No more free lunches - Why social now needs to be researched, measured and refined like any other area of performance marketing

The past year has seen executives become increasingly accustomed to Facebook altering its algorithm to ‘dial down’ a brand’s organic reach. There may still be resentment that the social media giant is not showing a brand’s messages to, on average, no more than one in 10 fans but there is not a great deal a brand can do about it. Pay to promote or put up with reach that has fallen off a cliff are the stark choices.

It is a similar story on Twitter where there has yet to be an algorithm change, though one is rumoured, but brands are increasingly promoting content to help their messages rise above the endless stream of messages on a user’s news feed. Instagram too, of course, has recently begun a pilot with trusted brands to roll out its promoted pictures service.

The truth is, then, social is no longer free. Other than having to find more budget to increase, or even just maintain reach, what does this mean for digital marketers? In the days when reach was free, content did not have to work quite so hard to prove its own worth, now though it has to – promoting content has turned paid social, and content generation, into a regular performance marketing channel.

Metrics rule

For Jai Gilbert, head of marketing at low-cost African airline Fastjet, the most obvious impact is content now has to work harder than before and so every post it runs through its social agency, Bozboz, has to be analysed. Just how that analysis is conducted depends on which camp it falls in to.

“Now that there’s invariably a cost involved, it’s more important than ever that we make sure content is paying for itself,” she says.

“We split that into two. If we’re running one of our one-day flash sales then it’s quite simple to look at how much we’ve put in to promoting a post leading travellers to the site against the number of tickets sold. We recently sold 45,000 tickets in a day and more than quadrupled the traffic to our site. So, there the analysis is pretty clear.

“As we’re just under two years old and we’re still opening up new markets, we also promote our brand values in content on social media, and so to ensure that we’re doing that well we run online surveys as well as face-to-face market research interviews. It’s a very different type of analysis than our direct response work. We look to see how well the branded messages are getting over our record for reliability, performance and safety which, the results show, they’ve been received.”

So, in the era of paid social being the norm, rather than an occasional nice-to-have boost, marketers are having to scrutinise the performance of their posts, rather like they were a television spot, in terms of conveying brand values, or like a digital display campaign, when particular products are services are being promoted.

Strategic rethink

This, of course, means they have to also be ready to scrutinise their content strategy so it produces copy, images and video which deliver the required level of engagement to warrant budget for content promotion.

That has been the focus at digital agency Mindshare where managing partner Jenny Kirby explains brands are working far harder through their agencies to ensure that content is appealing to consumers. This is particularly true of the work Kirby has been doing with Land Rover.

To get a better idea of the content people want to consume, Mindshare and Land Rover took a look at what people are searching for to discover where they may have gaps in their paid-social content strategy.

“Now it’s a given that you have to pay to promote content on social to get reach, it’s got to wash its face, so you’ve got to make sure you’re putting budget behind the right content,” she says.

“To identify what Land Rover customers and prospects were most interested in we took a look at what they were searching for so we could make a search cloud of terms. We then took a close look at the content we were providing to see if there were any gaps.

“The big area we really noticed we needed to improve on was pricing. In fact, the general realisation was that people want useful, practical information about cars. They want to know how big the boot is and if they can plug their iPhone in and so on. We still get a lot of interest in stunning photography and video but the steer we got was we needed practical information.”

Once the missing areas were identified, the content was created and the strategy tested by the metrics car companies pay the most attention to.

“We’ve got good tracking technology so we can see which content is causing the most engagement and which is leading to the most desired outcomes,” adds Kirby.

“Like any car manufacturer, for Land Rover that’s brochure requests and test drives. That’s the stage we’re at the moment. We’ve established the areas we were missing and we’re looking in to the metrics. If we’re promoting the content, we have to be able to show that we’re delivering and, although we’re only half way through that stage right now, I think we’re on the right tracks.”

Performance networks

Performance marketers who turn their traffic in to custom for brands, normally via an affiliate network, have had to sharpen up their act as well. In the past they could rely on a huge following to get offers and content out to their fans automatically through social. With natural results tuned down by Facebook, though, publishers are having to focus harder than ever before, according to Victoria Limpenny, senior team leader at Affiliate Window.

“We’re really noticing that publishers are having to really focus on more of a niche because if you have too wide an audience you can end up paying to promote to people that aren’t in market for a particular item,” she says.

“Brands are being a lot more sensible and focus on whom they work with because it’s not just about performance marketing partners with huge followings any more.

“We’re definitely seeing brands taking more time over picking partners who are a much closer fit to their demographic than before. We’re seeing a lot of deals where people will expect email campaigns thrown in with social, so there will be content promoted in social but there will also be emails through the publisher typically targeting people of the right demographic whom the publisher knows have shopped with a competitor recently.”

Limpenny believes that tracking has now become more important than before and is a good means through which an affiliate network can prove its worth. With the advent of paid-social receiving marketing budget, the content produced and promoted has to prove a return on investment.

However, last click systems will not always pick up the importance of an earlier interaction with a piece of content consumed through a promoted social post, and so fractional attribution, even if it is not used for payment, is become increasingly important in analysing campaigns to understand the relative influence of individual touch points along the customer’s journey.

This rising importance for analysis and attribution is forming a virtuous circle which can better inform marketers where their budget is working well so they can get the most through paid-social campaigns by optimising the content they promote.

The days of a free lunch are clearly gone and now content has to wash its proverbial face, like any other area of performance marketing, it has demonstrably became exactly that – a performance marketing channel born from what was a nice free bolt-on to supplement campaigns.

This feature was first published in the 15 October issue of The Drum. You can purchase a copy via the The Drum Store here.