1

Social Value BenchmarkUnlocking engagement opportunities

across the customer journey

2

Executive Summary

This research aims to answer a simple question. Do visible Social programmes undertake the fundamental Customer Engagement activities that drive sales, loyalty and advocacy?

OgilvyOne’s clients often come to us for support on Social strategy, because Social is underdelivering in terms of driving sustainable Customer Engagement. Our Social Value Navigator process helps our clients to embed their Social programmes deeply in their businesses. But to assess the Total Customer Value of a Social programme requires a wide range of internal data from sales and loyalty to website analytics. But there is also a need for a faster benchmark against competitors.

We have created the Social Value Benchmark to assess companies against their direct competitors and companies in other categories, based on public information. Benchmark assesses 27 companies across five categories. Our objective scoring system has created a database of 4,087 answers, categorised by journey stage, channel used and company. At any stage of the customer journey a score of 100% would indicate that the basics of a category-appropriate Social programme are in place.

Total Customer Value incorporates all forms of value that a customer brings to a business: Transactional, Loyalty, Advocacy and Collaboration.

3

Analysed to find opportunities for better Customer Engagement through Social, we found:

1. Social is most actively used in the

early stages of customer journeys with

a score of 51% at awareness falling to

21% at the point of purchase.

4. Many companies are reluctant

to leave the Social ‘safe zone’ and

engage with customers outside their

owned Social channels.

6. Social loyalty and advocacy

are particularly neglected with

average scores of 20% and 17%

respectively.

2. Companies have significant

room for improvement, with an

average score of 31% across the

customer journey.

3. Some Social tactics are neglected,

despite their value. For instance URL

shorteners are a simple way to collect

data on which Social tactics are working,

but only get a benchmark score of 31%.

5. Channel disconnect is a common

phenomenon, with a colder, more

broadcast, tone by companies on

their websites than in Social.

4

integrated, measured - and most of all, not strategic. Only 10% of CMOs believe that Social is well integrated with their broader strategy.

While we cannot see business objectives, we can understand them at a category level, and thus the potential roles that Social has in driving business value. The Social Value Benchmark scores these activities. A score of 100% at any stage of a customer journey indicates that good basics are in place.

To create the Social Value Benchmark we chose five categories to give us a cross section of different challenges for Social programmes. For each category we worked with our clients, industry experts and our client teams to define a category customer journey for a target customer. For each stage in this customer journey we defined a role for Social - ranging from very broad roles in raising awareness and influencing favourability to closing sales and nurturing loyalty and advocacy. For each of these roles we worked to define benchmarks for basic Social activities that would deliver that part of the customer journey, and developed a marking system for this. While assessing whether a programme is cutting edge is beyond the scope of this research, and indeed is what our Social Value Navigator process does, this research aimed to assess whether companies are undertaking basic Social activities that fit their business models. Finally we used this marking system to mark five or six companies in each category on their Social activities. We collected over 4,087 data points, giving us an unrivalled database of how these categories are delivering Social programmes.

Comscore: The Power of Like 2 http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2012/6/comScore_and_Facebook_Release_The_Power_of_Like_2_How_Social_Marketing_WorksDuke University’s CMO Survey 2014 http://www.cmosurvey.org/results/For instance ‘Getting Digital Right’ Milward Brown 2014.http://www.cmosurvey.org/blog/do-marketers-know-what-they-want-from-social-media/

Why do Social programmes seem to be

disconnected from broader strategies for

customer engagement?

The promise of Social is, after all, simple. Social relationships are central to our lives, and by extension to how we engage customers. It’s the oldest market research finding around - that the biggest influences on us are our peers, friends and family. And Social often shows good returns. For instance Target’s research with Facebook showed that Social advertising drove 27% higher sales than advertising without Social endorsement.

But when marketers are asked what they are doing, a dilemma becomes apparent.

On the one hand they recognise the importance of Social and plan to increase spending on Social by 144% over the next five years.

But on the other hand they struggle to quantify whether Social gives them a return. Surveys consistently show that only one in six marketers feel they have a good quantitative understanding of their returns, and only two in six even have a good qualitative view.

