0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar, how to use analytics to prove the impact of B2B social. As we know, marketing leaders expect social media teams to connect their efforts to real business impact, lead generation and revenue. But proving the value of organic social isn't always straightforward. That's why we bought in the experts from Aviva and Paycor to break it down. And when I say these guys know their stuff, they really do. So I'm really excited for this panel. This they're going to share actionable tips on tracking the right metrics for B2B, making sense of social data and tying organic social to revenue. So I'm Alina Dalal. I am the content marketing manager here at Oktopost and I will be your host today. We love to hear from you. So drop your questions in the Q and A and we'll cover them at the end. And don't worry, every single person will get a recording of the webinar afterwards. So let's kick off with some introductions. Maybe Matt and Madeline, can you share a little bit about yourself, your role and one of your biggest challenges in measuring B2B social media. Matt, I'm going to start with you.
1:03
Matt Churchill
Great, thank you so much. Super excited to be here for the session today. So, yeah. Hi, I'm Matt. I run the global social team at a technology company called Aviva. We're a leader in industrial software that drives responsible use of the world's resources. We're a richly matrixed organization with many complex but I think, and we think fascinating stories to tell. So the team and I work with stakeholders for business to try and do that and to do so in a way that will resonate with our target audiences online. And that is the core of the challenge that we face. We've got lots of complex stories, so determining which of those is driving activity at scale and then segmenting them is really tricky from a measurement perspective. So there's so many different touch points across comms. Social play is just a small part of that. So kind of getting to the central pillar of how social impacts that overcomes ecosystem is one of our big challenges.
2:04
Madeleine Dudas
Amazing.
2:04
Alina Dallal
Well, thank you for joining us. I'm so excited to have you here. And Maddie, how about you?
2:09
Madeleine Dudas
Thanks Selena. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. I'm Maddie and I oversee organic social media, social selling, advocacy and support sponsorship activations at Paycor. We are a human capital management company that helps businesses of all sizes manage their people operations starting from recruiting all the way to retirement. What really sets Paycor apart is our Focus on leaders. Our software is built to help leaders streamline operations so they can spend more time on what matters most, AKA their people. Now for one of our biggest challenges in measuring B2B social media, it's trying to tie our efforts directly to revenue and then getting buy in from others. While we can track things like website traffic, engagement, and even lead generation, it can be tricky to definitively prove how these metrics translate into real business results. And as social media continues to become more popular in the buying journey, we regularly evaluate more ways to track and paint a clearer picture of the buyer journey from social media to purchase. It's an evolving process, but we are making progress and that's why I am really excited to share it with you all.
3:25
Alina Dallal
I'm so excited to hear it because I know we're doing a lot at paycore. So thank you both for joining me. We're gonna get started with the first question. Matt, I'm gonna turn to you. So as we know, B2B social media is different from B2B social. Of course we still look at followers, likes and comments, but in B2B we take it that one step further. So my first question for you is what metrics are crucial for every B2B social media manager to track?
3:52
Matt Churchill
Thank you. Yeah, it's great. It's a great question because every community and every community member's need state is different. So there's no like for like comparison. But the crucial aspect is to make sure that you're measuring numbers, activities that are mapping back to your comms and your business objectives. So for example, if you're looking to measure how much activity there is around your content to kind of indicate how lively your community is, you want to be looking at engagement rate. There's things obviously like link clicks, click through rates on individual pieces of content and then hopefully that might lead to conversions further down the line that might be a sale or it might be a form fill. You also want to be considering Reach, but Reach has got all sorts of caveats around it. So you know, it's essentially rented ground in social. So it's helpful, but it's not the be all and end all. We know that LinkedIn's big play is video, so you need to be thinking about if that's a particularly strong content play for you. Look at watch time and what does that tell you in terms of when folks start to tail off and stop watching your video and do they kind of move on to the next thing? What can you infer from that in terms of the way that your video content structured, for example, and thinking again about the video piece because it's such a crucial part of any content strategy. When thinking about YouTube and how you're using that content, look at the performance of individual videos over time. So one thing you might want to do is to demonstrate the impact that social post has had on a particular video or a particular video series. And then you want to be looking at things like views and again, like clicks to the website. So those kind of core metrics kind of play into your broader strategy piece, but they also really tie down on a micro post by post level. Again, think about what their overall objectives are for each piece of content and how that maps back up to your overall objectives and the goals for, you know, being active in social. What's the social purpose? Those are kind of the core ones I think you should be considering as certainly a starting point.
