2. MARKETING CHALLENGES AND
OPPORTUNITIES
purchase, and behavioral data to inform better audience
selection and a coordinated campaign strategy across all
channels.
The digital age continues to shift the relationship between
brands and their customers. Despite the potential of today’s
targeting methods and communication channels, marketers
find themselves challenged to maintain margins and content
relevancy among a hard-bargaining, informed, and alwaysconnected public. Harnessing social media to gain new
insights and deliver better experiences is now a necessity.
COMPANIES START TO PULL IT
TOGETHER
Thanks partly to the rise of social networks, more information
about consumer preferences, motivations, and behaviors is
available to brands than ever before – Facebook alone has
over 100 petabytes of it, estimated by the MIT Technology
Review to be “the most exhaustive data set ever assembled
on human social behavior.” 1 Facebook’s influence on buying
decisions has doubled in the past year.2 Over 2.7 billion
“Likes” and one million new Twitter accounts are generated
each day.3 Brands must embrace this reality and adopt
a social-empowered engagement strategy to increase
marketing efficiency and drive return on investment.
Marketers who consistently win in today’s economy are
no longer focused only on crafting the catchiest slogan
and chasing media with the highest ratings, but rather
on understanding exactly who their customer is, sensing
when their customer is about to engage, and presenting
exceptionally relevant and compelling offers. It’s about
gathering insights and plugging them into multichannel
marketing campaigns that encompass owned, paid, and
earned advertising channels.
Leading marketers place social media as one of many
sources of customer intelligence that combine with offline,
1
Today’s enterprise has already adopted a number of
software tools to assist it in managing and harnessing the
social web. These typically take the form of:
~~ Social Listening to identify marketplace trends and
sentiment
~~ Social Publishing to disseminate and track content
via an ever-growing number of social accounts across
networks
~~ Social Customer Service to identify and respond to
individual customer complaints expressed online
~~ Social Advertising applications to place and target paid
ads on social sites
~~ Social Plugins including share, like, tweet and follow
buttons, gaming elements, and reviews
~~ Social Login to allow consumers to leverage social
accounts on third-party websites and applications
Companies have typically implemented these applications
on an ad hoc basis as their social needs have evolved. Like
many digital initiatives, social has grown up in isolation,
where teams are free to experiment and invest without the
rigidity of process and financial scrutiny typically imposed
on more established marketing functions. However, there
is plenty of evidence pointing to change. In a recent Chief
Marketer survey, marketers listed their greatest frustration
with social media as the difficulty in calculating ROI.4
Source: Tom Simonite, “What Facebook Knows,” MIT Technology Review, June 13, 2012 (http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/428150/what-facebook-knows/).
Source: Edison Research, “The Social Habit,” The Social Habit, June 2012 (http://socialhabit.com/secure/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Social-Habit-2012-by-Edison-Research.pdf).
Source: Jeff Bullas, “48 Significant Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics Plus 7 Infographics,” jeffbullas.com, April 23, 2012
(http://socialhabit.com/secure/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Social-Habit-2012-by-Edison-Research.pdf).
4
Source: Brian Quinton, “Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Survey”, Chief Marketer, June 2012
(http://www.chiefmarketer.com/research/chief-marketer-2012-mobile-marketing-survey-mobile-goes-with-everything-05062012).
2
3
3. Armed with these valuable
insights, marketers Brands
shouldn’t relegate “social”
to a silo but integrate for a
comprehensive customer view.
And as the social customer care manager for a leading
automobile manufacturer recently stated, “This is the first
job I’ve ever had where I don’t have to prove the ROI of what
I’m doing. But I know that won’t last forever.” Just as email
marketing and eCommerce have integrated into enterprise
marketing structures in recent years, signs of impending
integration of social content management, data, and
analytics into the marketing and IT organization are starting
to appear, forcing marketers to rethink the processes and
tools they currently use in order to achieve the overall vision
of the social enterprise (many of which were not built with
enterprise-class features such as security and governance
controls and points for customization and integration).
