Turning social Media from a branding tool to a record-breaking 12% Revenue Surge

Rhonda:
We surpassed the previous year’s revenue by 12%. I thought a lot about this question.

Emeric:
There’s no trap in here.

Rhonda:
There’s no trap. As soon as we pulled that lever to do more social media on this specific campaign, we saw our revenue go up.

Emeric:
Welcome to The Social ROI Hotseat podcast. My name is Emeric Ernoult. I’m the CEO of Agorapulse. Since 2011, I’ve been obsessed by proving that social media was more than likes and followers, that it was actually delivering a real return on investment and a business impact that can be measured.
At the beginning of 2022, Agorapulse launched a social media ROI tracker and report. Since then, I’ve been on a quest, the quest of social media ROI success stories you can learn from and be inspired by. This is why this podcast exists and I hope that thanks to what you’re going to learn following it, you too will be measuring the business impact of social media on your business or the business of your clients. Let’s get on with the show.
Hello, Rhonda, I am very excited to have you today on my new podcast. Thank you for joining me.

Rhonda:
Thank you so much for having me.

Emeric:
We had the privilege of getting to know each other very recently, before this summer, as you were working with our software. So that’s how we got to know each other and we’ve exchanged a lot of emails and LinkedIn about me wanting to learn more from you on how you leverage social media to measure the business impact. So I’m very happy to have you on the show today. For our listeners, what I would like you to do as an introduction is to, in like three minutes or less, give them the big picture of who is Rhonda Giedt and why they should care.

Rhonda:
Thank you so much. I am a marketing professional with over 20 years of experience and have helped two startups be acquired, one by Electronic Arts, one by MTV Networks. Last year, I also helped take a company public. Currently, I am one of the portfolio advisors for Hatchet Ventures. We are a successful group of executives that have a bias for action in prioritizing helping underrepresented founders such as women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, veterans, first generation college grads, non-college grads, and many others. I’m also a fractional chief marketing officer, working with companies in the manufacturing and SaaS industries.
Social media has always played a large role at a lot of the companies that I’ve worked at, and it’s mainly been a branding tool for us to help raise awareness and target customers during different points of our buyer’s journey. So I’m very excited to be here and talking social media with you.

Emeric:
I love the bias for action. I feel the same way. So that’s a great bias to have in my opinion. Social media being a branding tool, that’s a great segue to get to my first question. My first question is about the time when you realized that social media was a branding tool and probably only a branding tool, and you wanted social media to be more than that and to have business impact that you can measure. Do you remember when you had that realization that, oh yeah, it got to do more, it got to be more. Do you remember when it was and what get you there?

Rhonda:
Yes. So managing several marketing teams over the years, you want to know what’s working and what’s not so you can focus your limited resources and efforts into getting better customers to convert into paying customers. I’ve always asked any marketing manager, social media coordinator that I’ve had, anyone, what are we doing with social media? What channels are performing the best? What is getting us the best results? What is contributing to revenue? We would pull reports for hours, trying to get information from Google Analytics and other resources to try to piece together what was working and what wasn’t. We kind of got a general idea, but nothing that I felt comfortable going to an executive leadership team with and saying, “Social media is driving X percent of our revenue in our bottom line.”
I just kind of thought, “Oh, that’s not possible with social media.” You can do it with many other marketing channels. Email, you can say, “This email A/B test generated X number revenue more per week,” but you’ve never been able to do that with social media. When I discovered Agorapulse, it became a complete game changer for me. I had the ability to track revenue from social media and also understand different links within the post, what was working, what wasn’t, what was resonating with a particular target audience or persona that we were going after and track that all the way through and easily report on it and know that I was confident in the numbers and I never had that before. It kind of helps focus executives and people who are heading up marketing on, okay, we have limited resources, this is working, we know it’s contributing to revenue, so we’re going to need to put more effort behind it. When you don’t have that data behind it, it’s hard to say that confidently even though you know that it is working, but you don’t have the data to back it up.

Emeric:
What were you measuring before you started thinking about measuring business impact revenue and everything? What was the typical report like?