6:08
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I think what you're saying is also really important. It's not just the metrics, but focus on the platforms that are big for B2B. So like you said, LinkedIn and they're big on video. So we need to measure the metrics that go with it. And of course for B2B, we also have things like website traffic lead generation, which I know we're going to get to later in this webinar. So for now, the next question I'd love to ask both of you is to talk specifics about your B2B strategies. So what are your top social media goals this year and how do they link to your overall, overall business goals? Matt, I'm going to start with you.
6:35
Matt Churchill
Cool, thank you. So we've essentially got four, four, four big pillars. So firstly, we're looking to drive social advocacy. Secondly, we're looking to give our communities more of what they want. Thirdly, we're looking to better support our regions. And then fourthly, we're looking to better support our execs. And I'll break those down. So from a social advocacy perspective, this really ties into our values as a company and it's a really core piece of our comm strategy. We use social as a way of communicating what a fantastic place we are to work. We talk about our culture and we want our advocates because a lot of them are kind of sales and marketing. So to have a presence that is credible in a way that they can use to build their own profile and hopefully kind of connect with folks who are interested in hearing from them. There's also kind of lots of other benefits in terms of that reach and that Kind of third party endorsement and halo aspect too. In terms of our communities. This is why we're in social right where I think as a community manager, as a content creator, you're intrinsically interested in what drives people to engage and share and be reactive to something. So what we're trying to do is to ensure that all the different types of community, so whether that is someone who's interested in one of our products, if it's a colleague, if it's a member of our alumni network, for example, they've got content, content that is generally useful to them and providing value to their online experience. So we're always looking to refine the types of content and the substance of that content. And again, we kind of look at measuring that through engagement. Our regions are super important to us and we're very, very aware that we're in a global business, we operate in a globalized world. So we've got to make sure that where we have the opportunity to do so, different voices within the company, different stories throughout our business are shared and they're done. So and I think it's really easy when you're sat in London or you're sat in Chicago or you're sat in Tel Aviv or whatever it might be that you become so kind of focused on your, your, your, your bubble. So one thing that we're super, super focused on is making sure that all these amazing stories from throughout business are told. And then finally the exec piece. In our world we don't kind of really deal with celebrity endorsement or anything like that. Back in the day, you know, I worked with a sneaker brand and we had a very famous musician and it was dead easy, really, really simple to create great content and share that our execs and our senior leadership, they're our celebrities. They're the folks whose profile we need to, to help amplify and build. So one of our big plays is to help them show up more regularly and with better content to connect with the folks who are interested in hearing from them and hopefully looking to interact with us as a business so that we can help solve their problems.
9:35
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. These are very important goals to have. Maddie, do you have similar ones or are you all slightly different?
9:41
Madeleine Dudas
Yeah, super similar. Building off of what Matt said, our social media strategy is deeply integrated with our over brand building and business objectives. And so this year we have three core goals. So the first is to establish paycor as the leading HCM or human capital management provider for business leaders. And second, we want to enhance our brand awareness and become the recognized thought leader in the HCM space. And then finally, we want to drive tangible business results such as revenue growth, lead generation, and then even building real relationships with potential customers, partners, clients, you know, employees, you name it. And we know we can achieve these results by showcasing our technology and expertise. We can share valuable insights and then also this will help to build stronger relationships with our clients, partners and employees. And this approach directly supports our overall business objectives by accelerating growth, strengthening our market position, and even improving customer retention. And I really believe that a strong social media presence is essential for achieving any of our business goals or any business goals in general. And that's why we are dedicated to continuously refining our strategy to maximize our impact. Because as you know it, you know, social media is the way and it only is continuing to get bigger and bigger.
11:24
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I want to champion what you're just saying because it is especially in the. In The Journey of B2B Buyer Social media is crucial along that journey. So with both of your goals in mind, what key metrics are you tracking to monitor your organic social performance? Matt, I'm going to start with you first.