Forrester Research recently noted, “Savvy marketers will
demand social measurement tools that demonstrate how
their social programs are creating marketing and business
success.” Rather than today’s social listening vendors, the
report predicted that “those tools are likely to come from
vendors with expertise in tying marketing spend directly to
business outcomes.”5
5
This attempt to integrate social into the enterprise has coined
the imprecise field of Social CRM. While some include internal
collaboration tools in this category, a more focused definition
is presented by Forrester as “connecting social media to
the customer database and informing customer strategy
through this information.” Forrester goes on to say this focus
makes Social CRM “the customer intelligence professional’s
mandate.”6 Gartner has clarified this particular function under
the moniker “Social for Marketing.”
ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGES
Customer intelligence and CRM professionals, especially
those with a direct marketing background, know
segmentation well. However, they typically aren’t well aligned
with their digital marketing counterparts. Though they know
that social media will impact their job, they often don’t yet
understand how and may struggle to find their footing in a
converging digital world. 7
Source: Nate Elliot, “The Four Social Marketing Tools You Need”, Forrester Research, February 2013 (http://www.forrester.com/The+Four+Social+Marketing+Tools+You+Need/fulltext/-/E-RES90461).
Source: Shar VanBoskirk, Sarah Glass and Elizabeth Komar, “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast”, Forrester Research, November 2011
(http://www.forrester.com/US+Interactive+Marketing+Forecast+By+Industry+2011+To+2016/fulltext/-/E-RES61089).
Source: Zach Hofer-Shall with Suresh Vittal, Allison Smith, “What Social CRM Means to Social Intelligence”, Forrester Research, January 2011
(http://www.forrester.com/What+Social+CRM+Means+To+Customer+Intelligence/fulltext/-/E-RES58455).
7
Source: “Marketers still confused over social media”, utalkmarketing.com, June 2009
(http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/article.aspx?articleid=14342&title=marketers_still_confused_over_social_media).
Source: “Direct Marketers Facing Longer Unemployment”, MarketingProfs, 2010
(http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3868/direct-marketers-facing-longer-unemployment).
6
4. Social is a rich-albeit uniquedata source that provides
additional context and
accuracy to customer-centric
marketing programs.
Conversely, digital marketers understand social media as
a promotional channel and perhaps are assembling some
aggregated insight from it, but they don’t truly grasp
it as a data source or fully leverage its use in targeted
campaigning. For many digital marketers, “targeting” and
“segmentation” are terms related to personalizing content
for anonymous site visitors. Digital marketers could learn
something from their direct marketing counterparts in
the way of building a comprehensive customer view,
targeting at an individual level, and evaluating multichannel response attribution. 8
Due to these organizational challenges , delivering on the
Social CRM vision has proven easier said than done – and
especially so in large-scale B2C marketing. Marketers have
also encountered technical challenges, discovering that
access to their social data in the cloud can be limited, and
the integration of the data is particularly difficult without
non-social personal identifiers. This requires marketers to
make some important realizations and adopt a methodical
approach to their social marketing program.
SOCIAL MARKETING HAS A ROLE IN
DATA DRIVEN MARKETING
Data driven marketing works in a digital and social world.
Socially-enabled marketing doesn’t require reinventing
direct-to-consumer marketing tactics from the ground up.
It’s still about creating an insightful view of the customer,
using analytics to understand behaviors and predictive
indicators, segmenting messages intelligently, and delivering
relevant content. Social is a rich – albeit unique – data
source that provides additional context and accuracy to
customer-centric marketing programs.
Social engagement drives social insight.
Just having a Facebook page or Twitter handle doesn’t
necessarily cut it. Social CRM is accelerated by permissionbased social data. Brands need to establish deeper
relationships with consumers to gain that permission.
Consumers expect value in exchange for sharing their data
with brands. This requires making the experience with your
brand a social one. Once permission has been granted,
brands must extract data via the social network’s API and
process it into a usable and standardized format.
8
Source: Dave Chaffey, “Back to direct marketing basics: how digital marketers can learn from DM”, Smart Insights, April, 2010
(http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/digital-vs-direct-marketing/).
Source: Lois Gellar, “Social Media Marketing: What’s The Point?”, Forbes, April 2012
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/loisgeller/2012/09/04/social-media-marketing-whats-the-point/).
