by Zontee Hou

4 Insights from Meltwater Social Summit: A Cross-Industry Survey of Marketers

At the Meltwater Social Summit in NYC earlier this summer, I had the pleasure of presenting the second day keynote, entitled: Future-Proof Your Social Media Strategy Through Smart Measurement. During this interactive session, I surveyed the ~200 marketers in the room, who came from every industry, on some of the activities that they are currently doing (and not doing). Here are a couple of takeaways and what it means for us as an industry.

Only about a quarter of marketers have documented customer journey for their target audiences

It may surprise you, but in 2019, many marketers don’t have strong frameworks for understanding the needs, behaviors, and barriers of their ideal customers. While many may have personas, bringing those personas to life (so that they are useful for content planning purposes) with a customer journey is absolutely essential.

If you’re looking for a place to get started, I highly recommend Avinash Kaushik’s tried and true See/Think/Do/Care model as a manageable place to start mapping key insights.

Yes, testimonials are important, but expert voices are important too

When asked which voices matter most to their customers, the marketers in the room overwhelmingly felt that the most important resources for their customers were “customers like them.” Perhaps this is unsurprising, since 61% of respondents to Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer indicated that they trust “a person like them.”

However, the Trust Barometer also indicated that 63% trust academic experts and 65% trust industry experts. In our work, we always recommend that businesses balance ethos (credibility, expertise, and authority) with pathos (emotional resonance). By having BOTH testimonials that indicate that your business understands your customers’ plights AND expert explanations that make you seem more credible, you will foster trust.

By having BOTH testimonials that indicate that your business understands your customers' plights AND expert explanations that make you seem more credible, you will foster trust. Share on X

Engagement reigns, but should it?

In this open-ended poll, the most common response to the question of “what are the key metrics that you measure today?” were:

Engagement
Reach
Impressions

While these numbers are easily accessible, they often don’t tell us a highly actionable story about our customers and their behaviors. Where you can drive your customers to higher value content (e.g. blog posts, articles, forums, videos), you should. This will allow you to measure things like time-on-site, click-paths, length of videos watched, scroll-depth, and use tools like heat maps to better understand the intent of your audience, not just their basic consumption.

Production is the main challenge for most marketers

ClearVoice released research earlier this year, in which they asked marketers the open-ended question, “What’s your biggest challenge with content?” Most of the responses, like the responses below focused on production issues, such as time, resources, and content quality. Similarly, the crowd at the Meltwater Social Summit gave similar responses:

With that in mind, I want to challenge marketers to think more critically about what content takes the shortest amount of time of them to produce with the highest results. If you’re not seeing leads being driven from ebooks, but from videos, shouldn’t you consider the ROI on ebooks and redirect those resources?

Your marketing team should also invest in getting good at efficient production, whether that’s outsourcing, implementing agile marketing practices, or investing in project management.