Why is this? After all, the internet and modern technology have given marketers more knowledge than ever before about what makes people tick.

Firstly, meaningful social media measurement is complicated. Marketers are addressing this through increased investment in analytics and data management.

Secondly, and this is the focus of our research, Social programmes are badly aligned with overall business strategy. CMOs understand that Social is not delivering because it is badly

5

There are six areas that stood out across categories.

Social is barely used at many parts of the

customer journey. While almost all companies

examined use Social to drive awareness, with

a Benchmark score of 51% at the Awareness

stage, very few use it in loyalty or advocacy

programmes, or around the point of purchase,

despite the high value that customers put on

peer endorsement.

The average Benchmark score of 21% at the

point of purchase indicates that companies are

largely not trying to sell in Social, or to create

bonds immediately post purchase. Both of

these are reasonably simple to implement with

tactics as simple as asking buyers to follow

Social channels specifically for customers

immediately post purchase.

For many companies Social appears to

be synonymous with ‘What is done on my

Facebook page’ rather than ‘How do I use the

power of relationships to drive my marketing?’.

Activity rates are dramatically higher in

broadcast Social channels (e.g. posting

content on a Twitter feed) than when engaging

customers, even at the most basic level of

responding to customers who ask a question.

In some high ticket price categories such

as travel and automotive, brands often don’t

respond to customers’ questions even though

these questions are often when customers are

actively shopping.

Social is most actively used in the early stages of customer journeys with a score of 51% at awareness falling to 21% at the point of purchase.

Our research in more detail

1

http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/research-studies/digital-drives-auto-shopping.html

6

10

20

30

40

50

60

Awareness Consideration Purchase Loyalty Advocacy &Collaboration

On average companies scored a Benchmark

score only 31% across the full customer

journey. There are some quick wins that even

relatively sophisticated companies could adopt

tomorrow. For instance, despite the role of

thought leadership in lead generation for B2B

companies, very few use Slideshare’s Lead

Capture option or even put links to register for

events in their Social feeds.

Companies have significant room for improvement, with an average score of 31% across the customer journey.

2Average score by journey stage as a potential of total points available at that stage of the customer journey.

%

7

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

UGC Forums

Slideshare

Pinterest

Blog

LinkedIn

Shortned URLs

Google+

YouTube

Website - Social integration

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

Marketers appear largely unaware of many

Social tactics and channels. For instance, the

potential of Social activity to impact unbranded

discussions (e.g. through a hashtag) or

unbranded search results is very often

neglected. Equally, forums are crucial for the

B2B customer journey, but often ignored by

B2B marketers.

Some Social tactics are neglected, despite their value. For instance URL shorteners are a simple way to collect data on which Social tactics are working, but only get a benchmark score of 31%.

3

Average scores for common Social tactics.

8

There is often a reluctance from brands to

engage outside their owned channels. So if a

potential customer asks a question about a

brand without explicitly mentioning its Twitter

handle, then it is rare for brands to take

advantage of that opportunity.

B2B firms in particular are often good at

creating meaningful content. But after

There is often a stark divide in tone by

channels. Corporate websites are generally

rather cold, out of date and broadcast. On

balance even the weaker Social channels have

more warmth of tone and authenticity.

publishing it in Social they often fail to respond

to questions from potential clients. This is

something that would be unthinkable offline,

for instance at a conference. While this is

justifiable in some circumstances, we see no

evidence that this is thought through.

Many companies are reluctant to leave the Social ‘safe zone’ and engage with customers outside their owned channels.

Channel disconnect is a common phenomenon, with a colder, more broadcast, tone by companies on their websites than in Social.

4

5

9

Over 20% of the companies in our study use

Net Promoter Score as a metric of business

success, and thus at a leadership level

understand the importance of customer

satisfaction in driving growth. Yet these same

companies also often fail to undertake simple

Social activities that would boost customer

satisfaction and loyalty, such as rapid response

to questions in Social, or connecting customers

to materials (such as a YouTube video or blog)

that make it easy to understand a complex B2B

piece of accounting software. Therefore the

average scores of 21% and 17% across Loyalty

and Advocacy are particularly low. This is

doubtless one of the reasons that our previous

research on Passion Brands has found that only

2% of positive brand experiences result in public

advocacy in Social channels.