Rhonda:
Typical report were followers compared to competitors, likes engagement, comments, repost, what I call marketing fluff numbers. It’s nice to know that people are interacting with your content and maybe even downloading something if you have a trackable link in there. But a lot of the ICPs that I have marketed to don’t like to be tracked. So they will be on a browser that strips all that information away, and sometimes you can’t track it all the way through.
Having those ICPs definitely present a challenge. We could only report on what the individual social media platform was giving me. I don’t always trust that either. When you’re on Facebook or Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, are those numbers valid? Because you need to back it up. I understand not all numbers are one-to-one, especially when you start doing integrations, you have some fall off, but they need to be close. Having a one source of truth where you can access that information and know that it is correct and accurate is really helpful.

Emeric:
When you were doing these reports with the engagement, the likes and the followers, were you sharing them with the C-suite and the VPs and the execs or not?

Rhonda:
No one cares about that.

Emeric:
They didn’t care? Great, great. How did you educate them on caring about social media? “Okay, this is part of my job. I’m doing social part of many other things, but it’s part of my scope.” How did you educate them so they changed their view? What did you do to make them pay attention to what was being done on social media?

Rhonda:
Well, I think it’s a blessing and a curse that social media has never really been one of those channels that a lot of executives care about. I never really brought it up. It was just part of the overall marketing mix of this is what we’re doing. As long as you were getting results and hitting your revenue numbers, no one asked questions. It’s because social media hasn’t been viewed as that strong channel for driving revenue. I feel that it’s just kind of set up as, “Oh, it’s a branding tool, we need branding, we know that it’s beneficial, we just don’t know how beneficial.”
With Agorapulse, it makes it concrete and gives you a proof point where you can have those conversations with executives, especially if, and every marketer has had this of, “Oh, we should do this on this channel because it’s amazing and I just read this article and everyone’s doing great on it.” That could be true if your ICP is there. If your audience isn’t on that channel, then it’s not going to work for you. Having those data points to have that discussion where it becomes tangible instead of, “I feel that this is working,” or, “I saw this,” or, “a competitor did this,” you have tangible results to show, look, this is what worked, this is what it resulted in. Having that data that you’re confident in is a game changer.

Emeric:
So you don’t think we can sell enterprise CRM on TikTok?

Rhonda:
I’m not saying that.

Emeric:
You don’t know yet.

Rhonda:
I’m not saying that. It depends on where your customers are and there are some B2B customers on TikTok.

Emeric:
Yeah, there are some. Absolutely. Speaking of tracking impact, what can you tell me about the tech stack that you’ve used or that your clients have used, the tech stack you had to use when you were working for clients as a fractional CMO? What is a typical tech stack and what are the different pieces of software you’ve seen and you had to bridge together?

Rhonda:
I have pretty much used anything and everything under the sun. Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, Looker, homegrown stuff, anything and everything. Everyone knows that tracking is vital. You need to show the impact of what your efforts are. For a marketer, you need to know which channels are working for you so that you know what levers to pull. You may not report that up to the board or the executive team, but to get the results that you need, you need to have that data. However, at the end of the day, revenue is the only thing that matters and you need to keep that in mind. But everyone knows when you’re setting up tracking, it’s really hard because one, you either want to track everything and then you have all this data and you don’t know how to interpret it or you don’t track enough or you don’t track it all the way through. You don’t have a way to verify your data and ensure that you’re tracking to that revenue number. You get pieces of it.
I think that’s a lot more difficult than a lot of people realize. Especially today, so many companies use so many tech stacks. I think I heard an average of 8 or 10 stacks across a normal organization. That’s a lot of integrations, that’s a lot of data to source through. No one piece of software can really track everything that you need. On top of it, you usually still have to do manual calculations at some point before you can even start interpreting the data. So having a software platform such as Agorapulse that has that one source of data for social media, and you can verify it through the individual platforms and through Google Analytics. You can say, “Look, yeah, they’re not one-to-one, but they’re close enough and our one source of truth for this particular channel is going to be our social media platform.” If you can have that for each of the channels, for email marketing, for social media, for everything that is in your marketing mix, then it helps you get to where you need to be.

