In 2014, Forrester Consulting conducted research with the goal of uncovering how the world’s largest companies organize, plan, and execute social marketing efforts.
For the 2014 State of Enterprise Social Marketing Report, Forrester Consulting surveyed 160 senior leaders managing or overseeing digital or social marketing – Director, Vice-President or C-Level executive – at companies with revenue of $1 billion or more.
Participants spanned companies across eight industry verticals from the United States and Western Europe. Analysis of the study unearthed key insights and trends from the world’s largest enterprise companies deploying social marketing programs within their organizations.
The Results
In determining the value and priority of social marketing, enterprise companies overwhelmingly report social marketing to be a high, and growing priority from the top-down:
High-Level Influence
Social marketing is currently an executive-led, and organization-wide, priority. Seventy-eight percent of companies place the responsibility of social marketing under a CMO, C-Level executive or an Executive/Vice President, and 69 percent of organizations are prioritizing social marketing based on the way it is organized and executed within their organization.
New Hires
With that, 69 percent of large companies are increasing staffing for social marketing in 2014.
Investment
Social budget is increasing at a greater rate than total worldwide budget. Sixty-eight percent of companies are growing their social marketing budget from 2013, compared to 55 percent increasing total worldwide marketing budget from 2013 to 2014.
Facebook or Pinterest or Twitter … Somewhere
Social tactics are also growing! Nearly all, 98 percent of companies market on at least one major social network!
Expanding Social Reach
At least 58 percent have plans to use a social network that they were not utilizing previously.
Content Creation, Curation
One in four, 25 percent, plan to use tactics outside of social networks – including curating social content on own sites, branded blogs, “word-of-mouth” campaigns, branded community or forums and/or accepting customer ratings and reviews on own sites.
Lines of Communication
Nearly three out of four companies, 73 percent, measure the business value of social marketing through audience resonance: engagement metrics of comments, responses, shares.
Respond to Feedback
Tactics are being deployed to foster audience involvement, with 69 percent of companies encouraging and/or recognizing customers that talk about them on social networks.
According to Plan
Relevancy and timeliness of content delivered across social marketing channels are being prioritized, with the majority of companies having a process in place to deliver both.
Engagement and Reach
Reach and resonance are the top two measurement areas – aligning with objectives of awareness and preference—with 76 percent measuring volume metrics, indicating the number of individuals reached by social messaging, and 73 percent measuring engagement metrics, indicating the level of interest and interaction from those audiences.
Monetization and Value
Three quarters of companies are using data and insights to identify social marketing tactics that influence customers, with 73 percent of companies continually evolving and defining best practices on how they measure business value created by social marketing tactics.
What do these takeaways mean for trends in Social CRM? Validation!
Social CRM allows you to start engaging with your customers and prospects in a collaborative manner across key social channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. Social CRM is taking traditional CRM software – Customer Relationship Management software designed to provide one central location to gather, store, process and analyze present and historical customer information – and giving it a social marketing personality.
By incorporating social marketing, automated with social CRM, into sales and customer service activities, you can learn more about your customers likes and dislikes. By leveraging the vast amounts of information available on social media channels in a meaningful manner, you can uncover more leads and better interact with your customers and prospects – boosting your overall customer experience. Today, automating and measuring social marketing with social CRM solutions can create a customer connection that nurtures long-term, rewarding customer experiences. Plus, social CRM solutions allow you to automate, as well as organize, your social media campaigns.
As businesses of all sizes push to discover ways to effectively develop, deploy and measure social marketing, the rapid adoption of social CRM tools are … inevitable.
Image: Spredfast
Aira Bongco
This just goes to show that social media is no longer an option for promotion. It is a must. This is because so many people have their lives integrated with the Internet while staying on social media sites. Internet promotion is the only way to reach these people.