REPORT

Achieving
Social
Performance
How to deliver the revenue growth
CMOs demand with social media
Executive summary
2

CMOs know social media

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
matters, but marketers must
work harder to prove its value.
Marketers are under pressure to attribute ROI to
social programs as they fight for budget alongside
established revenue-focused channels like paid
media, email, and search engine marketing. To
succeed, marketers must elevate social from a
tactical channel to a growth engine. This involves
creating a long-term vision of how social will
transform their organization—as well as delivering
data that shows social is converting audiences and
driving revenue along the way.
RECOMMENDATION 1 3

Put advocacy—not chasing

algorithms—at the center of your

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
content strategy.
To achieve the reach needed to inspire and influence purchase decisions,
social advocacy should remain your top brand-building priority. Every
organization knows about advocacy; few give it the strategic priority
it demands, especially as Facebook’s pivot to a “privacy-focused
messaging and social networking platform” will continue to push out
corporate content in favor of ephemeral interactions with friends and
close networks.1

RECOMMENDATION 2

Move from ad-hoc social promotion

tactics to structured campaigns.
Advocacy gives you compelling data to present to CMOs, showing that
social is driving product consideration. But don’t stop there. Use social
advertising to expand beyond your loyal social audience, increase market
penetration, and deliver the conversions CMOs expect. Most social teams
have adopted ads as part of their content amplification toolbox. But
ad-hoc post promotion alone won’t deliver success. A planned, structured
social campaign strategy can help you expand your target, run targeted
ads at scale, and optimize your spending.

RECOMMENDATION 3

Take small steps to solve social

attribution.
Attribution still has a long way to go for every channel, with only
36.4% of companies able to prove the impact of marketing spending.2
Mature channels like TV and digital advertising use a combination of
complex statistical models, expensive technology, and evolving best
practices—but even then, data can be directional at best. However, you
can help CMOs understand social attribution by borrowing established
models from paid media teams, as well as integrating social data with
omni-channel approaches to better demonstrate the impact of social
marketing on financial and customer outcomes.
Social media is
4

at a crossroads

CROSSROADS
IN THE LAST DECADE, IF YOU ASKED A CMO which
brands they thought were masters of social they
likely would have replied with brands such as Red
Bull, BuzzFeed, or the Dollar Shave Club. Back then,
marketers were misled with a popular myth that
went something like this: “Advertising is dead—and
to reach consumers, you must think like a media
brand, attracting an audience with a never-ending
drumbeat of organic and viral content.”

But as we enter the next decade of social with 2020

around the corner, it’s clear that simply publishing
content on social media and using traffic and shares
as metrics for success will not be enough.
 5
CMOs are under pressure
to deliver measurable growth
In the past, CMOs saw their role as the organization’s chief storyteller. In

CROSSROADS
recent years, CMOs have also been tasked with identifying and mapping
new routes to revenue. Many companies—including Johnson & Johnson,
Coca-Cola, Uber, Lyft, Beam Suntory, Taco Bell, and Hyatt Hotels—have
eliminated the CMO role, replacing it with titles such as “chief growth
officer,” “chief experience officer,” or “chief commercial officer.”3

According to the CMO Survey, increased acquisition of new customers,

increased purchase volume, and increased cross-selling are the top
business drivers CMOs are focusing on in 2020 and beyond. With
these expanded responsibilities, CMOs are under pressure to do more
with less. As a result, social marketers will face more scrutiny and
less patience for social metrics with unclear links to show that social
strategies are driving real business outcomes.4

Attribution is holding back social transformation

CMOs know social is a critical part of building brands, customer
acquisition, customer retention, and customer service. However, as
the authors of the CMO Survey note, executives need better data to
justify investments in social—which has “led companies to prioritize
search engine optimization and other paid digital media over other
digital expenditures.”5

While CMOs are prioritizing the established channels they know

best, they understand that social can build compelling competitive
advantages if executed properly.

