stayed loyal but also increased their spending with the firm.© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbook ›› Product teams find inspiration and ask for feedback before development. Technology companies like Dell and IBM got an early jump on using social media for product development, but today that use case is spreading across industries. Jewelry brand Alex and Ani asks its fans and followers what kinds of charms they want next before designing and manufacturing them. And one brand in high-end luxury fashion — an industry known for setting trends without appealing to customer desires — is now analyzing fashion trends during the current season to inspire its designs for the following one. ›› Sales teams connect with prospects and uncover barriers to purchase. According to LinkedIn, sales reps who actively use social media to find and engage prospects are 51% more likely to meet their sales goals than their social-eschewing colleagues.16 But it’s not just B2B companies that use social for sales success. Equinox, the luxury gym and fitness brand, has used social to engage customers and publish inspiring content and advice for several years. Now it’s also analyzing location-based social data to identify new gym locations and shape fitness offerings to appeal to local residents. ›› HR teams attract great candidates and augment the brand’s voice. Social media is no longer just a broadcast outlet for newly posted jobs. Companies like General Electric (GE) understand that their recruiting presence feeds the brand identity and vice versa. Shaunda Zilich, GE’s former global employment brand leader, worked across the conglomerate’s businesses to centralize the recruiting brand — and social is a key piece of the evolution. She tells us: “We created a foundational partnership between marketing communications and the employment brand. They sold goods and services; we sold opportunities. GE can be an intimidating company, but it all comes down to storytelling, and social is where we did it.”Social Will Pervade Your Post-Digital TransformationIn today’s post-digital world, calling out what is “digital” isn’t relevant when digital is part ofeverything.17 Companies that embed social technology into their culture as their customers do in theirown lives discover that separating out what’s “social” becomes impossible. Social technologies — andthe open, collaborative, and iterative mindset that comes with them — become a key piece of yourpost-digital transformation when they facilitate transparent human interactions everywhere within yourcompany and between it and your customers. Remembering the three rules of post-digital marketing,you’ll use social to: ›› Be human — use interactions to deliver your brand promise, not just talk about it. Post-digital marketing requires authenticity, empathy, and inclusivity — three tenets that social marketers have always embraced. When social dissolves into the fabric of your organization, it becomes one of many outlets that manifest these traits rather than the media that manufactured them. Heifer International, a nonprofit that allows people to donate animals to communities in need, has been inclusive from the very beginning. Its social programs focus on raising awareness of the issues it© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbook supports and providing “the spark that makes conversations grow” rather than soliciting donations. By including people in the vision and mission, participants are more likely to feel a sense of attachment, so they become contributors, and growth occurs naturally.18 ›› Be helpful — uncover and solve problems using social media’s unique features. Post-digital marketers focus on solving customer problems rather than hawking products. KLM uses its social handles to market and provide customer service but understands that its customers neither know nor care about departmental distinctions — so the airline doesn’t dwell on them either. Instead, it’s laser-focused on helping the customer, regardless of how many different departments must get involved. Or consider Rush University Medical Center’s Rush Road Home program: Originally, its social strategy, developed with Zocalo Group, focused on discovering veterans who could benefit from its treatment programs for post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the organization is developing programs to treat the condition via social technologies. ›› Be handy — get all hands on deck to work at the speed of social media. Post-digital marketers are deft, agile, and dexterous. Deployed inside your company, social technologies can increase the speed and efficiency with which you serve your customers. One marketer at a restaurant franchise told us, “Sometimes we receive questions we can’t answer in the social media department, so we have to ask other departments. [Our social media management solution] makes it very easy to send social interactions to colleagues, so they answer the question and it’s logged in the solution. The solution is very flexible, so we use it for community moderation.”RecommendationsDevelop Five Core Competencies To Achieve This VisionThere are five pillars of social operations that companies in all stages of social engagement strugglewith — and they’re the five underlying skills and processes that marketers must get right to achieveconsistent success. As you embrace social technologies, build your company’s competence in: ›› Community management. This is a broader and more important function than it used to be; it now encompasses developing and enforcing social media policies, publishing content, funneling feedback throughout the organization, and maintaining a knowledge base of a brand’s most vocal advocates. Community management is usually handled centrally early on in a brand’s social evolution, but — like social media usage itself — develops into a distributed function over time. One large consumer packaged goods firm we spoke with started with a lone community manager for all brands. Now a global team maintains standards across hundreds of employees who have community responsibilities added to their core jobs. ›› Content development. Content is top of mind these days for most marketers, regardless of industry or channel. But Chris Bowler, EVP managing director at Flipside Group, cautions that in their fervor to focus on content in general, marketers are losing specificity in social content:© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbook “Unfortunately, many marketers think of social as just a broadcast mechanism, so they repurpose one message across the different channels without being unique to the social network itself. To benefit from social, you have to know what works where and what doesn’t.”