Post purchase ‘bonding’ is a particularly

fruitful area for many companies, particularly

in high engagement categories. Most

companies have a cooling off period, so the

point of purchase isn’t final. More importantly,

post-purchase bonding with the vendor has

a substantial impact on long-term loyalty

and advocacy. There are many opportunities

for companies to improve this bonding, for

instance by soliciting feedback post purchase

(and responding to that feedback) or by

persuading customers to opt-in to Social

channels so they are kept informed on new

products, and develop a deeper relationship

with the business.

Social loyalty and advocacy are particularly neglected with average scores of 21% and 17% respectively.

6

See Bain’s work with Intuit as an example of post purchase product demystification http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/do-your-b2b-customers-promote-your-business.aspxhttp://www.slideshare.net/socialogilvy/socialogilvy-advocacy-studyjuly2013-1

B2B software

• Most companies are present, and active, in a wide range of the relevant channels. The most common failings in early stages of the journey are failing to use more visual Social channels. B2B marketers often seem to implicitly assume that attractive content which is easy to consume, while containing meaningful business insights, is not as relevant to B2B as it is to B2C.

• Active companies are, throughout the journey, reaching out to places where they might find new customers such as independent forums (which B2B buyers value highly), and by using unbranded hashtags and other tactics that will increase visibility for people researching the category.

• Testimonials, ratings, reviews and other forms of customer endorsement are most commonly used on company websites. But, they rarely appear in Social channels such as Twitter, despite their acknowledged value in driving purchases.

• Lead generation tools such as invitations to webinars are occasionally used but they are rarely used to generate attendance at the higher value offline events. What starts in Social usually stays in Social.

B2B software is one of the more advanced categories in our research, doubtless reflecting its heritage as relatively early to using the internet as a core part of their business model.

As with the other categories the use of Social declines as customers go through the journey, leading to missed opportunities that close sales or cement loyalty with the brand. However, performance in the earlier parts of the journey are significantly better:

10

• Blogs are also underused as a way of delivering technical and practical information to buyers – on average scoring only 62%.

• While Google+ is now routinely used, it is often not integrated well with the broader Google ecosystem by brands. So for instance, if a brand does a public Google Hangout it often doesn’t effectively link to it from its other Social properties, so limiting its discovery in search.

When looked at through the lense of channels, the major category themes are:

• The average score for use of LinkedIn is 75%, it’s substantially higher than the Forum score of 33%. Whilst LinkedIn has an impressive reach, B2B surveys typically show that forums are used more.

• Facebook is inconsistently used for marketing, despite its extremely high audience penetration, with just 61% of Benchmark tactics used. The stereotype that B2B buyers don’t use Facebook isn’t helpful to marketers, not least because of the amount of personal time they spend on the platform.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

PurchaseEvaluationShortlistInvestigateIdentify ProblemLead Back

Average benchmark score

%

11

12

Travel

and restaurants. While this level of Social integration is not necessarily complex, no travel brand that we examined uses it.

• All brands examined respond to questions in Social, though more consistently through Twitter than other channels. While many brands also consistently re-tweet positive customer feedback, they often do not re-share positive endorsements that occur in other Social channels.

The travel industry’s business model of fixed perishable inventory, often sold through intermediaries with significant levels of commission. This means that there is a premium on driving direct bookings and fostering loyalty within regular travellers. However, Social’s use often fails to reflect this.

The average Social Value Benchmark score declines from over 70% at the inspirational stage of the customer journey; it then drops to less than 40% at the point of purchase, dropping further to less than 20% once people are experiencing the products. Therefore there are many missed opportunities to close sales or cement loyalty.

• Brand content early on in the customer journey provides many opportunities to engage potential customers. But once somebody expresses an interest in a brand’s content it is relatively rare for a company to encourage them to subscribe to an appropriate Social channel so that they are engaged with follow up messaging.