Social media seen as tool to accomplish

key strategic objectives for the company
100%
88.2%
Feb 2018 Feb 2019

64.7%
60.1% 59.2%
55.5%
50% 45.6%
40.8%
32.6% 35.3% 33.6%
28.7% 28.7% 29.0%
25.6%
21.8%
16.6% 17.2%
13.5% 13.9%
10.2% 8.3%
0%
Brand Acquiring new Introducing Retaining Brand Improving Marketing Identifying new Identifying Improving Improving
awareness and customers new products current promotions employee research customer groups new product current customer
brand building and services customers (e.g., contest, engagement you currently and service products or `service*
coupons) don’t target opportunities services

Source: The CMO Survey

 Social media spending is expected to rise by 73% over five years from 6
11.4% to 19.7% of marketing budgets. And social’s role in accomplish-
ing key strategic objectives has soared in the last year:

88.2% of CMOs report using social to build brand awareness

CROSSROADS
(up from 45.6% in 2018)

60.1% report using social for acquiring new customers

(up from 32.6% in 2018)

55.5% report using social to retain current customers

(up from 28.7% in 2018)

CMOs clearly understand that social is where customers and com-

petitors are headed. But attribution must improve in order to elevate
the strategic priority of social in the organization. CMOs need to see
data on both short-term results (conversions, sales, revenue) and
long-term strategic benefits such as sharper customer insights, brand
building, and improving customer and employee engagement.

When paid media teams ask for budget, they’re armed with data on
brand lift, ROAS, and LTV metrics. TV spends can be justified with
multi-channel attribution and marketing mix modeling. Social must
also fight for its piece of the budget pie. We must work harder to
gather, report, and analyze the hard data and conversion metrics that
CMOs prize.

Consumers—and social
metrics—are harder to track
Consumers now While CMOs are demanding harder data from social marketing teams,
share less on consumers now share less on public feeds, while accelerating their
public feeds, while use of 1:1 messaging apps. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
accelerating Stories continue to climb in usage, and traditional social metrics such
their use of 1:1 as likes have been removed in seven test countries for Instagram.6
messaging apps
With less content sharing and consumption happening in public
feeds, if you’re using native networks to demonstrate results, your
data sources are quickly drying up. The rise of private communication
on social channels also challenges traditional approaches to social
marketing. Expect to see less success with using social for content
distribution and more emphasis on spreading content via micro-influ-
encers, connecting 1:1 with customers, and creating value in private
messaging contexts.
 7
It’s time to elevate social from
a tactical channel to a growth engine
At Hootsuite, we believe in the transformative power of social to build

CROSSROADS
enduring, customer-centric brands. Social is the heart of modern
customer engagement. It’s a strategic investment that delivers
business advantages far beyond short-term lifts in sales.

While CMOs are tied to revenue targets, short-term thinking can also
hamper the broader performance of companies. With the rise in data
and measurement technology, it’s easier to optimize for tactical
wins (such as a spike in sales due to a sales promotion) rather than
longer-term investments that build lasting brand equity, customer
happiness, and true differentiation.

Social touches In this light, early adopters of social were right to think bigger than
every stage of just conversion metrics. Because social touches every stage of the
the customer customer lifecycle, it has broad value to companies for brand build-
lifecycle and ing, customer and employee experience, and unparalleled customer
successful social insights. This means that it’s short-sighted to value social based on
media strategies only direct conversions, as successful social media strategies lift all
lift all channels in channels in the marketing mix.
the marketing mix.
For example, search and social—both from an organic and paid
perspective—work together in the customer purchase journey,
with Forrester finding that 56% of consumers use both channels in
complementary ways to drive customer awareness, consideration,
purchase, and ongoing engagement.7 Facebook has been shown to
prime audiences to drive higher responses to TV advertising. And
campaigns that use a cross-channel approach with social and other
forms of marketing activity produce higher ROI.

That said, marketers must connect the dots and show how social
is not only building brand awareness or offering customer support,
but also driving tangible cost savings and lifts in sales. Marketers
must both create a long-term vision of how social will transform their
organization—as well as deliver data that shows social is converting
audiences and driving revenue along the way.
To deliver the data
8

and results CMOs

expect, focus on

THREE STRATEGIES
advocacy, ads, and
attribution
These three strategies—while not new and flashy—
are what’s driving results for our customers.
In fact, one of the biggest distractions for social marketers is the
never-ending lists of new innovations. We recommend caution ahead,
as CMOs are increasingly frustrated with the lack of accountability
in social. Focus on improving what you’re already doing rather than
chasing quick tactical wins with the latest feature innovations from
social networks.