5. Social data in and of itself is interesting; social data
integrated into a cross-channel, customer-centric
approach is impactful.
Social data is part of a customer-centric strategy that
yields better multichannel targeting and cadence. Brands
shouldn’t relegate “social” into yet another data silo
but rather integrate with other owned and partner data
sources for a more comprehensive customer view. There
is some value in looking at purely social data (i.e., social
listening platforms give marketers a view into what people
are saying about them in the social web), but in order to
drive true return on investment, social data must be part of
a broader customer-centric framework encompassing data
management, analytics, and engagement. By integrating
social and purchase information, marketers can begin to
understand the impact their social engagement strategy
has on sales and communicate with customers in a way
that drives future sales. Measurement is important across
all touch points. What is the lift on socially-enabled email
communications? How much do people who “Like” my
page spend in my stores? Social data integration answers
these questions and enables social insights to be applied
to outbound targeted campaigns. Without integration of
social insights into a centralized marketing database that
informs relevant communication programs, you can’t apply
the insight generated through social analytics.
UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL DATA
A fundamental part of delivering on the vision of Social
CRM is an understanding social data. Typical “big data
problems” around variety, volume, and velocity plague
companies wresting with social data management. While
there is much potential in its analysis and application,
additional unique challenges around access to customer
data, new data types related to behaviors and connections,
changing social network governance and API design, and
identifying a key that can be used to link social and other
customer data sources have limited marketers’ ability to
succeed. In fact, only 10% of organizations even have an
enterprise definition of social for CRM. 9
A framework characterizing data by its potential use,
availability, and data type helps to untangle the social
data bird’s nest and lays the groundwork for social data
management.
DATA QUALITY
Critics of social marketing often reference its data quality
perceptions. No data source is perfect, and all must be
evaluated relative to their strengths and weaknesses.
Third-party data aggregators typically imply preferences
or attributes based on non-related or aggregate source
data, limiting the accuracy of the elements they produce.10
And form-based data provided by customers in surveys
is the lowest quality data source according to Experian.
In fact, 88% of consumers readily admit to falsifying or
omitting information when completing forms online 11. In
contrast, consumers completing a social profile (especially
those who leverage that profile as their online identity
on other sites) do so for their own benefit, increasing the
likelihood of genuine representation. While in the early
“wild west” days of the Internet, individuals were known by
9
Source: Michael Maoz, Jenny Sussin and Ed Thompson, “The Concise Social for CRM Vendor Guide, 2013”, Gartner, Inc., January 4, 2013.
Source: Savannah McClelland, “Half of What Advertisers Know About Us May Be Wrong”, BMI Elite Blog, March 2013
(http://www.bmielite.com/blog/half-of-what-advertisers-know-about-us-may-be-wrong/).
Source: Rebecca Lieb, “Why privacy isn’t the problem with online targeting”, iMedia Connection, December 2012 (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/33251.asp).
Source: Deborah Pierce & Linda Ackerman, “Data Aggregators: A Study of Data Quality and Responsiveness”, CSUM, May 2005 (http://www.csun.edu/~dwm3265/IS312/DataAggregatorsStudy.pdf).
11
Source: Blue Research, “Consumer Perceptions of Online Registration and Social Login”, Blue Research, 2012.
10
A framework characterizing
data by its potential use,
availability, and TYPE helps
to untangle the social
data bird’s nest and lays
the groundwork for social
data management.
6. anonymous handles and largely maintained obscurity, the
rise of eCommerce, online dating, and social networking –
along with a greater comfort level online – has increased
consumers’ willingness to represent their true identity,
despite the privacy implications. 87% of social network
users now share their real names, and 77% readily share
brand preferences.12 Facebook has championed this
trend, as evidenced by a recent initiative to proactively
disable 83 million accounts that were found to represent
false or misclassified identities. According to Facebook’s
Chief Security Officer, Joe Sullivan, the network’s “entire
platform is based on people using their real identities.”13
As with all data sources, a rigorous master data
management and data quality process can help ensure
decisions are made on the best data available.