11:43
Matt Churchill
Thank you. Yeah, so essentially we're looking at engagement awareness. Those are our two kind of big buckets. And there's a number of different metrics that fall into that because they fall in, because those two really kind of ladder up to those objectives that I just talked through. In terms of engagement, we're really looking at engagement rate and that's really critical for us because no post is the same as another post. You kind of bucket them. According to. This is a video promoting event. This is a static image talking about a webinar. This is a post that's sharing a charitable initiative with five images. We know that's always going to get great engagement. So you kind of have to bucket them accordingly to go, oh, how are they kind of comparing against each other? So that helps us to kind of refine the approach that we take to each of those types of posters. As we move forward, we're then looking at awareness. You know, if our content is being seen, we can then interpret that as meaning it's being amplified. And that in turn helps us to grow our communities. At the heart of it, we want to make sure that the right people are seeing the right content at the right time. It's marketing 101. But those two kind of metrics really help us determine if we're being successful. And awareness is not just reach, that is things like on Instagram, it's accounts engaged. If we see that we have had a sudden spike in impressions, but we've had a drop in the number of accounts that have engaged with our content. I want to know why that is and what are the circumstances around that. Is it because we've had one post that's performed particularly well? Is it because we've had some paid activity that has led to a migration of folks who have seen content to follow us, but they've not started to look at the content and engage with it, for example. So we kind of want to use those kinds of metrics to understand on a post level as well as a wider macro level, like what's really driving interactions here. We're not so kind of demand gen focused Aviva, with social, but we do track conversions and we do track traffic to.com because again it helps us understand is our content engaging and is it driving awareness. So understanding has a piece of social content that's been supported by some paid, that's also coincided with a newsletter. Has that led to a form fill is really important because it can demonstrate the impact that we've had within that and please forgive the jargon within the social ecosystem and we can then kind of go, oh yeah, we provided value here, how can we repeat that elsewhere? So those are kind of the key ones that we're looking to to track. But again, you've got to think about if your focus is purely demand gen and you're not sort of bothered about reaching, I don't know, half a million people a month, how are you kind of honing in and being super sharp on identifying what those metrics are and how you're driving them?
14:47
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And Maddie, how about you, is it similar or are you tracking different things?
14:51
Madeleine Dudas
Definitely similar. I would say we definitely have a little more of a focus on demand gen, but then we also are focusing on advocacy efforts and brand awareness. So we track several different metric and this includes website traffic from social channels which we monitor using UTM parameters to understand the source of our traffic. And then we also use lead generation metrics such as like Matt mentioned form fills and downloads to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns. And then we're able to tie this back down to track down the funnel impact to sales, appointments, book lines and even pipeline. And we also look at qualitative data though, such engagement rates, including things like likes, shares, impressions and these are key indicators of audience interest and then content performance. And we use social listening data which includes, you know, brand mentions and sentiment analysis which really helps us gauge what the public perception is of Paycor and Finally, we, I would say we track advocacy metrics that include shares, reach, engagement and bookings. This helps us kind of get a good scope of our impact of our advocacy program, which we'll get more into later on, which I am super excited about because I love our advocacy program and I truly think advocacy is going to be such like an important thing when it comes to organic social.
16:29
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. So first of all, thank you both for sharing your goals and the metrics we're using to track because each business is different and each business's marketing teams have different goals from each other. So the metrics you look at are slightly different between every organization. But as we can see in B2B they're very, very, they're still similar and they're still tracking things on website traffic and conversions and lead gen. So the next question I want to ask you both is how often do you review your analytics and create reports and who do you share these reports with? Maddie, I'm going to start with you first this time.
17:01
Madeleine Dudas
Thanks, Selena. So we have a fairly structured approach for reviewing our analytics and creating reports. Personally, I conduct a weekly check for a quick overview of performance just to see if there's anything that is really standing out that we want to flag, maybe to some of the other people on the team. And then monthly I do an in depth analysis and generate a detailed, a few different, detailed reports that I can then share with my manager, different marketer, and specifically to our content team. And this kind of helps us really kind of guide our future social posts to really understand what's performing well, what should we lean in on more. And a lot of times it is fairly similar month over month in terms of what's performing the best and what's not. But then, you know, just seeing this is just showing that, okay, this is still continuing to be successful. But then maybe one month is like a random wow. Then we can kind of go back and understand, you know, why this was different. Why did Facebook outperform LinkedIn, which is our, you know, biggest platform this month or something? Or, you know, this posted really well. What was it tied back to things of that nature. So with the content team, we work very closely and quarterly we share a strategic overview to our leaders and this is where we can really share successes, make any adjustments or recommendations and we can just really show the impact of social media in addition for building brand and then driving demand.
