Social promises a revolution, but often delivers a damp squib.

The promise is simple. Social relationships are central to our lives, and by extension to how we market and build businesses. It’s the oldest marketing finding around - that the biggest influences on us are our peers, friends and family.

The problem is that appropriate use of Social differs dramatically by category. A car manufacturer like Mercedes, with highly engaged customers who only buy every 5 - 10 years, needs a very different plan from a chocolate company like Mars.

To understand this challenge better, we assessed companies’ Social activities against their direct competitors based on public information through the Social Value Benchmark.

Assessed on 4,087 datapoints for 27 companies across five categories this research had some surprising findings:

1. Social is most actively used in the early stages of customer journeys with a score of 51% at awareness falling to 21% at the point of purchase. Social is still implicitly seen as a broadcast medium, and so is used relatively traditionally by most marketers.

2. Companies have significant room for improvement, with an average score of 31% across the customer journey.

3. Many companies are reluctant to leave the Social ‘safe zone’ and engage with customers outside their owned social channels. Unless a company has had a very successful programme of engaging its customers, the vast majority of them are likely to be found outside its owned channels, so this both misses significant opportunities to increase reach and fails to be customer centric.

4. Channel disconnect is a common phenomenon, with a colder, more broadcast, tone by companies on their websites than in Social. Often companies have excellent testimonials or reviews from their customers in Social channels, but do not use these outside Social channels.

5. Social loyalty and advocacy are particularly neglected with average scores of 20% and 17% respectively. Many organisations simply don’t have any plan to engage their customers in Social after purchase.

The implications for digital marketers are:

1. Marketers must start every Social strategy from their business strategy, rather than a Social channel. ‘What can we do on Facebook?’ is essentially a meaningless question compared to questions like ‘How do we use Social to drive advocacy from satisfied customers?’ or ‘Which parts of our customer journey are our customers active in Social?’

2. Analytics needs to be based on what Avinash Kaushik calls ‘micro conversions’. While we may not always be able to measure whether somebody who gets customer service through Social then goes on to buy our product again, we can measure if they were satisfied. Marketers are too often starting from analytics provided by the platforms rather than meaningful business measures like NPS or impact on churn rates.

3. Content needs to be optimised to a purpose such as lead generation, or improved relationships with individual customer segments, rather than Social platform metrics like ReTweets.

4. Social needs to be integrated with CRM programmes - rather than having two separate streams of activity. Very few organisations currently use Social to cement loyalty - even through activities can be as simple as having a separate Twitter feed or LinkedIn group that only customers can join.

5. While most companies examined have good levels of customer satisfaction, and many use NPS as a business metric, very few are prompting their customers to advocacy or operating a formal advocacy programme. Our previous research on Global Passion Brands showed that there is often a huge disconnect between latent customer satisfaction and active advocacy. At its simplest brands should be asking for more feedback from their customers, and then boosting the visibility of this feedback. Hotels and restaurants have a lot to teach other categories in this regard.

 

By Rob Blackie, Director of Social at OgilvyOne UK

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