PUTTING THE DATA TO USE
Analytics
The logical first step to extracting value from integrated
social data is exploring it for analytical insight.
For example, once social preferences such as Facebook Likes
or Twitter Follows are available in the marketing database, a
company can answer questions such as:
~~ Which products or competitors are most socially preferred
by the segments in a company’s customer base?
~~ What effect does Liking a Facebook page have on instore spend?
~~ What common social affinities represent potential
cross-sell opportunities?
~~ Does the company’s media advertising plan compare
with the media brands for which its customers express
social preference?
This information enables marketers to make informed
decisions regarding marketing mix, offer design, and
campaign makeup. In addition, more advanced analytics
make use of big data technologies and the unique
behavioral and connection data generated by social
networks. These analytics can take the form of:
~~ Attribution of online and in-store revenue to social
media alongside other marketing activities
12
Source: uSamp, “Social Media Habits and Privacy Concerns Study,” uSamp, 2012.
Source: Heather Kelly, “83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes”, CNN, August 2, 2012
(http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fake-accounts).
13
7. ~~ Exploration of the network graph for “hidden
communities” of interconnected customers with similar
buying patterns
~~ Scoring for influencers and influenced customers
that includes business factors like referral revenue in
addition to traditional influencer metrics like number of
connections and frequency of social activity
Campaign Targeting
In addition to aggregated metrics and analytics, social
data provides a rich opportunity to ensure marketing
campaigns are relevant and well-targeted. Posts and
comments can be analyzed for campaign timing around
purchase intent, and attributes and preferences can be
used to target specific messages. For example, the NFL
leverages social data generated by social login (powered
by Gigya technology) to deliver personalized email
messages. Gigya’s CEO, Patrick Salyer, explained the
process to Destination CRM: “When someone logs into
Facebook [and has granted permissions], they can tell
who that user’s favorite team is and when their birthdate
is. Before their birthday, those customers will receive an
email that shows the jersey from their favorite team with
their name on the back, with an email saying something
like, ‘Hey come treat yourself for your birthday and
buy this Redskins jersey.’ You get a more customized
shopping experience that’s going to convert much higher
than say, [if a Redskins fan] gets a Raiders jersey.” 14
Early adopters are starting to reap the benefits of
these enhanced campaigns. When Samsung started
personalizing email campaigns with data collected as
part of a social login to their website, they found those
recipients were 34% more likely to open the email and
63% more likely to click on a link.16
15
In addition to elements crafted with social insights, other
integrated sources can – and should – be leveraged to
truly optimize the message. An individual’s lifetime value,
past response to discount or high value offers, availability
of inventory, and coordination with other channels come
together to produce an excellent customer experience
and optimized business results.
Personalized Interactions
While outbound marketing messages will continue to drive
brand response for the foreseeable future, consumers
are increasingly in control of the interactions that lead
to sales. This requires marketers to provide relevancy
in real-time on the web and on mobile devices. Gartner
estimates these customer-initiated, relationship-driven
interactions can drive up to ten times the response rate
as a marketing-initiated outbound message. Leveraging
Teradata technology, Travelocity personalizes customercentric home page offers with 7x more click-throughs and
4-5x more bookings than generic content.17
14
Source: “Social Data Redefines Marketing”, Destination CRM, September 2012 (http://www.infotoday.com/).
Image Source: Anand Patel, “The NFL Truly Personalizes Email Marketing”, Anand Patel Blog, January 2012 (http://www.anandmpatel.com/the-nfl-truly-personalizes-email-marketing/).
16
Source: Gina Rau, “Samsung Taps into a High Value Customer to Improve Email Marketability”, Janrain, January 2012
(http://janrain.com/blog/samsung-taps-into-a-high-value-customer-to-improve-email-marketability/).
15
17
Source: Source: Debbie Doran, “Travelocity: Being the Customer’s Champion with Teradata CRM”, Teradata (http://www.teradata.com/podcasts/Travelocity-Teradata-CRM/).
8. 88% of marketers using social
data for web personalization
claim it has a high impact on
their marketing returns and
customer engagement
In order to reach these levels of success, brands should
leverage social data along with other customer data
sources to determine the optimal content and offers to
present in that moment of truth.