18:43
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so important as well to take it to leadership and show them what you're doing and show them the Metrics that they want to see as well, and keeping the communication between your team so you can consistently use analytics to inform your content and make it even better. Which I know, again, we're going to touch on in a minute, but Matt, how about you?
19:00
Matt Churchill
Yeah, super, super similar to Maddie. Now I'm looking at the data daily because I'm a bit of a geek and I love seeing the impact that our content has has made. So like, I love feeding little tidbits back. If we see a post that's performing well and going, hi team, I've just spotted this. We want to like, let's dig into this and find out why. But formally we kind of report on a monthly basis and again, it's a platform by platform, content by content piece. We're really looking at kind of what's that overall performance, but we're always reviewing to try and find other interesting and useful metrics to demonstrate our impact. So we've had some really good success with LinkedIn newsletters, for example, and they've just started rolling out a couple of new metrics around email sends and open rates. That's really cool for us because we can then start to understand what proportion of our audience is using the LinkedIn newsletters on LinkedIn or are they choosing to use it via email? And does that impact how we craft the newsletters? For example, is there a certain way that we need to structure them? I don't know the answer to that, but hopefully we'll find out in a few months. And in terms of kind of feeding that back, same as Maddie, really, it goes through our comms function. It goes to stakeholders who have contributed content and their stories. We share it with our content team as well so they can start to feed in any little recommendations or findings. We're all about experimenting within our social team. We're lucky, we're super empowered to go and try stuff. So we do lots of GEO experiments we're trying to look at. Typically you do AB testing. We do A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing because we want to find out if we do a post that is published at the same time in a bunch of different time zones, how does that perform? Does it mean that one community is more active than another? Does the timing of a particular post in a particular language have an impact on how it performs? So we do lots of kind of ad hoc experiments, ad hoc testing and ad hoc reporting too, as well as that feeding back on campaigns and individual kind of activations too.
21:11
Alina Dallal
Thank you for sharing. I think it's so Important, as you said, you're not going to know the answers now, but in a few months, for example, with the LinkedIn newsletters, you're going to see the results. So these things are, they take time and month over month. As you're saying that you report, you'll slowly, slowly see the results. I want to move to the next question because I think a lot of social media marketers can relate to this. Social media metrics can be very overwhelming. So how are you making sense of the data and how do you use the data to shape your strategy? I know we touched on this a little bit, but I kind of want to dedicate a session to it, a question to it so that we can dive into it. Maddie, I'm going to start with you first.
21:44
Madeleine Dudas
Right, Yeah, I love this question. You know, social media metrics can be extremely overwhelming, especially when there are so many different things you can look at, so many different ways you can look at data and infer what it means. And so from trial and error, for me, what I found to be the most important data and what we focus on are key metrics that directly align with our business goals and then as well as our overall content strategy. And I utilize Oktopost Analytics Dashboard a lot to visualize this data just because I'm a visual person and this helps make it easier to identify trends and patterns. We also prioritize the metrics that demonstrate ROI to ensure that we're focusing on the most impactful activities. And this data significantly shapes our social strategy year over year. Because every year, like I mentioned before, I'm evaluating. It doesn't change too much, but we're just kind of refreshing it to make sure we're still on trend and we're able to optimize our content based on this performance data that we're seeing. We can adjust our targeting and messaging to reach the right audiences and then we can also identify those high performing platforms and content formats to maximize our reach and engagement. And finally, we also use a lot of this data to really refine our employee advocacy strategy. That way we can ensure usage and that it still remaining impactful because as I mentioned, employee advocacy is going to be the way of social media marketing. I have no doubt about that.
23:30
Alina Dallal
How about you? Do you have similar things that you see or is this or something different?
23:34
Matt Churchill
Yeah, it's like Maddie said, it's so tricky. There's so much data, so much data. But the key is keeping things simple. I worked for 16, 17 years, agency side and moving, brand side. I've learned that less is more in terms of communicating impact. Don't just report on a number for the sake of doing it in social. I think we're in a really privileged position. Don't tell your marketing colleagues. But because we're in the middle of the business, so we have this amazing contextual awareness of what's driving engagement, what's happening in two months down the line. So we can understand, oh, we're going to have a bit of a lull in activity here. We've not got any news coming up. What can we do to kind of look at impacting engagement and reaching all those other good things ahead of time? So for example, we'll use engagement to understand what content formats work and try and guide stakeholders how they can optimize ahead of time. We're present at lots of events. So for example, we found that pre content that signposts hey, we're going to be at XYZ event doesn't really drive that much attention. What works is those post event summaries or even those the during event pieces saying hey, we're at booth xyz. Here's a photo of the team Bosh. Lovely selfie. So we advise colleagues to really kind of try and focus on making those assets as great as they can be. The signposting piece is important, but we kind of know that it's not going to drive big numbers. So we kind of know that actually it's a very functional piece of content. Don't expect the world from it. And that really helps us in terms of trying to get the balance right in terms of that type of content and how we're going to try to shape how we can generate engagement at specific moments in time, whether that's at an event or a product release or whatever it might be.