Emeric:
A great segue on the tech stack and what you measure. We talked a lot about measuring revenue. Yes, you’re right, revenue is what matters in the end, but you and I both know that you cannot measure every single piece of revenue origin. There are a lot of revenue, we don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from a combination of things. But at the end of the day, especially in our world, in my world, B2B SaaS where we sell to businesses and there is a need for lead generation and there’s a need for brand awareness in the early days, and there’s a need for making sure that people are considering us when they’re considering buying a new piece of software. In our case, revenue is something, but if I only rely on revenue, what I’m going to get at the end is not going to be very exciting. Let’s put it this way.
So I also focus a lot on measuring everything that’s happening, like the trailing indicators. Everything that’s happening before the revenue is triggered and generated, that is important to me. Like people who visit my pricing page, people who sign up for a free trial, people who download piece of marketing that I created for lead gen to explain what we do and the value we do. All these things, I measure and they have a lot of value to me because I know that eventually if people consume enough of them or act on these enough, it will eventually lead to revenue. Even though my tracking software, like my Google Analytics for example, will not be able to track all the way there because they’re using their mobile for step number one and their iPad for step number two, and then their laptop for step number three and a friend’s computer for subscribing. And that you know is going to break the whole cycle.
What kind of goals you were tracking when you’re working for clients? What was your focus was? Were you focused on simplicity? Were you focused on tracking as many goals as possible? Did you have some kind of a framework to define the goals you want to track that are the trailing indicators of future revenue?

Rhonda:
Yes. When I normally start working with a customer, I start very simple, start with the basics. What is your web traffic? How much of that web traffic is your primary audience that you’re going after? How is your lifetime value? Because if you’re getting customers and they’re buying, but then they’re not renewing, that’s a problem. How long does it take in the buying cycle? Because that varies by product, by company, by industry. What is your conversion rate? What’s your bounce rate? All of those, what I call foundational marketing metrics, I track all of them.
I usually have, on average, about 30 reports that I look at on either a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to track all of that. If you’re working with an e-commerce client, what is the conversion through your cart? Where are people falling off? And you adjust that. As a marketer, you need to know that to keep the business running. However, as an executive, when you’re talking to the executive leadership team and the board, I think an issue, an obstacle that marketers have to overcome is not taking those metrics that mean a lot to you to those meetings. Because unless you’re in it day in and day out, you don’t understand the pieces together and you don’t have the time for the head of marketing to tell you the story so that you understand it.
I think as a head of marketing, you have to walk that line between knowing the day-to-day metrics that you’re looking at and how to interpret and leverage that, and then how to take that information and put it into terminology that the executive leadership team also understands so that they’re like, “Yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. Yes, that makes sense and keep going.” I think that is something that marketers have to wear multiple hats for that on metrics. But yes, I am one of those people that I measure everything and I test everything. It is in my DNA. It’s just how I am with marketing.

Emeric:
Yeah. Well, one thing I’ve realized, because I’m the C-suite part, I’m the CEO and I have my CMO who comes to us and explains what he’s doing. One thing I’ve realized is like, yes, we want to see the high level metrics, but we still want to go one step deeper to understand an MQL, a Marketing Qualified Leads. It can be so many different things. So we still want to go beyond MQL and say, “Okay, what does that mean? Do we have intent in that? Do we measure that? And how do we measure that? Do we have a vertical? Do we measure if it’s any kind of MQL that can come from any kind of vertical? Do we have geographic?”
So I still go beyond MQL and say, “Okay, you got that many MQLs, but I want to know if they’re good or bad.” And my way of knowing they’re good or bad is, where are they located? Are they big companies or small companies? Are they checking my pricing page or not? Connecting all these dots to try to get intent and right fit in terms of ICP and types of clients. That’s how we’ve defined our Google Analytics goals. We can have a little bit of that in the goals that we track. It is not perfect, but it’s much better than just revenue, which is, “Ah! I don’t know if I’m capturing everything.”