Companies are already integrating their owned web
properties with the social web, through the use of
Share, Like, and Tweet buttons and social login. A 2011
benchmarking study found 16 of the top 20 sociallyengaging apparel retailers had Facebook/website
integration.18 Social login in particular is important for its
ability to capture consumer opt-in to sharing of social
data that can then be used to personalize the online
experience. Online retailers such as Sears, Wal-Mart, and
Smashbox by Estee Lauder have created social shopping
experiences that connect consumers to products that
their friends and peers endorse or simplify gift-giving
by presenting recommended gifts for friends based on
their social activity. One such retailer gained 47% more
spend per customer from those who opted in to this social
shopping experience19, and according to a recent Direct
18
Marketing Association study, 88% of marketers using social
data for web personalization claim it has a high impact
on their marketing returns and customer engagement. 20
Consumers value this personalized experience, with over
half viewing it attractively and 46% saying it makes them
more likely to purchase from the site.
Leading marketers not only incorporate social data
into social experiences, but leverage it to drive content
decisions across offers, product recommendations, and
on-site promotions as well. Take an example of a financial
services company that displays featured content on their
website in a sidebar. Instead of presenting a generic offer
to all visitors, it could take into account the various data
points about a specific visitor, including:
~~ She is a 30-year-old female
~~ She has an IRA account with the company
~~ She Liked Baby Gap on Facebook
~~ She is currently browsing 529 plans
Source: Jon Kubo and Libby Smith, “Social Commerce IQ: Retail”, 8th Bridge, December 10, 2012.
Source: Tom Quinn and Matt Subbulli, “Evolution of Social Commerce”, Merkle, July 18, 2012
(http://www.wbresearch.com/uploadedFiles/Events/USA/2012/10359_007/Download_Center_Content/Evolution of Social Commerce.pdf).
20
Source: DMA & Neolane, “Big Data Impact on Marketing Organizations”, DMA & Neolane, January 2013
(http://www.neolane.com/Assets/neolane.comAssets/us-Assets/resources/pdf/BigData_Report_Jan2013v2.pdf).
19
9. Upon uncovering an insight,
incorporate the finding into
your existing cross-sell
and upsell campaigns to
quickly increase targeting
accuracy and ROI.
This information could be used to determine that the
promotion for an upcoming educational webcast on “Your
Child’s Financial Future” is the optimal content to present
at that time, based on the comprehensive portrait of that
customer.
STEPS TO GET STARTED
1. Use social login and apps to gain permission and
access to social data.
The most rich and useful social data starts with gaining
consumer opt-in to its access. Offering social login as a
registration option on your website is the most common
and effective way to start collecting this permission, with
typical adoption of 30-40% among registering users. Be sure
to collect an email address or associate a customer ID to
enable the integration of this data with other insight sources.
In addition, consumer-facing applications that reside on or
integrate with social networks can gain the opt-in needed.
2. Capture social data in a format that can be analyzed.
Requesting individual data elements from a social
network API is appropriate for certain applications, but to
enable integration of this data and to leverage it across
communication channels, pull it into a database where
it can be combined with other sources, mined for key
discoveries, and used for in-the-moment decisions.
3. Don’t stick social in a silo – it is one important facet in
a multi-sourced, multi-channel approach.
It is time to let social graduate from its infancy and
integrate it into enterprise business processes and
marketing systems. Tie data to purchases to analyze
campaign return on investment or to marketing
performance data to analyze its impact on response rates.
Align social campaign schedules with other direct, digital,
and advertising plans to deliver a consistent message to
customers and prospects.
4. Explore your social data to discover brand affinity,
product preferences, and buying indicators. Then
incorporate it into your existing cross-sell and upsell
campaigns or design new campaigns with this insight in
mind.
Social data lends itself to traditional data mining
techniques like clustering as well as emerging practices
such as network analysis, text analytics, and influencer
modeling. Upon uncovering an insight, incorporate the
finding into your existing cross-sell and upsell campaigns
to quickly increase targeting accuracy and ROI.