We’ve based our recommendations on what’s working with our

customer base, as well as insights gathered from our Social Maturity
Benchmarks, an internal database of 500+ enterprise organizations
in 12 industries with data on how they’re adopting, expanding, and
measuring social media.
 9
How leading organizations
drive business results with social
Hootsuite ranks organizations in five distinct stages of social maturity:

THREE STRATEGIES
foundational, tactical, strategic, leading, and transformative.

According to our benchmark data, the average organization sits

within what we call the Tactical phase, which we define as customers
“coordinating social media marketing activities across teams through
the use of technology.” Our aggregated data over time shows a clear
correlation between an advancement of social maturity and an
increase in return on investment in social.

Hootsuite’s Five Stages

of Social Media Maturity
HOW DOES YOUR ORGANIZ ATION R ANK?

Request your free assessment and benchmark your social

maturity against 500+ organizations in 12 industries. Each
assessment is customized to your organization and includes
practical recommendations. Contact us to learn more.

Foundational Tactical Strategic Leading Transformative

Developing social Coordinating social Executing multiple Driving business Differentiating customer
media marketing media marketing social media use outcomes through the experience and achieving
capabilities such activities across teams cases and measuring integration of social enterprise-wide business
as publishing, through the use of the impact on media use cases across objectives through social
engagement and technology departmental the organization media
reporting objectives
 In our experience, organizations see clear business value from social 10
once they reach the Leading stage. In this stage, organizations are
driving tangible business outcomes by integrating publishing work-
flows and measurement technology across the organization. When

THREE STRATEGIES
social publishing is standardized in large organizations, data becomes
cleaner, easier to unite with other systems such as Adobe Analytics
and CRM systems, and more visible among executives, giving social
the credit it deserves.

Reaching the Leading stage in social maturity can significantly

improve social performance and ROI. In our analysis of benchmark
data from 500+ organizations in 12 industries, organizations can
expect a 42x lift in brand awareness, 6.2x increase in customer
engagement on social channels, and a 32x increase in website traffic.
With tangible business benefits now visible from social, adoption in
the organization tends to surge with a 238% increase.

To begin moving the needle on social maturity, marketers are taking

a more programmatic approach to their social media. The most
effective strategies integrate employee advocacy programs with core
marketing initiatives, build formal social ad strategies, and track
social programs against clear business goals using website conversion
metrics from social channels.

Increasing Social Maturity to ‘Leading’ Significantly Improves ROI

42x 6.2x 32x 238x

Brand Awareness Engagement Website Traffic Org Adoption

Based on Q1 2019 aggregated data from Hootsuite’s Social Maturity Assessment

1. Put advocacy—not
11

chasing algorithms—
at the center of your

ADVOCACY
content strategy
Organic content amplification used to be the primary
value of social marketers. But as reach has consistently
dropped, many marketers struggle to know how they
can drive value beyond traffic and shares.
At the same time, organizations are becoming more open and
connected. Employees use networks like Workplace by Facebook to
share ideas; sales teams connect with leads on LinkedIn; HR teams
monitor chat apps like Blind; support teams are adapting to the speed
of messaging apps; and marketing teams are using user-generated
content and reviews from customers.

While brand-published content has a place in the purchase journey,

customers place a much higher value on 1:1 interactions with friends,
peers, and family. The opportunity for social marketing teams:
Increase the strategic priority of advocacy and demonstrate how
peer-to-peer engagement works in tandem with the other digital and
traditional channels in your marketing mix.
 12
Stop chasing algorithms
and start building advocacy
Social advocacy should be your top brand-building priority. After all,

ADVOCACY
Facebook says its main goal is to “prioritize posts from friends and
family over public content.”8 And LinkedIn reports that on average, an
organization’s employees have ten times more combined followers
than the organization itself.9

One-to-one engagement is a reliable path to influence sales. A study

by Forrester found that the main driver of awareness for customers in
social media was the activity of their social connections. As Forrester
found, “eighty-one percent of customers who credit social media
for making them aware of a recent purchase report it was either the
passive action of seeing a friend’s post (52%) or actively asking their
connections (27%) about a product or service they are interested in.”10

Social directly influences purchases

85%
of customers use social
channels for discovery and
consideration or purchase.

