How To Benchmark Your Social Media Strategy
Our four-phase roadmap will help you identify where you sit on the path to social domination, and how to supercharge your strategy
The ever-evolving nature of social media can make it an abstruse beast for brands to master in a way that fuels sustainable commercial outcomes. And this challenge is exacerbated if you haven’t benchmarked your social media maturity and developed a blueprint to focus your energy.
In a perfect world, social should be your most cost-effective channel to understand audiences, attract new customers, provide smart customer service, and nurture loyalty.
But too often it just isn’t given the opportunity to be successful. For a lot of brands, social looks good on the surface, but when we dig under the hood, we see siloed workflows, and too much energy spent grappling with tactics and new channels. The missing element is an embedded, sophisticated strategy and operating model that drives real business outcomes and efficiencies.
The million-dollar question is: What’s the secret to social domination? Well, it has two essential elements.
Firstly, you need a razor-sharp strategy that enables you to leverage technology to drive down costs, optimize your performance marketing and deliver sustainable commercial returns.
Secondly, you need to understand how everyday people are using social. That’s the key to finding and leveraging the nexus between your audience’s wants, needs, and behavior, as well as what your brand wants to talk about, and typically ‘sell’.
Sophisticated social media marketing should be a mirror to the real-life shifts in social usage, which ultimately enables you to create exceptional customer experiences you can monetize.
Understanding the intricacies of each platform is one thing, but you need to make data-led decisions about where and when to invest time and money to maximize commercial results.
The often-unheralded benefit of having a sophisticated strategy and guiding social principles is that it provides you with agility. When you’re clear on the parameters you’re operating within, you have the freedom to be adaptable and can be ready to pilot opportunities to take advantage of what’s next.
The Phases of Social Media Marketing Maturity: Walk, Jog, Run, Sprint
To be clear on the direction you need to take, you first need to establish where you currently sit on the road to social domination.
Our four-phase roadmap to social media maturity is a steady and sustainable guide to supercharging a brand’s social media marketing at your own pace, whether that’s a walk, jog, run, or sprint.
While each phase is connected, the path isn’t straightforward. You may be walking in some areas but running in others — and that’s great, as long as you’re moving forward.
While sprint is the mecca for social media, it’s important to acknowledge that very few organizations reach a sprint in all areas.
For many, sprint is purely aspirational; for others, it may not make commercial sense to strive for it. However, large corporates that want a serious return on investment should absolutely be operating at a run.
Walk: Activating Social but It’s Sporadic and Siloed
Organizations in the walk phase are active on social media but their activity is sporadic.
In our experience, this is where many organizations sit on the roadmap — and there’s no shame in that. Knowing where you are on the journey is the first step in developing a sophisticated plan to take your social strategy to the next level.
Often a social media strategy can be in place but be siloed or separate from the overarching business goals. It might focus on views or likes, but not be aligned to the meaningful metrics the rest of the business’ marketing activity talks to.
From a collaborative point of view, the social team may be sitting separately and have no integration of social flowing through different parts of the marketing team.
In this stage, social is often treated as a bolt-on, something that’s brought into the campaign process after the planning has taken place. But social is vast and complicated and should be at the heart of campaign planning.
Businesses here also typically have limited advocacy or external social influence.
Walk is typified by:
- Basic strategy, measurement, and reporting of performance that’s not aligned to business metrics
- Nominal cross-departmental collaboration and a lack of broader marketing integration
- Limited headcount, channel planning, budget, and paid amplification
- Sporadic publishing activity with limited reach, impacting the organization’s ability to nurture a broader network or target customer pools
- Data and pixels not leveraged
- Lack of governance or clear process
- Limited understanding of brand sentiment
- Siloed community management function requiring high-touch, reactive, human-only management
- No (or limited) internal advocacy or external social influence activity
Jog: Integrating and Embedding a Business-Wide Strategy and Operating Model
To progress from a walk to a jog the keyword is integration.
Instead of the siloed approach in the walk, there starts to be cross-business planning. Different teams come together to plan the use of social media channels to maximize results around a key objective.
Social-media strategy and internal operating models are now aligned and embedded, and the business has integrated its paid, owned, and earned channels.
This means the various social and content touchpoints have been mapped out and the business is thinking from a paid, owned, and earned point of view across all areas. Importantly, the activity is then mapped back to achieving objectives and business priorities.
For example, if you’re at an awareness stage of the marketing funnel, then you can look at your social activity with clear goals. It shouldn’t matter if you’re using social media or traditional media, as long as it’s integrated.
From a strategic point of view, when that integration is happening the business should see an increased ROI as a result.
Instead of sporadic activity, there’s a clear plan, budget, and publishing rhythm for each of the different channels.
The business is starting to develop basic measurement and social listening, rather than just putting everything out there on the internet and hoping for the best.
It’s also developing a resourced customer-service framework and some internal advocacy.
Jog is typified by:
- Formalized organization-wide strategy and cross-department operating model
- Social planning/audience pools mapped to business segments and priorities with paid media leveraging dynamic journeys (embedded in all marketing plans)
- Clear channel plans (on a page), roles, and targeting models
- Planned calendar, defined publishing rhythm, and content production budget
- Basic measurement framework and reporting
- Social brand and content activity primes for acquisition, i.e. audience pools lowering COA, and first-party and pixel data is ingested and leveraged
- Governance model defined and agreed across departments
- Social listening active and appropriate re-active activity in place
- Community engagement has a clear social customer-service framework, triage, and service-level agreements shared by a team
- Internal advocacy program and policy embedded
Run: Fuelling a Fully Integrated and Efficient Paid, Owned, and Earned Ecosystem
This is where we see a serious shift in gear driving meaningful results in NPS, salience, and sales through the implementation of a formalized strategy.