• Social logins allow brands to provide personalised travel information, as other companies outside the Benchmark evaluation do. For instance, Tripadvisor allows users to see which cities their Facebook friends have been to, what they did there and to see how highly they rated sights, hotels

are typically poorly integrated, despite the high value that hotels and airlines can drive through channel shift. For instance, many YouTube channels don’t link to the parent website, to other Social channels or even encourage the user to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Equally websites often miss opportunities to deepen relationships through driving customers to Social channels.

• Social is rarely integrated into loyalty programmes, so missing an opportunity to personalise and contextualise information.

• There appear to be very few post purchase attempts to drive advocacy through Social, again surprising given the role of friends and family in choosing destinations, hotels and airlines.

• Travel brands are also rarely using the informal reviews such as testimonials on their non-Twitter Social channels, despite the role that reviews play in planning trips. Ratings and reviews are inconsistently used, even though half of travellers use them on the route to travel purchases.

• Websites that pull feeds of reviews from Tripadvisor, for example always draw the text of reviews only, rather than pictures that would bring these reviews to life.

• The typical customer experience in travel is to search on, and use, multiple devices throughout the journey, for instance dreaming about destinations when looking at Social content on mobile, researching in more depth, and buying, on desktop and tablets, and then travelling with mobile devices. However, despite this channel and device hopping, websites and Social

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

SharingExperiencingPurchasePlanningDreaming

Average benchmark score

%

13

14

FMCG - Beverages

Social holds out the opportunity for FMCG to build stronger, and direct, relationships with its consumers that weren’t possible in the past. However, while there is some limited evidence of programmes to promote loyalty, this opportunity is largely unexploited.

FMCG scores substantially better on average at the Awareness (49%) and Consideration (24%) stages of the customer journey than elsewhere, reflecting the category’s traditional emphasis on brand advertising. This is mainly driven by the brand’s creating and deploying interesting pieces of content for a mass consumer audience, and then having a two-way dialogue with their consumers.

The major missed opportunities in the early part of the journey are to engage consumers more deeply. While this was difficult in traditional brand advertising, brands in FMCG are often, implicitly, refusing to engage consumers more deeply, even when consumers are eager for this engagement. For instance, ratings and reviews are rarely seen anywhere in Social channels, despite their role in providing Social proof that a brand is high quality. Equally while brands have a legitimate role in wider public discussion, for instance a cold drink could enter discussions on hot weather, most of them are restricted to broadcasting their views, rather than seeking out relevant conversations to join, such as by using unbranded hashtags that would surface their content in appropriate locations.

15

a more respectable (though still low) 20%. However, there are still very large missed opportunities at this stage: for instance, through better integration of packaging with Social channels.

Advocacy programmes are weak though, with an average score of 11%. Given the value of repeat purchases and habit forming in FMCG, this is a substantial missed opportunity. Simple tactics such as re-posting positive customer experiences and asking customers to be advocates are largely neglected.

At the point of purchase this challenge becomes most evident. While online shopping for FMCG brands is still only relatively small at 5-6% of UK groceries, we would expect to see most brands experimenting with it, not least because of the ability to drive sampling and repeat purchases. However, when we examined FMCG brands, there was virtually no experimentation going on.

The post purchase picture is brighter. Most brands have some additional level of resources for existing customers on sourcing information for example, so the average loyalty score is

0

10

20

30

40

50

AdvocacyLoyaltyPurchaseConsiderationAwareness

Average benchmark score

6http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/06/supermarkets-open-dark-stores-online-food-shopping-expands

%

16

B2B logistics

Five major themes are apparent across the category

• In the early stages of the journey, activity is largely broadcast brand advertising. Even on this, narrow role, most companies fail to undertake simple actions that would better surface their content to potential customers. For instance, unbranded hashtags that make them more visible in search to people who are searching for information in the category.

• As customers start to investigate potential suppliers, logistics providers are failing to provide them with the information that they need. Tactics that involve providing practical information for potential customers, such as a regularly updated blog or use of forums, are largely neglected. Brands often fail to take advantage of the most basic opportunities such as answering customer questions on their Social channels. Very few reach out on forums or Twitter where potential customers are asking unbranded questions.

