The way you articulate the significance of your social media strategy can secure the essential executive backing required for its success. At Sprout Social, we utilize our platform to convert social data into practical insights that resonate with decision-makers. We aim to assist you in achieving this as well.
By merging data from Sprout Social with insights from various marketing channels, we’ve optimized workflows for uncovering and disseminating social insights. This methodology equips our leaders with real-time data to facilitate smarter, quicker decisions.
This is how we are demonstrating the value of social media and obtaining resources with Sprout.
Why it’s vital for social media teams to effectively convey the value of their strategy
There’s a continual tension between social teams and leadership. Social media represents a long-term commitment, yet companies require clear, quantifiable returns to validate expenditures.
The issue often manifests as follows: Leadership wants to witness results; consequently, a social media manager dedicates excessive time to manual reporting and evaluating impact, leaving little time for creative strategy. A lack of time for significant, strategic initiatives leads to subpar performance, and leaders fail to perceive the necessary impact to warrant additional spending. This cycle persists.
To disrupt this cycle, it necessitates integrated tools that aid you in connecting the dots between organic social content and activities further down the sales funnel. This is how you gain the trust, time, and focus needed to engage in audience-driven content that yields more robust long-term results. As outcomes materialize, they set the stage for acquiring additional personnel and resources to advance your strategy.
Demonstrating social media’s worth begins with executive support
Reaching the desired state mentioned above initiates with obtaining executive sponsorship. Depending on your starting position, overhauling your reporting infrastructure might entail anything from acquiring social media software to prioritizing this effort among other marketing projects. Having a leader advocating for you ensures the efforts navigate through hurdles without stalling.
For us, using Sprout meant we already possessed the tools necessary for capturing data for multi-touch attribution. However, securing the backing of our CMO and VP of Brand and Social was crucial for propelling this initiative alongside other marketing analytics activities.
“Social teams are driving revenue,” asserts Sprout’s Senior Social Media Strategist, Olivia Jepson. “However, last-touch attribution only conveys part of the narrative. Engaging in strategic conversations about how social influences the entire funnel—ranging from top-of-funnel engagement and reach metrics to down-funnel demand—is vital for constructing a more effective reporting infrastructure.”
With our executive sponsors’ guidance, we rethought our social reporting strategy, replacing our five-year-old content tagging system with a new framework that aligns with Sprout’s messaging priorities. Their support has also cultivated a closer collaboration with our marketing analytics team, making sure the effort is prioritized in their workload.
Connecting social and business value with Sprout
Creating an actionable social media dashboard is a long-term endeavor, not a quick fix. Diving into reporting without a clear understanding of what you’re measuring can result in an ineffective narrative around impact.
Begin by establishing your goals and working backward. “The capability to pinpoint what content affects pipeline revenue through multi-touch attribution was at the top of our list,” explains Rachael Goulet, Sprout’s Director of Social Media. “We also sought enhanced data visualization and the flexibility to customize reports, allowing us to emphasize channel and content impact while retaining a comprehensive view.”
This approach directed our focus on the crucial metrics linking social’s effect to pipeline generation—KPIs such as Earned Media Value (EMV), Cost Per Action (CPA), Cost Per Lead (CPL), and of course, Leads Generated.
These metrics assess brand visibility, message impact, and distinct revenue pathways, sourced from four primary platforms: Sprout Social, Employee Advocacy, Salesforce, and Google Analytics.
In Sprout, we utilize My Reports—a premium addon that allows us to elevate the metrics that align with business priorities in an impactful way—to measure:
- Campaign efficiency, assessing our social’s impact on collaborative initiatives.
- Performance of key brand messages, pinpointing copy and creatives that consistently engage.
- Cross-network performance, concentrating on the platforms that yield the highest audience impact.
- Engagement effectiveness with our target audience segments, including product focus areas that are driving the most results.
Employee advocacy also significantly contributes to Sprout’s social media initiatives, providing $450,000 in earned media value just last year. Leveraging Sprout’s Employee Advocacy tool, we collect impressions data to offer a comprehensive overview of social reach.
Due to rigorous UTM tagging within Sprout, we can directly connect social and employee advocacy efforts to revenue through our Salesforce integration. Multi-touch attribution enables us to monitor the influence of social media, influencer marketing, and employee advocacy on leads throughout the sales funnel, providing a true measure of pipeline impact.
The final component in our data feedback loop is Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector. This integration allows us to analyze Sprout data further, revealing richer network and audience insights within a custom dashboard that strengthens the narrative surrounding our strategy’s impact.
How we present social’s value to our leadership team
Data storytelling combines both art and science. The scientific aspect focuses on collecting, analyzing, and visualizing precise data. Meanwhile, the artistic facet involves crafting a narrative that illustrates the meaning behind the data and its influence on business outcomes.
At Sprout, we’ve established a systematic approach that suits us: a monthly social performance executive summary. It merges key metrics linked to business value with contextual competitive analysis, allowing leadership to understand our standing in relation to competitors.
“Many people are unaware of what they can request regarding social data,” states Jepson. “Once I began organizing insights and sharing them proactively, more colleagues approached me with their own requests for data extraction. It opened doors for the social team.”
This scalable method ensures we consistently share insights and keep leadership informed. We achieved this by perceiving our executive team as an audience—treating each leader like a consumer when presenting data.
What unfolds when you narrate a more compelling social ROI story
This revised approach enabled us to highlight the complete worth of our social media strategy. By transitioning to a multi-touch attribution model, we uncovered a 5,800% increase in additional pipeline impact. Accounting for efficiency improvements, social lead generation, and earned media value, the Sprout Social platform yields a 529% ROI.
Now, we can clearly exhibit the ROI of our top-performing content and key messaging initiatives. Additionally, we can emphasize the value our product delivers to social teams—quantifying benefits such as social customer support, reporting efficiency, and time savings.
By illustrating the impact of our strategy, we’ve secured extra budget for team expansion, broadened our influencer marketing initiatives, and even gained approval for Sprout’s inaugural brand activation at Design Miami 2024. These successes would not have been feasible without a profound understanding of both our data and our product’s potential to generate results.
Taking on the role of end users of our own product enhances this process, creating a feedback loop that not only improves our value demonstration but also bolsters customer-oriented product design and development.
Looking to illustrate the ROI of your social media strategy? Request a personalized demo of Sprout Social and discover how it aids in connecting your strategy to tangible revenue impact.
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