In terms of maturity, it’s completing the loop from strategy through to measurement and having an ability to dynamically optimize. Various specialties across the business are aligned and a scalable operating model is formed.
A fully integrated and efficient paid, owned and earned ecosystem is flourishing. The various touchpoints and how they come to life for your average user are mapped out, maximising cost efficiency and exposure.
- Social driving measurable business results i.e. NPS, salience, and sales
- Scalable hub-and-spoke operating model
- A social steering committee in place to ensure social activity is integrated and maximized across teams and departments. This includes appropriate training in how to use social with the necessary budget, resources, and tools, working with a centralized social team
- Fully integrated content, social, and performance marketing live across all relevant digital channels
- An intelligent, data-driven paid approach with clearly defined roles
- Dynamic calendar and measurement dashboard in place, with processes established for agile content additions, driven by tactical insight and social data
- Sophisticated customer experience using social mapped through marketing funnel and loyalty loop
- Dynamic building of audience pools for intelligent targeting and retargeting, measurably lowering CPA
- Governance model applied for all activity showing commercial benefits and ROI, with workflows integrated with existing technology
- Process loop for social listening that informs marketing, innovation, product development, service, and brand enhancement, including competitor monitoring
- Seamless social customer service with defined routing and approval workflows (equal to established channels such as phone, email, and chat), documented issues/crisis plan, the use of social media management tools, and some automation
- Advocacy linked to reduced talent acquisition costs
Sprint: Integrating a Social Culture, Powered by AI Technology, Delivering Sophisticated Results and ROI
Sprint— the social media mecca — is virtually a social-first approach. It’s not so much a strategy as an integrated culture, which readily adopts technology as it arrives, across all business functions.
That means engaging a socially empowered and trained workforce. Social media is a centralized entity that acts as a service provider for the rest of the business, taking briefs and delivering integrated approaches.
Paid media is dynamically optimized and powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, with machine-learning delivering sophisticated results, reducing costs, delivering higher ROI, and reducing the need for human involvement.
The social strategy becomes seamlessly integrated with other business systems, enabling holistic customer visibility and personalization.
Content and creative is optimized based on their performance through the use of dynamic creative optimization (DCO). This technology optimizes the creative on the go based on user interaction.
DCO is where multiple headlines, copy, and other elements are built into a social media advertisement and the technology switches the elements interchangeably until it finds the combination that resonates or performs best. It’s learning from user experience and optimizing content at a rapid rate.
The customer journey is optimized via AI through all touchpoints, resulting in an intuitive and intelligent customer experience. All acquisition activity is based on social data to build intelligence for dynamic targeting and overall performance optimization.
Sprint is typified by:
- Extending social strategy from marketing metrics to seamless integration with other business systems, delivering holistic customer visibility and personalization of the customer
- Social-media-orientated company culture, adoption, and governance across functions
- Dynamically optimized paid-media investment, powered by AI
- Broader integration of social into CRM and CX functions
- Intelligent content production, utilizing DCO technologies
- Measurement linking to commercial/business outcomes
- All acquisition activity using social data to build intelligence for dynamic targeting and overall performance optimization
- Applied governance replaced with a lived, integrated culture
- Sophisticated social intelligence — real-time leveraging of online insight, competitor activity trends, and sentiment
- Proactive and expedited customer service, driven by social engagement centers
- Brand reach and salience accelerated by sophisticated advocacy programs and platforms, and social influencers driving strategic interest
Social Specialists: Best Practice in Action
The skincare brand Dove is a classic example (in many elements) of social media best practice. Where it continually excels is in its campaigns that start conversations around social purpose, mobilizing people around an insight, and creating conversation and content as a result.
It harnesses technology to bring people together around common passions, and it has clear strategies in place that leverage social conversations and organic sharing behavior to build its brand and spread its message.
The scale achieved through social and subsequent earned media has helped Dove position itself as more than just a skincare brand.
Its social media focus on empowering women to love their bodies and grow their self-esteem has contributed to its community growth and brand loyalty.
Its #ShowUs campaign was launched as a call-to-arms to talk about body positivity and acceptance. Project #ShowUs, in partnership with Getty Images, features a library of more than 5,000 photographs of women from 39 countries around the world.
Analysis of Dove’s paid media activity shows the brand is dynamically optimizing content with cutting-edge social technology. This enables advertisers to provide a combination of images, text, and platform-specific preferences so that systems can automatically create the right combination for the audience.
It has a sophisticated use of social creators and influencers in its social publishing. It also partners with retailers in its social content and has thoughtful customer journeys leading to other areas of content or e-commerce from social. This clearly marries customer needs and commercial outcomes, while differentiating them from competitors.
Dove’s success on the social scene has proven enduring. Year after year, its ability to stay relevant to its customers, through social media, is seeing well-documented results in boosting brand love and, crucially, commercial outcomes.
Unfortunately, we can’t click our fingers and reach the heights of Dove’s success overnight, but we can run our own race.
Knowing where you sit on the road to social media domination and where to invest your energy is a powerful place to start.