B2B clients often tell us that their biggest business challenge is getting visibility for their experts before a potential client draws up the shortlist for a project, both online and offline. Hence we would expect prioritisation of a) participation where customers are, and b) conversion of these conversations through lead generation tools such as invitations to webinars or events.

However, B2B logistics companies perform poorly in Social, across the whole of the customer journey. As in other categories the use of Social declines as customers go through the journey, leading to missed opportunities to close sales or cement loyalty:

• Even in the early stages of the journey, companies are executing less than 30% of the available Social tactics on average.

• Over the journey stages, from the point of Purchase to Cross-selling and deepening Loyalty, less than 15% of opportunities are used.

• Customer care through Social is increasingly common, and appropriately fast. This responds to an important customer need for reassurance and problem resolution. However, its execution is inconsistent. For instance, one company’s Twitter feed has a prominent picture visible to customers of a badly delivered parcel. While the service problem is real, the visibility has been driven by the corporate brand itself re-posting the picture. The customer care feed is thus inadvertently damaging its own brand.

• Reviews and customer testimonials are only used inconsistently to close the deal around the point of purchase and cement loyalty. When testimonials are used they are overwhelmingly on corporate websites and rarely extend to Social, despite the simple opportunities available, such as re-tweeting positive customer feedback.

• From purchase onwards there are many missed opportunities to cross sell products and deepen customer loyalty: for instance, logistics companies do relatively little to encourage Social sharing. Social sharing by customers isn’t just valuable as a source of advocacy. It is also valuable in driving loyalty by encouraging customers to make a visible public commitment to brands, making them less likely to churn later.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

LoyaltyCross-SellConversionPreferenceConsideration

Average benchmark score

%

17

18

Automotive

• Sharing functionality is restricted to Social channels - despite the key role of peer discussions in purchasing. Most car manufacturers have a configuration tool on their website to find out the cost of a car with personalised extras, but few of them make it easy to share this. Given the role of friends and family in influencing car decisions this is a significant, and easy to fix, opportunity.

• Lead generation, at the basic level of booking test drives, is largely unused, despite its high value.

• There is almost no attempt by brands to engage in external discussions and communities, despite their role informing customers who are looking for practical information.

• Manufacturers fail to respond to many questions in Social, even though many of these are either existing or potential customers. Manufacturers also often make it

Automotive companies miss opportunities to drive Total Customer Value through loyalty, advocacy and collaboration with customers. Whilst brands use Social creatively to convey the value of their cars, this tactic is much stronger at early stages of the customer journey with an average score of 70% at the Consideration stage, followed by a steep decline through purchase to loyalty and advocacy.

However, despite the high value of engaging customers up to and beyond purchase, there are many missed opportunities in automotive:

• Brand websites are usually somewhat clinical. This means that many of the key research objectives of customers, such as reviews, can only be found on external sites, beyond brand influence.

• Dealers are often poorly integrated, even though the vast majority of car purchases happen at a dealer. For instance, simply finding a dealer can be quite a complex experience.

19

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

RenewMaintainPurchaseSelectExploreConsider

Average benchmark score

• Post purchase, manufacturers generally provide significant amounts of information to their customers. But very little attempt is made to instil owner pride or provide tailored experiences. Manufacturer CRM data, and Social graph data, are hardly ever used to provide any sort of contextualised experience, even as simple as offering family cars to people who have already purchased a family car.

hard to contact them through their website, so discouraging questions from potential and actual customers.

• Customer Service information videos, FAQs, Blogs and other ways of getting product updates and useful information out to owners are neglected, making it hard for many owners to self serve. Given the value of loyalty and advocacy in this market, this is a major missed opportunity.

7http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/research-studies/digital-drives-auto-shopping.html

%

20

The Social Value Benchmark research methodology

loyalty and advocacy. Customer journeys are used to ensure that the entire approach is rooted in the Total Customer Value components of Transaction, Loyalty, Advocacy and Collaboration. For each customer journey stage, one or more roles of Social are defined. And for each role of Social a number of questions are defined.

the company, so there is a relationship across the full customer journey. B2C journeys are significantly more diverse.

