Cool Vendors in Social Marketing, 2015

G00274768
Cool Vendors in Social Marketing, 2015
Published: 17 April 2015
Analyst(s): Julie Hopkins, Jake Sorofman
Social marketers can advance their programs by gathering and applying
audience insight, and by using better performance metrics to improve
execution. Our Cool Vendors offer emerging tools and technologies to help
social marketers design more effective engagement strategies and improve
ROI.
Key Findings
■
Emerging tools help digital marketers better understand their target audiences, facilitate
engagement, and optimize their social initiatives at scale. Three of our Cool Vendors' solutions
— CommandPost, Insightpool and Traackr — help digital marketers mine audience insights to
enhance their social engagement strategies.
■
Digital marketers in multibrand global organizations can be more effective when they're able to
manage social marketing activities in one platform. Expion, which is expanding its business
from the United States into Europe and Asia/Pacific, has a social relationship and content
management platform for complex global organizations that handle a high volume of content
across brands.
■
Marketers are being held accountable for social marketing and advertising expenditures,
especially as budgets rise. LiftMetrix helps digital marketers know what tactics work best and
on what social sites.
Recommendations
■
Leverage social insights to better understand your audience and what motivates them, and to
track their actions. This will enable you to optimize your downstream outreach and engagement
to achieve marketing objectives and business outcomes.
■
Assess shortcomings in your global strategies. Where gaps exist in sharing resources, insights
or assets, determine how technology solutions can get teams on the same page, limit rework
and, through learning, improve performance.
■
Demonstrate the value of your social marketing activities by using a methodology to measure
the costs and benefits of your efforts. If you aren't leveraging an attribution model, or using a
true ROI calculation, then track impact of social activities on the ROI drivers (revenue, cost,
risk).
Table of Contents
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 2
What You Need to Know.................................................................................................................. 2
CommandPost................................................................................................................................. 2
Expion.............................................................................................................................................. 3
Insightpool........................................................................................................................................4
LiftMetrix.......................................................................................................................................... 4
Traackr.............................................................................................................................................5
Gartner Recommended Reading............................................................................................................ 6
Analysis
This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but
rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.
Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any
warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
What You Need to Know
Social marketing is maturing, but not without growing pains. Marketers want tools that can run
social initiatives at scale, to a point of measurable performance. What might have been forgiven in
social marketing's youth is no longer acceptable in most marketing organizations. Our Cool Vendors
in Social Marketing research puts the spotlight on five providers that help marketers bring more
intelligence, scale, efficiency, measurability and accountability to their social marketing programs.
CommandPost
New York, New York (www.getcommandpost.com)
Analysis by Julie Hopkins
Why Cool: The roots of CommandPost can be found in CMP.LY (CMP.LY is now doing business as
CommandPost), which was founded to help social marketers manage and monitor compliance with
federal disclosure rules and regulations. The company's ability to track the actions of individual
influencers and advocates became the foundation of a broader set of audience insight tools, now
packaged all together as offerings from CommandPost. CommandPost takes high-level interactions
on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram, and drills down to give marketers a
deeper understanding of their audiences. Competitive monitoring capabilities offer marketers the
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ability to track, benchmark and report on many of the same criteria across Twitter, Facebook and
Instagram for individual competitors, groupings and industry segments.
Marketers can use CommandPost to track which actual individuals connect with what specific
pieces of content, in what channels, over time. They can identify their most engaged audience
segments, their most (and least) engaged members, and what content is driving that engagement.
Tracking and analysis can also help to reveal content or topic connections between users that may
have otherwise gone unidentified, to help improve or expand content and audience engagement
strategies. Segment reports offer additional audience insight, providing demographic and
psychographic information about engaged audience segments.
Finally, CommandPost's earned media measurement capabilities aid the process of connecting
changes in strategy and engagement to business value, allowing marketers to evaluate performance
and compare efficiency across channels, alone or aggregated, across multiple brand social media
accounts.
Challenges: CommandPost currently doesn't monitor social engagement on two key channels:
Google+ or Pinterest, limiting use cases. To that end, CommandPost is still in aggressive product
development mode (it launched in 2014), so the change in strategic direction that yielded
CommandPost is still being proven. In addition, the company is still working to help clients
understand the value of its data. Clients are likely to be wooed by the individual and audience
insights they can generate. But, chasing individuals may not be valuable for some organizations at
scale, and audience insights may be too loose to drive strategic change.
Who Should Care: Digital marketers who want to know whether they are reaching their target
audiences on social sites, want to identify their most influential advocates, who wish to see
competitive engagement metrics, and track and measure activity across social channels. B2B
marketers, for whom tracking engagement patterns of single prospects is important, may actually
benefit most directly from the individual insights generate by CommandPost, which can be used in
a social selling scenario.
Expion
Raleigh, North Carolina (www.expion.com)
Analysis by Jake Sorofman
Why Cool: Expion's social and content marketing platform takes on a key challenge in social
marketing: how to manage social activity and content effectively in a multibrand organization
seeking global coordination. Organizations rolling out a software platform for hundreds of people or
more want to avoid any product or service that requires extensive training. Expion makes it easy for
users to customize and access information for content discovery, content planning, social
publishing, moderation or other roles. The vendor's expansion into Europe and Asia/Pacific is
encouraging, and reflects its intent to support clients who seek global thought leadership and
support. In addition to hiring talent in these markets, Expion has partnered with WeChat, a
messaging app developed by Tencent in China, and Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site.