43%
of customers were influenced by a company’s
social post when shopping, and 30% report
they were influenced by paid social ads.

38%
of customers use online reviews
to research brands, products, or
services they’re interested in buying.

Source: Forrester
 Everyone knows about advocacy. But Hootsuite’s study of over 9,000 13
B2B and B2C marketing leaders found that just 30% of organizations
run customer advocacy initiatives and less than one-quarter use
Just 30% of
employee advocacy or social selling.11
organizations

ADVOCACY
run customer Not only do social networks prioritize customers’ posts; those
advocacy posts also have a bigger impact. That’s why our customer Georgia
initiatives State University asked students to use social media to promote the
and less than school’s commitment to innovation. The result: 6,500 shares through
one-quarter Hootsuite Amplify, 2.4 million social impressions, and an improved
use employee reputation.12 Similarly, our customer Meliá Hotels used Hootsuite
advocacy or Amplify to generate employee advocacy—and drove 61,000 social
social selling. posts and 142 million impressions in 2018.13

Advocacy can be directly linked to top-line revenue growth. Our

customer Amway, for example, provides each of its distributors (called
Amway Business Owners) with personal retail websites (for example,
amway.com/[distributorname]). This gives Amway a simple and
centralized way to track the individual distributor’s ROI from social
selling tactics.14

As Amway knows, social is essential for inspiring purchases, especially

when products are recommended by like-minded peers. But tracking
that last step to purchase can be opaque if customers leave social net-
works to convert on websites. With individual websites for thousands
of distributors, it’s much easier to track these vital conversion metrics
and better understand how social is directly increasing revenue. It
was this investment in social selling programs and ROI measurement
savvy that led to Amway being able to specifically attribute its 2018
sales growth increase to social selling in their annual report.15
2. Move from ad-hoc
14

tactics to structured
ad campaigns

AD CAMPAIGNS
Social marketing teams first adopted ads to overcome
dwindling organic reach. But now, ads must become
an integrated and programmatic part of how you
reach and convert customers on social.l.

Social advertising can deliver the conversions CMOs demand.

According to a Forrester survey, social ads drive customers towards
the purchase funnel more effectively than other digital ads.16 And PwC
reports 37% of people start purchase journeys on social networks—
more than any other digital channel.17

But while many organizations occasionally boost organic social posts,

only 53% run social ad campaigns.18 And ad-hoc post promotion
won’t deliver success; to get real results, you need a planned, struc-
tured social ad strategy that intelligently connects to the rest of your
social strategy, advocacy efforts, and other channels such as email
and paid media.
 15
To drive growth, expand
beyond your loyal followers
It’s easy to advertise to your social followers. But when that strategy

AD CAMPAIGNS
plateaus, it can be hard to find profitable new audiences. In 2018,
Facebook removed third-party data brokers from its targeting
options.19 Now advertisers report that Facebook’s lookalike audience
targeting has stopped performing too.20

Savvy organizations look beyond native ad platforms. Social agency

Absolute Results used Hootsuite Ads to test different audiences for their
clients and drove 28% more conversions at 55% less cost per lead.

Organizations say targeting specific offers to precise audiences

drives greater ROI. That’s why our client Visit West Hollywood used
Hootsuite Ads to run hundreds of simultaneous creatives. The result:
They doubled site traffic and nearly tripled hotel nights booked, all
at a 20% lower cost per click and with 75% less ad management time.
Similarly, when our client Tax Act A/B tested social ads, they doubled
clicks and cut cost per acquisition in half.

How to build your organization’s

measurement framework
At Hootsuite, we guide our customers through three stages, helping
them create a framework to measure the value of social media.

1. DEFINE 2. MEASURE 3. PROVE

What do you Is social moving Did you hit
want social you towards your your business
to solve? business targets? goals?