For instance, in B2B software the first stage of the customer journey was a ‘lean back’ stage where customers are not actively looking for information, but instead relatively passively consuming information from peers and industry experts.

With the exception of B2B accounting software, all customer journeys went past the point of Transaction to judge Social’s role in driving Loyalty, Advocacy and Collaboration. The relatively small number of collaboration programmes led us to report them under Advocacy and Loyalty, as appropriate.

Our research used expert insight from Ogilvy’s Social community, client and category understanding from Ogilvy client teams, Ogilvy clients and external partners. We undertook a five-stage process, fully documented and shared with our clients.

This research methodology aims to measure whether visible Social programmes drive sales,

1. Defining the customer journey

All Ogilvy clients already have a well defined customer journey, used as the basis for planning Customer Engagement programmes for our clients. Choices at this stage were to define the ambition of the customer journey (e.g. the full journey or just the focus for Ogilvy’s current work?), markets (global, local or a combination) and target customer personas. For instance in the B2B accounting category we focused on a persona of younger business owners, typically relatively recent startups. This choice of customer personas then influenced the competitor set chosen.

Customer journey stages are relatively similar within the B2B categories, in that the target customers are typically buying directly from

21

For instance, in B2B software’s ‘lean-back’ stage, one role of Social was defined as increasing awareness and a familiarity of the brand through increasing its prominence through social sharing. Other common Social roles included customer dialogue such as customer services, social proof, reviews and testimonials.

Social’s role can be dramatically different by both category and stage in the customer journey. To focus in on the role of Social we examined both successful client and competitor Social programmes in the category – and other successful Social programmes that address similar challenges in other categories.

To successfully answer a question such as ‘Is Social being successfully used to raise awareness’ we need data points that:

a) Are meaningful indicators of whether a brand has a coherent Social strategy. For instance, it is very unlikely that a brand with a strong Social strategy will be failing to use URL shorteners in Social, because they would be losing a significant source of data on their impact.

b) Are possible to judge from public data. We created scoring criteria for each data point, so that there was consistency within and between categories for the same data point.

However, to enable robust comparisons we excluded data points that:

a) Needed internal client data, such as sales or profits, to judge them, because we would not be able to compare across companies.

b) Were qualitative. While we believe that qualitative judgement is extremely important, it is not quantifiable and therefore we excluded qualitative judgements as much as possible.

To source these data points we examined companies both in the category, and in categories that faced similar challenges, as well as industry research on customer journeys.

2. Defining the role of Social for each stage in the customer journey

3. Defining questions to assess whether Social is being used well for each stage of the customer journey

22

and Social experts to ensure consistency. We also made amendments to research methodologies at this stage.

Each of the 4,087 data points contains:

• Category• Company• Cross-category customer journey stage (e.g.

‘Awareness’)• Category customer journey stage (e.g.

‘lean-back’)• Property (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)• Question (e.g. ‘Is the company using

Social graph to provide contextual recommendations?’)

• Score• Measurement scale• Notes.

At the end of this stage in the research we typically had, for each category:

• Five journey stages

• One role of Social per stage, justified and explained in more depth for researchers and clients

• 5-10 questions per journey stage, to assess whether Social was being used consistently to achieve business objectives

• 5-10 Social properties we would use to assess each of these questions

• 5-6 companies assessed per category.

On average we assessed each company on 151 questions, for a total of 4,087 questions assessed.

Each researcher was either an Ogilvy Social expert or planner on the relevant account. After being fully briefed on the research process, their research outputs were cross-checked by category

Category and client findings were cross-checked with experts and clients to ensure robustness – though given their close involvement through the process no major changes resulted at this stage.

The data is now available for analysis for Ogilvy clients as a database to interrogate.

4. The data gathered

4. Judging the questions

5. Analysis

23

How OgilvyOne can help you

• Map to the key engagement opportunities in their customer journey

• Provide visibility of what competitors are doing

• And companies with similar challenges in other categories

• We then help clients scope these out in depth to create a Social strategy and programme for the future that’s rooted in their business, and credible to C-suite stakeholders.

