Unlocking Social Insights to Drive Results: A Case Study with Merkle

Unlocking Social Insights to

Drive Resultswith

SPEAKER

George KamideSenior Manager, Social Media and Content

TURN INSIGHTS INTO ACTIONS

@digimindci

OUR VISION

Insight-driven decisions will

redefine a brand’s competitiveness

“Insights-driven companies will grow at

least 8 times faster than global GDP”

Real-time Authentic Customer-

centric

By 2018, 2.44 billion people will be using social networks

Aggregate

Analyze

Act

OUR A3 APPROACH

Helps Reach the Full Potential of Social Web

CAMPAIGN EXECUTION

STRATEGIC PLANNING

ANALYSIS

Digimind Social Vision: Transform data into actionable

insights at each stage of the marketing process

Campaigns

Competitors

Market

Segmentation

Marketing Mix

Messaging

Reach

Amplify

Convert

THEY RELY

ON

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Who We Are

Our Work

Data-Driven, Technology-Enabled Performance Marketing

Our Services

Strategy | Analytics | Technology | Data | Creative | Media | Loyalty

Our Value

Acquiring, Retaining & Maximizing The Value Of Your Most Profitable Customers

Our Differentiation

Our heritage in data, technology and analytics gives us the ability to gain unique insights that when combined with our strength in performance media, fuels our ability to develop and execute addressable experiences that drive customer engagement, loyalty and shareholder value.

Our Passion

Helping the best brands in the world create competitive advantage through people-based marketing.

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At Merkle, we’re energized by answering one question: How can we make content more rewarding for the audience?

We’re obsessed with getting the answer right.

@colbybrownphotography

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Audience-First Approach to Social Media

Social Listening

Social Audit

Audience Matching

Audience Affinities

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CHALLENGES

AUDIENCE

OBJECTIVESSite Traffic via Social

Increased Engagement

B2B

Financial advisors

Institutional Investors

Crowded Field

Rapid Change

Silent Audience

Case: Global Asset Manager

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Solution: Responsive Content Strategy

Influencer Conversation

Past Performance

Market Topics

Site Analytics

Monitoring custom sources

Ongoing measurement and benchmarking

Analysis of volume, trends, and sub-topics

Internal site search and user behavior

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Influencer Conversation

Past Performance

Market Topics

Site Analytics

• What’s Happening

• Topic volume and trends

• Content shaping the conversation

• Who’s saying what

• What users are searching for on site

• What To Do About It

• Categorized and prioritized content topics

• How to Promote Content

• Content types

• Creative & messaging tactics

Social Listening Report

Solution: Responsive Content Strategy

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Results: Responsive Content Strategy

+780% Twitter referral traffic

+404% LinkedIn referral traffic

+123% Site sessions via social

+126% New users to site

• Increased social media referral traffic to site

• Refined messaging tactics to drive click-through

• Re-aligned social audiences to more relevant users, driving new people to site

• Shared insights with Paid Social team to optimize supporting media with insight-led campaign restructuring

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Service Integration: Applying Social Listening Insights to Paid Media

Copy Testing

Rhetorical question syntax, using “Why” and “How”

First month results:

Restructuring Targeting Criteria

Moving from “industry-based” to “content-based” targeting

First month results:

YoY Performance

82%ER

Increase

46% CPE

Decrease

57%ER

Increase

58%CTR

Increase

32%ER

Increase

68%CTR

Increase

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Bonus Track: Earned Media and Audience Behavior Insights

• Despite site traffic and paid media success, on Twitter, direct engagement remained problematic

• Raw data pointed to downward trend, but that was inconsistent with other metrics

• Earned Media had increased 50% despite lower volume of Owned Media

0.00%

0.05%

0.10%

0.15%

0.20%

0.25%

Jan

-15

Feb

-15

Mar

-15

Ap

r-1

5

May

-15

Jun

-15

Jul-

15

Au

g-1

5

Sep

-15

Oct

-15

No

v-1

5

Dec

-15

Jan

-16

Feb

-16

Mar

-16

Ap

r-1

6

May

-16

Jun

-16

Jul-

16

Au

g-1

6

Sep

-16

Oct

-16

No

v-1

6

Dec

-16

Twitter Engagement Rate (%)

50%Earned Media

Increase

3% Owned Media

Decrease

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Bonus Track: Earned Media and Audience Behavior Insights

• Further research revealed a behavioral trend favoring manual Retweets among financial professionals

• Before social listening: 15 manual RTs

• After implementation: 2,916 manual RTs

Lesson: Know thy audience, and don’t be afraid to re-define success metrics.

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CHALLENGES

AUDIENCE

OBJECTIVESScalable Targeting

Cost Efficiency

Cord-cutters

Cord-nevers

Existing subscribers

New Shows

Broad Categories

Highly-Competitive Market

Case: Global Asset Manager

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Organic social data uncovers audience affinities which allows us to produce an advanced testing taxonomy

UnderArmour

DrewBrees

DraftKings

Solution: Mine Social Audiences for Affinities

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Merkle drove the best performance in Paid Social that our client had ever seen. As result we were awarded additional scope including programmatic video.

Methodology Resulted in Perfect Relevancy Scores for Facebook ads

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Takeaways

• Audience first, content second

• Social Listening is more than monitoring

• Evolve from “keeping score” to “making runs”

• Invest the time to build out processes

• Involve all stakeholders: social, media, creative, CMO

• Keep parameters focused, it’s easy to fall down rabbit holes

• Fail fast: test everything

• Try your best to break your tools

Thank you.