Learn how to apply these questions to your measurement

challenges—including real-world examples from eHarmony, Unilever,
AccorHotels, and Grupo Expansión—in our short book.
3. Take small steps to
16

solve social attribution

ATTRIBUTION
You must set your executives’ expectations when it
comes to social attribution. Persuading executives to
invest the time and budget to build a working social
attribution model isn’t easy; some executives say
it’s hard to divert social spending from execution to
measurement.

But it’s worth the investment: Research by Neustar found organiza-

tions that invest at least 10% of their budget into measurement are
three times more likely to significantly outperform their goals.21

Social attribution can’t be solved in a day—but here are two practical

approaches that have worked for our customers.
 17
Borrow attribution best practices
from established channels
With employee In large organizations, simply establishing best practices for UTM codes

ATTRIBUTION
advocacy, he and campaign tagging can go a long way toward giving executives
was able to a clearer view of social’s impact. For example, our customer Grupo
show that 3,000 Expansión used Hootsuite Impact to track organic and paid social
participants activity across 70 employees and 17 magazine brands. The result: better
led to 100K social workflow and improved ability to measure success.22
customer
Next, work with analyst teams to start building an attribution model. You
engagements
can borrow and apply attribution best practices from established teams
such as your paid media team. Adobe, for example, built an econometric
attribution model using Hootsuite Impact, Adobe Analytics, and
Salesforce.com to compare social’s results to other channels.23

Similarly, Casey Hall, former director of social media communications

at Thomson Reuters, worked with an in-house analyst team to build
models to measure social performance. For social selling programs
at Thomson Reuters, Hall helped their European pilot demonstrate
an 18x return on investment compared to the cost of social selling
programs. With employee advocacy, he was able to show that 3,000
participants led to 100K customer engagements, including clicks back
to the website.

How to unite social

and website conversion data
WITH HOOTSUITE IMPACT, you can confidently Plus, you’ll discover the specific actions you need
measure and demonstrate that your social media to take to increase revenue and marketing impact
investments are paying off. from your organic and paid social media content.

Now you can accurately track the complete social Request a demo or ask your customer success
conversion funnel all the way to the business manager about Hootsuite Impact.
metrics that matter to you—including purchases,
sign-ups, and email acquisition.
 Hall also helped to unite social data with other digital data. “We 18
wanted to make it part of the entire data mix that we were using in
marketing,” says Hall. “We used Adobe Analytics and brought the CID
if you’re not
code into our social publishing, so now we could track all the way
connecting social

ATTRIBUTION
down to the post ID what traffic was coming into our website, where
data to other
it was coming from, and start to see the value of social traffic when it
channels, you’re
came to downstream performance.”
missing the
complete story Hall used Adobe Target to create unique experiences, personalizing
of social’s far- social media to help generate higher quality customer engagements.
reaching impact These efforts paid off, showing that social generated the longest time
on customer on site of any digital channel, beating out paid search, email, and
buying decisions. organic search.24

Expand beyond social tracking

for a true customer view
In addition to using established attribution models, it’s important to
remember that the reason why social media is notoriously hard to
attribute back to revenue is that social touches multiple stages of the
purchase journey from discovery to conversion.

In other words, if you’re not connecting social data to other channels,

you’re missing the complete story of social’s far-reaching impact on
customer buying decisions.

A smart approach we’ve seen is from Travis Chambers, the CEO and
founder of the social video agency Chamber Media. The agency drives
incredible growth from social channels. But Chambers is also wise to
the fact that if they only look at internal data from social networks (such
as the Facebook pixel), the value of their social content will be at best
underreported—and at worst, credit will be stolen from lower-funnel
channels like organic search, email, and pay-per-click advertising.

“Marketers make the mistake of looking at the Facebook pixel with

a microscope,” says Chambers. “But to understand the impact, you
can’t look at social as a separate revenue channel. The truth is it
influences all revenue channels. You need to also analyze the impact
of social on Amazon sales, retail sales, website orders, YouTube traffic,
and lifts in branded searches. We look at the holistic picture.”25

Remember that social’s strength is uniting your organization around

modern customer engagement—not trying to prove the supremacy of
social over other marketing channels.
 Instead of trying to be a hero, be a helper. Work together with estab- 19
lished and respected teams such as paid media, email marketing, and
website optimization. Help them achieve their business goals. And
then track how social is contributing.