Rhonda:
It’s true. And you are a dream CEO to any marketer.

Emeric:
I’m not sure.

Rhonda:
You are. I think all marketers wish that CEOs would dig a little deeper and sometimes they don’t have that background or they don’t have that time and they rely on the people that they hire to do that for them. So to me, that is a dream I’m sure your CMO is very happy.

Emeric:
I’ve done a lot of our marketing in the early days of being a bootstrap company and being a founder, you got to do everything. So marketing was my area of expertise and my co-founder was our CTO, so we both had our own things and it worked pretty well. We touched base on that for a minute. We mentioned TikTok and I’m curious to know, what have you seen in terms of social networks working for your clients or other companies you’ve worked for? I’m sure they’ve been pretty different and varied. What have you seen and is there any pattern, like if you’re B2C, you got to do this, if you’re B2B, you got to do that? Well, I kind of know a little bit about that, but I’d love to hear it from you.

Rhonda:
You probably know more about it than I do because you can look across all of your clients and see what’s working. But like with anything, it depends. I’m working with a company called Skin Theory who is taking the mystery out of skincare, and they want to track where their downloads are coming from their app and which channels are working best for them. So they’re B2C and Facebook, Instagram, TikTok work really well for them.
For some of the B2B companies that I’m working with, Us in Technology, who are diversifying the tech industry, total B2B, having success with TikTok. Their members go on and have testimonials, and they’re doing really great with TikTok. ZNE Capital, who is saving the planet one apartment building at a time, they’re working to net-zero carbon emissions. They get a lot out of LinkedIn. I don’t think that you can say, “Oh, if I’m B2B, I’ve got to be on this platform. If I’m B2C, I’ve got to be on this platform.” It really is where is your audience and how are you going to reach them? That is proven with a couple of those companies.

Emeric:
Okay. I can’t let you go without going one step deeper on that B2B company that’s successful on TikTok. What can you share with us that you understood that made them successful on TikTok as a B2B company, the little tactics and the things that they’ve been doing on TikTok?

Rhonda:
Us in Technology, they are this amazing company that is helping first generation college students, minority groups that are in the tech world. They’re mentoring these groups of talent pools across a whole host of disciplines, and then working with companies to have a pipeline to hire from. I think in that kind of setup, TikTok makes sense because you have the talent going, “This is amazing.” You have B2B enterprise customers who are hiring from it, who all want to be on TikTok and are trying to figure out how to do TikTok. So it makes sense that it works for them.
You have to look at it holistically. In their business, it makes a lot of sense. And just to have that talent pool saying, “Oh, this has been so great. They helped mentor me. I didn’t know about negotiating employment contractor or what to ask for.” There’s all these soft skills that you don’t get when you’re going through college. And even if you’re not going through college and you’re applying for a job, there’s a lot of things that you just learn along the way. Us in Technology is helping speed up that by mentoring these talent pool groups that then in turn stay with companies longer. I think it’s all how your business is set up and who your audience is.

Emeric:
Makes sense. Makes sense. If you had to pick one of the companies or clients you work for that’s an amazing example of success on measuring business impacts of social media, which one would it be and what was the success and how was it measured?

Rhonda:
I thought a lot about this question.

Emeric:
Yeah, because you have questions in advance. I didn’t surprise you. There’s no trap in here.

Rhonda:
There’s no trap. I racked my brain because I was trying to come up with an answer of this company before I used Agorapulse so that I wasn’t a walking, talking billboard where you-

Emeric:
It doesn’t have to be about Agorapulse. Absolutely not. This is not an ad for me. You’re doing a great job. I’m grateful. But it can be anything else. That’s absolutely okay.

Rhonda:
I mean, if you’re looking at companies just mass market wise, I think people who are doing companies, and I haven’t worked with them but are like Wendy’s and Oreo, they have a great social media presence and they are on top of every trending topic and all of that. If you’re looking at B2B companies, I think Pavilion and 6sense and Gated do a great job of providing value to their customers and not forcing people through a particular funnel, but being a source of research and inspiration for when a company is looking for a new solution.
I think there are few companies that are really doing social media super, super well. As I said before, most of the companies that I’ve worked with view social media as a branding tool. And yes, there’s some great things that you can do, but it’s nothing that I think is on the level of those companies.