25:35
Alina Dallal
That's a really interesting real life example that you're giving and I completely agree with what you're saying about keeping it simple because it can be be really overwhelming. But once you really understand and you can drill down into those simple key metrics, it really is almost like your secret like tool to understanding what works. We can see what works and what's not working. And something I'd also add here is just content like taking in like seasonal things. So for example, if it's the summer and your advocates are sharing less, it's not. It's just remember it's not down to you, it's the summer, people are taking time off. Just little things. Maybe employer branding campaigns work better in Q4 than Q1. It depends on different businesses and how you see it. But it's also to take into account when you're looking at your social strategy and the results. Matt, I'm going to stay with you. I have a question for you. So we mentioned earlier about building your community online and we know that as marketers, half our efforts go towards building an engaged community. But also in B2B social, we also need to drive website traffic for lead conversion. So how are you balancing both of these goals?
26:37
Matt Churchill
Yeah, again, it's really tricky. I feel like we're repeating there's a lot of complexity here. And again, like, don't tell your marketing colleagues, but social is actually quite difficult. Essentially, you're tackling two different need states, possibly three. Even so, with engagement, you're looking at deep, long lasting relationship building that may lead to a transaction. The website traffic piece is assuming that you've got someone who's looking to connect, so that's obtaining information or going through to sales, for example. So it means you've got to be aware of the objectives of your content before you're posting. Always have like at the back of mind, like, why am I putting this piece of content on the Internet? What's the objective? So what you might find is that you're posting one type of content more for one particular goal. Is that driving value to the business? That's the question you've always got to have. And if you find the answer is no, you're going to be driving the opposite result of what you're aiming for. So try and readdress that. And again, like thinking more, thinking broadly again, platforms like YouTube and thinking about how that can drive SEO, there's lots of other metrics that all of a sudden become really relevant or potentially useful. If you're looking at driving traffic. So you could go down like super, super deep, dark number filled rabbit holes with these things. So again, the trick is really trying to keep your list of metrics finite. So as we've said, like you, you don't become overwhelmed. And like Maddie's hit the nail on the head, it's so overwhelming. It can be. You can sit there, I do words and creative. I'm not a numbers person at all. Maths, not interested at all. Give me a well structured spreadsheet that someone else has built that I can just plug stuff into. Great. Having done this for 15, 17, 18, 19 years. Wow. I've now got a few things that I can kind of use to build my own spreadsheets, which is great. Keep it simple, keep simple. Don't become overwhelmed.
28:34
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. You're saying it's tricky and it's interesting to hear because I know it's a lot, it's a big dilemma. I have a lot with a lot of B2B marketers and social media marketers about how do we find this balance? How do we do both if both of them are our goals? So yeah, we've had a lot of conversations and actually my team at Oktopost put together this research and they found that on the weekends there's actually two times more engagement for community building building posts. And when looking at the days of the week of what day of the week drove the most website traffic, we actually found that Wednesdays were the day that people were clicking more. So it's really interesting. It was an analysis of over 9,000 posts from B2B LinkedIn, B2B LinkedIn posts for brands. So I can also send that in the follow up if anyone's interested to see it. But as you're saying, it's very tricky to find this balance. So the next question I have, Maddie, I'm going to turn to you. How are you linking your social media efforts to revenue?
