With the ever-changing landscape, marketers are once again encouraged to rethink their social media marketing strategies.

It should come as no surprise that social marketing continues to be a core part of the strategy in 2023, supporting the entire customer journey with social advertising as the number one budget allotted to digital channels digital.

Where social marketing management platform

The foundation of any good social media strategy is management tools that allow these marketers to track, post, and engage across all platforms. Profitability is the ability of digital marketing leaders to capture the attention of their customers, capture their interest, convert that interest into sales, and foster a community of supporters. brand household.

Marketers recognize that they should continue to invest in social marketing management (SMM) platforms as a core component of their martech system, as this will allow brands to connect with customers in real-time through data across channels and initiatives. At this point, 60% of marketers say they prefer the integrator approach to opt for current technology. However, as marketers take charge of the growing number of social media solutions, they must also demonstrate a return on investment in their technology.

With that in mind, the below outlines how digital marketing teams can determine the value of an SMM platform when choosing between multiple options.

Is your social marketing tool working well with others?

Social marketing needs to work throughout the business, not just for marketing purposes. This means finding success and growth through shared insights and the ability of social data to support interactions between channels. They should highlight how social data can be combined with other customer information to demonstrate its value across the enterprise, allowing them to:

• Enhance omnichannel marketing programs and customer experience.
• Help customer service teams become more effective and insightful to society by applying social data to customer profiles.
• Assist HR teams in communicating employee value propositions and using social platforms to attract talent.
• Understand customer expectations for brands around diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
• Increase direct-to-consumer revenue streams and provide digital commerce teams with user-generated content.

Social marketing analytics and attribution

While digital marketing leaders believe social marketing is highly effective, efforts to demonstrate the business impact of social media will continue from the perspective of personnel investment, communication, and communication. information and technology.

Social marketing is notoriously difficult to tie into traditional success metrics, such as sales conversions and ROI and doesn’t have a “one-size-fits-all” measurement method for social platforms. festival. Introducing the possibility of social commerce can help here. However, marketers have difficulty measuring consistently across different competing social platforms and connecting social analytics with insights from other marketing channels. Organizational walls between paid and organic media, mismatched goals, and interdependence exacerbate these challenges.

Vendors in this market support most social marketing use cases (e.g., monitoring, posting, and engagement), but the majority do not extend to other social marketing activities. . Execution of the funnel (e.g. email marketing or web analytics). In addition to the basic capabilities, look for the following services to prove the value of investing in social media management platforms:

• Social advertising: Support social advertising through performance-based campaigns or paid amplification for organic posts.
• Audience Engagement and Customer Service: Ability to collect, reinforce, disseminate, respond, escalate, and track 1:1 conversations with members of the public, including interactions with customer service through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Measure and analyze: Monitor campaign performance, assist with impact assessment of campaigns or programs based on reach and engagement data provided by social platforms, and measure engagement with campaigns’ social marketing efforts. Includes the ability to analyze campaigns and content across social platforms in parallel.
• Integration: Integrate data from transactional data streams or several third-party data streams for use in more targeted customer interactions and more robust predictive modeling.

The Path to Social Marketing ROI

How can digital marketing leaders take meaningful next steps to an SMM implementation that will deliver ROI? Starts with:

• Determine what existing tools are available within the organization (such as a media team using a PR tracker or a customer service team using a social customer service tool) prior to bidding, as well as whether these existing partnerships can support extended use cases.
• Work with their IT department to determine where the SMM platform should integrate with other business systems, such as a CMS or CRM platform.
• Focus on their business goals across the organization by asking vendors how their unique capabilities and experiences can help them achieve them, rather than comparing each feature, which is unlikely to reveal much of a difference.
• Ensure that team member who will use the tools on a daily basis feel comfortable with the user experience of the platform through customer demos and reference checks. While very few of these vendors offer sandboxed environments for testing their platforms before purchasing, usability is a key component of success.