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Challenges: Expion is flanked by heightened competition from other social marketing and content
marketing vendors in the category, and maintains a lower profile among them. For this reason,
competition for global brands, and the fight to defend their in-market knowledge, will be fierce.
Who Should Care: Digital marketers at global companies who want to increase their effectiveness
and lower the cost of managing content and social engagement across a complex brand portfolio
and globally distributed social channels.
Insightpool
Atlanta, Georgia (www.insightpool.com)
Analysis by Julie Hopkins
Why Cool: Insightpool applies core techniques of marketing automation, lead nurturing, and drip
marketing to social marketing. Using Insightpool, brands can identify unknown, but likely to engage,
advocates based on content consumed, conversation topics and bio characteristics, then drive
them to take actions that lead to — or are indicative of — conversion. The tool analyzes data in
social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. It then develops
profiles of customers, prospects and influencers. A marketer can then use the tool to trigger highly
personalized and targeted messaging, such as a tweeting a coupon or offer, to a select group of
people, or inviting a segment of prospects to an upcoming webinar or event. Insightpool's February
2015 acquisition of Next Principles is designed to build on the vendor's ability to identify and
suggest conversation approaches with prospective influencers, and use Next Principles' social
selling capabilities in a united sales and marketing platform.
Challenges: Insightpool requires a minimum six-month contract and has an extensive onboarding
process that requires testing and optimization. Guidance from Insightpool resources, and support
from its client success team during the onboarding process may mitigate resource impact on the
client side, but this process can still be time consuming. Also, the tool was originally focused on
Twitter, which limits usability for brands that are invested or focused on other platforms.
Who Should Care: B2C and B2B marketers that want a better way to identify and proactively
engage prospects via Twitter. Insightpool complements social media marketing tools such as
Hootsuite, Sprinklr and Spredfast. It can also be integrated with email and marketing automation
platforms such as Marketo, Oracle's Eloqua, Salesforce's ExactTarget and Pardot. Connections
back to CRM or marketing automation systems facilitate greater visibility into connections occurring
in the sales funnel.
LiftMetrix
New York, New York (www.liftmetrix.com)
Analysis by Julie Hopkins
Why Cool: LiftMetrix addresses the need for better understanding of social marketing ROI. It offers
the ability to track your brand's performance from first activity across Facebook, Facebook Ads,
Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other social sites through Google Analytics to see audience
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engagement and conversion activity. By applying internal company metrics, ad buying rates and
other data, the tool calculates the return generated from posts, ads or content in near real time.
Clients can see what's generating the desired outcomes in terms of likes, shares, engagement,
conversions or other metrics. By looking at the history of the most successful social activities,
clients can obtain granular recommendations on what to prioritize, enabling them to amplify highperforming content when the moment is right.
Challenges: Digital marketers and other business stakeholders have struggled with ways to
accurately attribute the impact of social marketing and advertising expenditures. LiftMetrix can't
calculate ROI across multiple marketing channels, but is useful for brands that put emphasis on
social media. As with attribution modeling, noise in the system can cloud perfect value assignment.
In the end, clients will benefit from closer consideration of the connection between investment and
performance. Tools like LiftMetrix can facilitate this connection, but should use insights provided as
a part of their analytical process, versus the answer to all remaining questions. Insights are currently
limited to Facebook, Facebook Ads, Twitter and Instagram, because this is where ad dollars are
being spent (though Pinterest and YouTube are to come).
Who Should Care: Digital marketers who seek an easy-to-use solution to immediately quantify and
compare the value of organic and paid social activities.
Traackr
San Francisco, California (www.traackr.com)
Analysis by Julie Hopkins
Why Cool: Traackr helps clients identify influencers and build actionable relationships with them.
Clients upload a list of existing influencers, or use Traackr's algorithm to identify influencers across
the Web, based on topics or areas of interest. Influencers are associated to projects or
engagements; within projects, profiles are ranked based on reach, resonance and relevance,
helping marketers to prioritize resources allocated to social outreach. Influencer listening helps
marketers identify key topics or relevant content for commenting, curating or sharing. Engagement
analytics can point to activity or connections forming among a group of influencers or a project,
which can drive content or outreach strategy. For marketers seeking to make connections that are
outside their influencer network, an influencer network map helps identify connection points and
steps to building a relationship between the brand and desired influencers.
Challenges: Some marketers dismiss influence marketing's effectiveness, suggesting there are
more effective ways to engage with target audiences and drive conversions. Influencer strategies
also can be challenging to scale, or to connect to adequate returns. In response, Traackr's leaders
have been vocal proponents of influence marketing's value, specifying ways it can be used to reach
new audiences and build relationships with prospects. However, connections with other social tools
(such as listening or publishing) — which may address some scale challenges — are not yet in
place.
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Who Should Care: Digital marketers interested in establishing an influencer program, or who are
already tracking influencers manually (for example, using a spreadsheet) but want to discover,
establish, manage and track relationships with select people on social sites.
Gartner Recommended Reading
Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"How to Determine Social Marketing Revenue Attribution"
"Six Considerations When Integrating Paid Media Into Social Marketing"
"Market Guide: Social Analytics for Marketing Leaders"
"Market Guide for Social Marketing Management"
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