29:27
Madeleine Dudas
Thanks, Lena. Yeah, great question. And I think this is really important because a lot of times when we think of social media we just think of, you know, the brand building piece of it. And you know, I think sometimes it's harder to get that buy in from other people who aren't necessarily marketers or they're not touching social media. You know, if I'm talking to our cfo, how am I supposed to tell him that, you know, this people of Paycorp post that, you know, got 700 likes, which it didn't. I would love that. But it didn't. But, you know, is actually attributing to real business results. And so that's why I think it's so important to tie back to what are our overall business and company goals to really establish, like how can I make an impact with using social media? And I think too it gives you an opportunity to be creative. So a few ways that we're doing this. So we are meticulously tracking leads generated through social media campaigns and this allows us to see which platforms and content are most effective in attracting potential customers. It also, as I mentioned previously too, helps us to determine what type of content that we should be pushing out more. And then we also use a combination of Salesforce, Google Analytics and our CRM data to attribute revenue to specific social media activities, whether it be likes, comments, shares, etc. And this really helps us understand the customer journey and how long it's going to take them before they are, you know, booking those meetings with us and having those conversations about purchasing. And then finally we leverage, as I mentioned earlier too, UTM parameters and to track that website traffic and conversions from social media. And this cannot help us really identify too, you know, what pages on our website are performing well because as I mentioned, one of our goals is to be establish ourselves as a thought leader in the HCM industry. And so we push out a lot of our own content, a lot of our own Thought Leader SEOs. And so by using UTMs, we can kind of see, you know, what's performing best, what do people want to see more of and then tying that back into, you know, what's going on in the bigger picture of, you know, what's timely right now, you know, we are getting into tax season and stuff, so W2s and whatnot, you know, those might be some things that would be of relevance for our audiences. And then I think too just, you know, by combining these methods, you know, we're, we're really effectively measuring the impact of social media from our bottom line.
32:20
Alina Dallal
Amazing. That was million dollar question one I wanted to ask you. And now I have Million dollar question 2. How are you now using this data to prove the value of organic B2B social media to your leadership team?
32:33
Madeleine Dudas
Yeah, and this is kind of what I was saying. It can be tricky, especially when you have someone who's super data or numbers driven and sometimes social media isn't that numbers driven. But proving the value of organic B2B social media efforts to our leadership is so crucial. So we kind of use a multifaceted approach. We present our data in a clear and concise manner, both monthly and quarterly, as I mentioned. And this ensures that our leadership team has a consistent understanding of our social media performance and that we're kind of keeping it top of mind. We emphasize metrics that directly demonstrate ROI just because we know that's what is important to them. And we also highlight compelling success stories or any other success case studies that can help us to illustrate how our social media activities have led to tangible business outcomes. We connect our social media performance to paycor's overall business objectives that are set annually. And this really helps us to demonstrate how social media contributes to the overall company's success. And of course, finally, we leverage Oktopost is, you know, it's a hard word to add the S on sorry, but we use that reporting capabilities to really provide visual evidence of our social media impact. So things like charts, graphs and other visuals that can kind of make the data a little bit more digestible and impactful because, you know, while, you know, our CFO might be super numbers driven, our chro might, you know, be more of a visual person. So it might help to be able to put some of that stuff onto a graph or a chart. And so by consistently presenting data in this way, we've been able to effectively demonstrate the value of organic B2B social media to our leadership. And that's why we've been able to consistently secure ongoing support for our initiatives.
34:45
Alina Dallal
Amazing. It's so amazing to hear that you've been able to do this and you were able to show that social is impacting the bottom line because we know as social media marketers that it is having an impact and it can be tricky to prove it, but it's not impossible. And as I was saying, that you are doing it and presenting the data in a way that they'll understand and that they'll digest. Depends on what, depending on what their preferences are is also really, really crucial in this journey. So it's incredible to hear that. So congratulations first of all.
35:11
Madeleine Dudas
Thank you.
35:13
Alina Dallal
Stay with me. I have one more question directly to you. I know you spoke earlier about your employee advocacy program and how you're using analytics to keep it going. So my next question for you is how do you use social analytics to continue to drive your advocacy adoption?
