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Are you there ROI? It’s Me, Marketing: A cost-saving series from Khoros

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

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Proving ROI in marketing takes a vastly different approach than the next day's Metrics. 

The vast number of platforms people interact with is rapidly ballooning into a complete social media circus. There is T.V., movies, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, heck, and even podcasts these days. Due to all of these channels, marketers are nothing more than a band of shouting songbirds in the consumers' eyes. The principal problem for marketers is that while they do their song and dance for consumers to purchase their product or service, it’s becoming increasingly unclear how to measure success and, most notably, how to track it. 

 

A Common Challenge:

A commonly cited issue by Khoros customers is that they struggle to fully integrate with the Khoros platform. In turn, they are struggling to make the transition from native publishing and analytics to entirely using Khoros marketing. As a result, sometimes it’s a challenge to see the forest for the trees and, in turn, the full value of using the Khoros marketing platform.

Now why exactly this is happening could range from any number of reasons. It’s no secret that change management is challenging. Here’s what can happen if not all your team is using the Khoros platform. 

 

Mismatched Analytics 

Khoros Marketing’s analytics tool is designed to blend all your stats, comments, views, and likes into one place. However, while Khoros analytics can absorb natively published content analytics, having things siloed means not everyone is on the same page and causes riffs in the team flow and understanding. 

 

Underused labels 

Khoros’s marketing labels were created to help cut through the fog of social media. By using specific labels, a social marketer can see who, when, where, and what their customers are writing on their social posts. A commonly cited pain point by Khoros customers is that they're struggling to get this data but aren’t using labels properly. It could be either they aren’t using labels at all, not labeling their posts properly, or a mixture of the two. 

 

If you haven’t used labels yet or want more information, please visit our how-to guide on social marketing labels!

 

Inefficient Publishing Workflows 

Some Khoros customers have reported that getting content out at a reasonable rate is taking too much time. Strictly why this happens heavily depends on the team and their dynamics. However, it’s fair to say that if half of your team is siloed to content creation and the other half is publishing. Then a quarter of the publishing team only publishes natively, and the path from idea to social post is filled with more roadblocks and speedbumps than a back-country road. 

Now, what do these three things have in common? They are costing you money on all fronts. Much like any tool or solution, you and your team will see the most value when using it to the maximum of its ability. 

 

Khoros Platform 

While it feels like common sense, it’s essential to remember that 95% of people aren’t ready to buy a product or service when exposed to advertising. With the common pain points and the U.S. economy on the edge of an economic recession, it could quickly feel like a safe bet to slash all marketing budgets, including the Khoros solution. 

 

It’s no secret that running a social team will generally cost at least $1000 a day. This hefty sum comes from salary reporting from Glassdoor for social media managers averaging $75,000 dollars a year or roughly $35 per hour. Plus, the general cost per click for Twitter and Instagram averages around $0.70 per click, and most social teams have a minimum of three social managers on staff. After you pay your social media team, your photographers, writers, editors, and your design team, the true cost of social begins to show. Of course, you could save that money by going into duck and cover mode and hoping you come out the other side. However, as our director of strategic services, Matt Deluca, said it best in a Khoros expert interview

 

If you are willing to go dark and not have your brand be front and center and present in people's minds when they're in their purchasing decision, you're basically conceding to your nearest competitor.” 

 

So you can’t simply slash your budgets, and leaving your team siloed will only cost more money. Khoros can solve all the abovementioned problems by merely centralizing your platform into one unified place. 

If you are already a fully integrated Khoros customer, your reduced time to post saves daily cash, no matter how your campaigns perform. Your analytics get a booster for clarity and real-time stats. You’ll already know if your customers are engaging positively or negatively, and you’ll be able to adjust your campaigns accordingly. This keeps your brand top of mind for your customers, which highly increases your sales down the line. 



Take Khoros Marketing into the real world.

It’s easy to point out when other brands make mistakes or do not use their resources “properly.” It’s even easier to say do this, or that, or whatever to improve your marketing campaigns without providing real-world examples. 

Instead of giving you a vague idea of how to improve your marketing, let’s introduce an impressive H.R. company Randstad as our primary case study. Randstad has been a Khoros customer since the Spedfast and Lithium merger. According to their director of social and content marketing Karen Pace, they couldn’t be happier partnering with Khoros to achieve their marketing goals. 

Karen had this say when asked about why precisely what Khoros does to meet her marketing goals. 

“I need dashboards to be able to give me that 30,000-foot view. If I need that information, I need to take 2 seconds and go get it right now. I then take the data and translate it into user-friendly slides using Excel, and I then translate that into visuals. I need non-social people internally to understand the impact of what we're doing day-to-day and integrate my reporting into enterprise-wide reporting.” 

 

If you’re curious to learn more about what Randstad has been accomplishing with Khoros, check out the Titans of Customer Engagement Podcast where they were featured in “Audience-First: Lessons & Strategies for Building a Better Brand”! 

 

In addition to Randstad being a top Khoros customer, Karen Pace found the value of having our platform being as unified as it is. When she talked about having her “non-social people” understand the impact of her team’s work, this applies to every single brand working in social marketing today. Whenever your entire team can clearly and easily see what the analytics are showing, how the workflow is getting completed faster than ever, and how your customers engage with your brand, it’s nothing less than a piece of cake to prove the ROI of social marketing. 

 

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Can’t wait for the next installment of this cost-saving series? Take a look below at the resources to deepen your learning!