Emeric:
Got it. Got it. But if you were going back in the latest companies you worked with, what is it that was success for them and how did you measure it? If you’re thinking about the companies you worked for, the last companies you’ve worked for where you measured business success. I’d love for the audience to get something specific that they can learn from and they can apply, “Oh yeah, I can try that too, on my own. I can try that at home and see how it works for me.”

Rhonda:
Yeah, so I think the biggest success that I’ve seen with social media was at a past company, we used to do annual Cyber Monday deals that were super successful every single year we did them. One year, we were tracking to the same level that we were the year before. I’m a super competitive person and I was not happy that we were going to hit the same number that we were the year before.
My social media manager was a rockstar, love her. I called her up and I’m like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” We made a game time decision halfway through the day to do a bigger social media push, which you have this whole strategic plan when you’re going into Cyber Monday and you know what works and you know what levers you’re going to pull. And social media just again, was that branding tool, but I was like, “I have it in my gut that I think this is going to work.” On the fly, we came up with a campaign that spoke to a very specific audience on Facebook and it worked.
We surpassed the previous year’s revenue by 12%. I was so excited and I fully contribute that to social media and the efforts that we did because we were tracking on an hourly basis where our revenue was. As soon as we pulled that lever to do more social media on this specific campaign, we saw our revenue go up. Now, we couldn’t track everything through, but that’s the only thing that we changed. So I know in my gut that that worked for us.

Emeric:
That’s really interesting. So basically the way you were able to attribute that 12% increase on revenue to social media was because of timing?

Rhonda:
Yes, because of timing. Of course, the whole strategy helped get us to where we were the year before. But to get that bump, it really came from social media.

Emeric:
And that was Facebook mostly?

Rhonda:
Surprisingly, it was Facebook, yes.

Emeric:
What was that persona that you were going after that was specifically on Facebook? Who were they?

Rhonda:
Surprisingly, the audience that we went after were men buying Christmas presents and holiday presents for their loved ones.

Emeric:
Oh, okay.

Rhonda:
And it worked.

Emeric:
Yeah, I can relate to that. I always will be, “Oh my God, what am I going to buy? What am I going to buy?” If I’m on Facebook at that very moment and I see something that’s valuable, I’m just going to go and, “I found something, I’m good.”

Rhonda:
Yes.

Emeric:
I’m going to [inaudible 00:30:30] next year.

Rhonda:
Yes. It was a very specific audience that wasn’t in our primary ICP, but we knew that they were out there and that they did buy and we took a gamble and it worked.

Emeric:
Okay. Now, the less shiny side of things, if you had to think about failing at getting business impact from social, what have you done that you’re not going to do again on social media that was a waste of time because you couldn’t prove that it’s working and you didn’t want to keep doing it?

Rhonda:
My biggest failure, which was attributed a lot to social media, was a product launch that I was working on. We were relying on social media to build the momentum, to build the awareness and to reach our ICP. The launch was a total flop. It crashed and burned spectacularly. This was due to several factors, but the biggest one was not having 100% buy-in from the entire executive leadership team. Yes, they said, “Yes, we’re going to do this. Yes, this product is going to launch on this time. Yes, we’re all on board.” But I had this nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, something was holding them back, and I should have trusted my gut and really pushed to find out what was causing them to hesitate and what was not being said.
I think because of that, when we launched the product, we had this huge push on social media and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, we don’t want to say that. We don’t want to do this. Oh, I’m not sure. Like, let’s not publicize that.” And all of the fear and worry and unspoken issues came up as we launched and it didn’t really work.
I think you have to sometimes take a step back and not worry so much about the product launch date and getting to that end goal and really saying, what is it that you are not good with? It turned out to be that they didn’t really want social media to be the vehicle for this product launch for whatever reason. And I don’t think that we were quite ready to launch the product to be a 100% honest on that. But I think you just learn from those and everyone fails. Everyone has those major blenders and you’re like, “Okay, pick yourself up, regroup. We still have a product, we need to sell it. It won’t be the great launch that it was.” And you just regroup and you learn from it. But I would say trust your gut and really dig in, because when things start to hit and people are like, “Oh wait, no.” There’s something behind that and you need to trust your gut.