›› Performance management. If there’s one problem with most social marketing programs, this is it. Too many marketers launched into social without a clear idea of what they were trying to accomplish. The answer is to know why you’re choosing social for a particular program before you launch it and to establish key performance indicators in the strategy phase. Forrester’s POST framework will help you do that.19›› Social intelligence. Social intelligence is “the management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate, measure, and recalibrate marketing and business programs.”20 Performance management will give you the results of one program, but social intelligence will make all programs perform better. Social intelligence firm Brandwatch is working with a financial services client that’s using social data to uncover when a customer may have unwittingly shared compromising personal details online. It uses the information not only to help that customer but also to improve its security products and messaging.›› Training. Although nearly everyone uses social in their personal lives, no one is ready to use it professionally on day one — and social technologies and applications are constantly changing. Every company will have unique needs, processes, and rules by which each employee must abide — and an established training process will ensure compliance. Cox Communications takes an advisory approach in which the team acts as consultants to others who are just starting to use social media. Rob La Gesse, former VP of social strategy at Rackspace, took a more formal approach, with two full-time employees whose sole job was to train colleagues on other teams on how to use social for the brand. Whatever level of formality you choose, you cannot ignore training as social busts out of its silo.© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing PlaybookEngage With An AnalystGain greater confidence in your decisions by working with Forrester thought leaders to applyour research to your specific business and technology initiatives.Analyst Inquiry Analyst Advisory WebinarTo help you put research Translate research into Join our online sessionsinto practice, connect action by working with on the latest researchwith an analyst to discuss an analyst on a specific affecting your business.your questions in a engagement in the form Each call includes analyst30-minute phone session of custom strategy Q&A and slides and is— or opt for a response sessions, workshops, available on-demand.via email. or speeches. Learn more.Learn more. Learn more.Forrester’s research apps for iOS and Android.Stay ahead of your competition no matter where you are.Supplemental Material LQ Digital RackspaceCompanies Interviewed For This Report SapientRazorfishAdobe SpredfastBrandJuice VMLBrandwatch Zocalo GroupClarabridgeCox CommunicationsGeneral ElectricLithium© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing PlaybookEndnotes1 See the Forrester report “Forrester Data: Social Media Advertising Forecast, 2017 To 2022 (Global).”2 Source: “Results,” The CMO Survey, February 2018 (http://www.cmosurvey.org/results/february-2018).3 As we’ve argued in previous research on the topic, marketers who were too bullish on social took much-needed budget out of successful channels and put it toward social, hoping to achieve business results. Instead, they got lots of media attention and grew their social audiences but hurt their companies overall. To see what happened to brands like Pepsi and Best Buy, see the Forrester report “Integrate Social Into Your Marketing RaDaR.”4 In a Forrester survey of marketing decision makers, we asked marketers to identify the four most effective demand management tactics from a list of 19. B2C marketers ranked social media marketing the most effective for awareness and consideration, and second-most effective for retention and enrichment. Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Marketing Survey, 2017.5 To learn more about how to ensure you’re using social marketing tools strategically, see the Forrester report “Four Steps To Add Social To Your Marketing Strategy.”6 See the Forrester report “Three Steps To Modernize Marketing Thinking.”7 Source: Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Harvard Business School Press, 2008.8 To evaluate your social marketing maturity, see the Forrester report “Define Your Social Media Maturity To Advance Your Social Marketing.”9 POST stands for people, objectives, strategy, and technology. This four-step process ensures that marketers prioritize their audience and objectives when adding social to their marketing strategy before selecting social tactics and supporting technology.10 We wrote a full case study on this program. See the Forrester report “Case Study: Unilever Designs Content Around Customer Interests, Not Products.”11 See the Forrester report “Social Technographics® Reveals Who Your Social Audience Is — And How To Approach Them.”12 We wrote a full case study on this program. See the Forrester report “Case Study: Unilever Designs Content Around Customer Interests, Not Products.”13 See the Forrester report “Spin User-Generated Content Into Brand-Building Gold.”14 Net Promoter and NPS are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.15 Examples include Telstra, Salesforce, Gnip, and Wells Fargo. See the Forrester report “Use Social To Bridge The Gap Between Marketing And Customer Service.”16 LinkedIn created a Social Selling Index that measures sales reps in four different dimensions: creating a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. It found a correlation between social media engagement and sales performance in which social selling leaders are 51% more likely to achieve sales goals than those who have a low SSI. Source: “Measure your sales success with Social Selling Index,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions (https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling/the-social-selling-index-ssi).17 See the Forrester report “Thriving In A Post-Digital World.”18 Source: “Heifer International, raising awareness across social audiences,” Adobe, 2016 (https://www.adobe.com/ content/dam/acom/en/customer-success/pdfs/heifer-international-social-awareness-case-study.pdf).© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

For B2C Marketing Professionals August 10, 2018You Don’t Need A “Social Marketing” StrategyVision: The Social Marketing Playbook19 For more information on using Forrester’s POST framework, see the Forrester report “Four Steps To Add Social To Your Marketing Strategy.”20 To find out the costs and benefits organizations should expect as social media expands its value for marketing and beyond, see the Forrester report “Build A Case To Show Social’s Value To Marketing And The Entire Enterprise.”© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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