The full list examined is: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slideshare, forums, YouTube, shortened URLs, Social logins, website, social lead generation, search.

OgilvyOne’s Social Value Navigator™ can help you make sense of whether your Social is delivering, and what Social you should, and should not, be doing.

We start by rooting our analysis in clients business objectives, target audiences and the customer journey that goes alongside them, as part of our broader Customer Engagement planning process.

We then undertake a Social Value mapping process scoping potential Social activities that -

Properties examined

We do not believe that companies should have a channel based approach. However, for the purpose of analysis every question was categorised either with a channel or under another grouping such as Shortened URLs, to enable clearer cross-category analysis.

Categories, companies and journey stages assessed

Category Companies Normalised journey stages

B2B financial software Sage, Xero, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Awareness, Consideration, Purchase

Premium automotive Landrover, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Mercedes Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, Advocacy

B2B logistics UPS, DHL, Parcelforce, TNT, Fedex, DPD Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, Advocacy

Travel - hotels, airlines, aggregators British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Expedia, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Marriott

Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, Advocacy

FMCG - beverages Nescafe Gold Blend, Coca Cola, Tetley, Douwe Egberts, PG Tips

Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, Advocacy

24

FAQs

Is the quality of content in Social

assessed here?

A comprehensive assessment of content quality in Social requires a full Social Analytics and Social Content Strategy, so is beyond the remit of this research.

However, a number of questions in the research assess proxies for quality, such as growth of audiences in Social channels, clicks on links (where data is public) and other forms of audience engagement. While these are approximate, in many cases very low levels of interaction occur, indicating that the content is not engaging its audience.

Does this assess internal organisation or

resourcing of Social?

No, but this is something we benchmark with clients when we undertake the Social Value Navigator process.

Where are the full questions?

A number of the questions have been published, or referenced, in this research report. The full set of questions is available to Ogilvy clients.

Does this assess overall effectiveness of Social

strategies?

Yes and no.

Yes - because it assesses whether companies reach the Social Value Benchmark. This allows us to understand if the company is appropriately using Social across the customer journey.

No - because a full Social strategy needs to integrate with the individual company’s broader business and marketing strategies. We do this for clients through Social Value Navigator - an in-depth process for creating Social strategies that drive business results.

Does this assess qualitative delivery of Social?

No.

Qualitative assessments are important, but are hard to do without both in-depth analysis of the company and its business strategy. The Social Value Benchmark though, by judging the essential tactics that are needed for each stage of the customer journey, allows us to understand whether a company has the infrastructure in place to drive results.

25

Is this global research?

Each category has been examined from the point of view of a UK customer. However, in many cases companies either direct UK customers to global Social channels or do not have UK channels. In these cases, where appropriate, global channels have been scored.

Acknowledgements

Authors: Rob Blackie & Emily Allen

Editor: Ann Higgins

This research required a vast amount of wisdom from Ogilvy colleagues and clients, including: Alexandra von Puttkamer, Anders Kinberg, Andrew Lopez, Ann Higgins, Annette King, Anya King, Brian Jensen, Caolan Hunter, Clare Lawson, Donald Pirie, Emily Allen, Gareth Richards, Gosha Khuchua, Irfan Kamal, James Myers, James Whatley, Jo Coombs, Joana Chau, Jonathan Gapper, Jonathan Nguyen, Joseph Grigg, Keshan Bolaky, Leo Ryan, Marcus de Pfeiffer Key, Margherita Tuvo, Marshall Manson,Matt Holt, Mel Stanley, Neil Hawke, Patou Nuytemans, Rachel Armstrong-Jones, Rob Bartlett, Sam Williams-Thomas, Shailen Joshi, Simon Luff, Steve Jenkins, Tara Davanzati, Thomas Crampton.

If you would like more information on how OgilvyOne can help you, please contact Tracey Barber, New Business & Marketing Director OgilvyOne on +44 (0)20 7566 7407, or tweet us @ogilvyone or @robblackie_oo