Emeric:
My last question is about what is next on your journey to social media ROI and measuring business impact? Where do you want to go next? What do you want to try next? What do you want to win at next?

Rhonda:
Well, I am really enjoying working with the entire portfolio companies within Hatchet Ventures. A lot of them are at pre-seed and seed stage. So they are doing social media, but not quite to the grand level that they’ll get to. I am excited to see as they grow, how social media grows, the campaigns that they do, the different channels that they try, and knowing that they’re able to track it now, they’re going to set the world on fire in a good way and be really great. And then for some of the fractional CMO clients that I’m working with, I’m working with them to really help accelerate their growth to get them to an attractive exit. Social media can really help with that. Whether you are trying to get acquired or going IPO, having that social media presence to drive what you’re doing and let specific audiences know whatever message that you’re going after is really key to part of that growth and now I can track it.

Emeric:
Cool. I have one question that’s unrelated, but that’s something I heard you say in one of the previous interviews you did with someone in my team. I’d like to see if you remember. You had someone in your team who came to you and say, “Oh, I want to use tool X.” We’re not going to mention names. “I want to use tool X.” And tool X is very affordable, not to say cheap and you had doubt about the cheap tool, and you thought that there was one ideal way to make that person realize that the cheap tool was not the right solution. Can you share with me what you told her, what you advised her to do?

Rhonda:
Yes. So I love building teams and mentoring people on my team so that they can grow their career. As I have learned and just said, you learn from your failures. So I said, “Let’s go for it.” I knew it was going to be painful, but fortunately, as I said before, social media was not at the forefront of the executive team. So I had room to play with it. She set it up, started doing posts on it, and I am asking for these reports and all of this and it was painful. It was really painful for her. I think she would sit there pulling her hair out, going, “What in the world?” I let her suffer for a few months. I did.

Emeric:
That’s really mean, Rhonda.

Rhonda:
I did. It wasn’t one of those things where… Because she knew right away. I was like, “Okay, we need to wait three months and see. Maybe it’ll get better. Maybe you just need to learn the job and to not.” So it’s coming up on the three-month mark and I was like, “Okay, it sounds like we need to change platforms. Go out, find some platforms, bring me the pros and cons, you know what we’re looking for.”

Emeric:
You know what you don’t like.

Rhonda:
“And what you know don’t like and what’s going to help you do your job.” And she did. She brought me Agorapulse. When she was presenting all the choices, I was just like, “I don’t know this company and we just went through this.” I was like, “Are you 100% sure? Because you’re going to have to live with us.”

Emeric:
Yeah.

Rhonda:
She’s like, “Yes. Yes, I am.” And yeah, it was a game changer.

Emeric:
I wanted you to share that story because I thought it was really, really smart of you to not tell her what to do, but to let her go experience what the choice she was about to make is going to mean for her and let her make the decision and realize for herself. I thought that was great coaching. When I heard that, I said, “Oh, that’s amazing.” I should be doing that. “Oh, I want to buy this or I want to try that.” “Okay, go.” I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I’m not going to tell you that. I’m going to let you try. I’m going to let you experience the pain it probably is going to be, but I won’t be the one telling you. I want you to feel that pain and then come back to me and say, “Okay, yeah, no, it doesn’t work.”
So that was a really smart way to do it. I am very happy that it was another tool and eventually you came to us. You didn’t know us before, so I had absolutely no influence in that process, but I thought that was really smart of you.
Rhonda, thank you very much for having shared your social media ROI journey with me. I wish you the best for the next couple of months and I’ve been thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you very much.

Rhonda:
Thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed it.