NEXT STEPS
This collaboration benefits both teams. As Forrester found, 58% of
customers report using social and search together to research and
buy products.26 This synergy presents new opportunities for market-
ers to build holistic customer journeys that deliver the right content in
the right context.

Finally, while you can teach your peers in paid media, email marketing,
and website optimization about social customer engagement, they
can teach you which metrics matter most to your CMO. Start collecting
those data points from your social programs, too. You’ll learn the met-
rics and reports that your CMO values, helping elevate social’s role from
a tactical channel to a critical part of the company’s growth engine.

Next steps: Related resources to increase

Benchmark your social strategy
against industry peers
Use Hootsuite’s Social Maturity Assessment
to benchmark your organization’s technology,
strategy, and measurement practices against
500+ organizations in 12 industries. See how
your organization compares by requesting a
complimentary custom assessment, including
personalized recommendations from an expert
at Hootsuite.
Contact us to request a custom assessment.
your attribution acumen
Demystifying Social ROI: A brief guide for CMOs.
In this book, you’ll learn how Hootsuite builds mea-
surement frameworks, including real-world best
practices from eHarmony, Unilever, AccorHotels,
and Grupo Expansión.
Take the course. Learn ROI measurement from
experts in the field with Hootsuite Academy’s
Social ROI and Value Analysis online course and
certification.
Book a custom workshop. Improve the impact
of your social efforts with a clear measurement
framework—including relevant KPIs that help you
prove your ROI from social—with a custom work-
shop and guidance from Hootsuite’s services team.

Acknowledgements
Research and analysis: James Mulvey
Design and art direction: Eric Uhlich
Editor: Curtis Foreman
Endnotes
1 Facebook. A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social
Networking. 2019.
2 The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights
Report. 2019.
3 Ad Age. Why more brands are ditching the
CMO position. 2019. See also: Deloitte. CMOs
and the spark to drive growth. 2019.
4 The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights
Report. 2019.
5 The CMO Survey. Highlights and Insights
Report. 2019.
6 Facebook. Second Quarter 2019 Results
Conference Call. 2019.
7 Forrester Consulting and Catalyst. Why Search
+ Social = Success For Brands. 2016.
8 Facebook Newsroom. Bringing People Closer
Together (2018) and Building a Better New
Feed for You. 2016.
9 LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. The Real Value
of Your Employees’ Social Media Reach. 2017.
10 Forrester and Catalyst, Part of GroupM
Connect . Why Search Plus Social Equals
Success. 2016.
11 Hootsuite. Social Media Barometer 2018.
12 Hootsuite. Case Study: Georgia State
University.
13 Hootsuite. Case Study: Meliá Hotels
International. 2019.
Ready to see how Hootsuite can help your organization achieve
social performance? Request a custom demo at hootsuite.com/enterprise
20
ENDNOTES
14 Forrester. Justify Your Social Media Programs
By Methodically Measuring Them. 2019.
15 Amway. Amway Reports Sales of $8.8 Billion
USD in 2018. 2019.
16 Forrester. Forrester Analytics: Social Media
Advertising Forecast, 2018 To 2023 (US). 2019.
17 PWC. Global Consumer Insights Survey 2018.
18 Hootsuite. Social Media Barometer 2018.
19 AdExchanger. Facebook Kills Off Third-Party
Data For Targeting. 2018.
20 Marketing Land. Advertisers seeing dwindling
results with Facebook’s 1% Lookalike
Audiences. 2019.
21 Forbes. Underinvestment in Measurement and
Advertising Spend Stifles Long-term Business
Growth, According to Neustar’s Marketing
Accountability Report. 2017.
22 Hootsuite. Case Study: Grupo Expansión.
23 Adobe Customer Story. Thomson Reuters
unifies customer experiences.
24 Hootsuite. Future of Social: New York. 2019.
25 Hootsuite Blog. Viral Videos are Dead, Says
Creator of the Decade’s Most Viral Ad. 2018.
26 Forrester and Catalyst, Part of GroupM
Connect. Why Search Plus Social Equals
Success. 2016.