Social Marketing Has An Attribution Problem. Reach Is The Answer.

Social marketing is important, obviously. We all know that it’s worth doing, or nobody would do it. And yet, proving its value is incredibly difficult.

For other forms of marketing, this isn’t even a question. Take our friends over in Paid Social. They can easily explain their value. They can even run the numbers and give you their value to two decimal places. Put money into ads, track conversions, rinse and repeat.

For hyper-targeted forms of marketing — like Paid Social - attribution is really easy. And by attribution, we mean measuring the impact of your marketing activity. It’s about measuring outcomes you care about and saying “that happened because we did X”.

Attribution is very hard for organic social. You don’t know who’s seen your marketing. It might be existing customers, or it might not. If 1,000 people see one post and 1,000 people see another, is that 2,000 total people? Or is the same 1,000 people twice? And how do they feel about it? Has it changed anything?

So organic social has a bit of a hint of shouting into the void. The impact isn’t directly measurable. So when higher-ups begin to question its value, you might draw a bit of a blank.

Which isn’t entirely fair. Other aspects of marketing feel a bit more ‘solved’. Take Press, for instance. You take it for granted that managing press is part of a good marketing mix. But can you prove the value? Are you measuring the impact of good…