35:28
Madeleine Dudas
Yeah, so I really love this question. As I mentioned, I'm super passionate about advocacy. I recently saw some data that was B2B buyers will. 20% of B2B buyers will make their buying decision their shortlist based off of social media. And as I've said over and over again, I know this number is only going to continue to grow because it's grown since last year and the previous year. But yeah, so I kind of got this inspiration from Oktopost with you know, the advocate network that's within Oktopost and then you know, the leaderboards and how can we kind of marry the two and do something a little more personalized for paycor? So we've established a social advocacy network and this is a group of top performing sales professionals that are across North America. And the focus of this group is developing these individuals into online leaders and mentors within their own teams and their own regions. And participants who are in this network receive exclusive training, whether it be for personal branding, using Oktopost, you name it, whatever they want to know more of, we're willing to provide it. We also have perks and opportunities for them to really grow their personal brand on LinkedIn and just online in general. And being a part of this network really creates a sense of exclusivity and incentive for participation and to demonstrate the impact of employee advocacy. We're very transparent with our advocates. As I mentioned too earlier, with leadership, we share success stories to them. We're also sharing success stories of, you know, a closed deal that came from a advocate who had posted something. So we're sharing our successes weekly, monthly and we also utilize reporting to provide data driven insights tools like Oktopost. This is where they're essential to have as they effectively allow us to analyze employee advocacy performance as well as Salesforce because all of our sellers, you know, live in there with, in the day to day life. So it's really nice that you know, Oktopost has this great integration with Salesforce because it's kind of like a all in one shop for us and beyond just showing the impact. We actively work to drive adoption and engagement. So we provide the advocates with easy to share content, making it simple for them to participate. And this might be the most important part of driving adoption. But we also actively listen and incorporate their feedback not just through suggestions that they're making through the tool, but by having real live conversations with them, asking them what they would want to see as they are the professionals who are, you know, getting the leads and getting the prospects. So we want to know, you know, what does their audience like to use or see. And I like to throw around the world like or word social stalking. You know, if you are a 20 something girl like myself, you might know what this is in terms of being able to find someone on social media and basically find out their whole life story. Similarly, we can do that with our potential business accounts. You know, find out where they work, who they work with, find out what their pain points are and then be able to take that information and really cater your content to be exclusive to that. So if I'm someone who I'm a HR professional and I am using, you know, I work for a company and I have manual payroll still, you know, we want to hopefully you know, get you to buy in from us and make that manual, you know, automatic. So I'm going to start pushing out some content that might be catered to you and to your pain points. So I think doing those type of things really helps with just making showing the successes of people who are actually being able to have outcomes and finally too going on with engagement and buying Adopt, getting adoption from our employees at Paycorp we love to compete and we love to have fun. So we create fun competitions and incentives to further encourage participation and make advocacy a really rewarding experience. So by combining the strategic program of our advocacy network with clear communication, sharing data driven insights, and a focus on making advocacy easy and rewarding, we've been able to really successfully drive adoption and build a strong employee advocacy program at paycorp. And you know, it's still. Yeah, I think it's always like changing. There's always more that we can do. But it's like really fun to be learning about and be listening and hearing from what other people are doing and saying.
40:35
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. You made all of these points are great points especially I just want to highlight. Having your advocates really involved in the program, really giving feedback and speaking to them about what they want. To be included is so important because then they'll feel more like they belong in the program, that they want to join in, but also specifically show them the results. I do it with my own advocates. I say this is what you brought us as a team. This is the results we got. This is how many people new, new leads we found. This is what the impact that you've made and it makes them really encouraged to join in, which is something you can get from looking at social analytics. I can see questions for the Q A are pouring in, so if anybody has any questions, now's the time to drop them in. I'm going to move over to the last question and ask both of you if you could share one piece of adv for proving social media's value to leadership and demonstrating impact, what would it be? Matt, I'm going to start with you.
41:29
Matt Churchill
Really great question. I love this. So I've been really fortunate in my career to have lots of advice thrust at me and I think the, the kind of process of all that is make sure your stakeholders are super clear on what measures and impact you can control in social and what you can't and be ready for that to change at any given moment.
41:57
Alina Dallal
And Maddie?
41:58
Madeleine Dudas
Yeah, basically building off of what Matt said, I think it's really important to focus on demonstrating measurable ROI by aligning social media goals with your overall business or company objectives and then consistently reporting and tracking those metrics that will directly impact your company's revenue.
42:21
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. So both of you, thank you so much for leaving that us. On this note, it was amazing advice. Our QR codes for our LinkedIn are up here if you would like to connect with any of us and reach out with any more questions. Now I'm going to pull up the Q and A and see what questions that we have. I'm going to pull them out. Somebody asked an anonymous attendee, Maddie, how are you tracking closed deals that are influenced by advocates? Is it a Salesforce integration?
42:50
Madeleine Dudas
Yes, it is a Salesforce report. And so there are different touch points that our team has just determined internally that they attribute to us Oktopost. And so those will come up in a report that then we're able to share out to any, any stakeholder who we think would be of interest to see those. And that definitely has really helped us with like influencing usage from Oktopost. Getting buy in from others is really being able to show like, okay, it's not just the pay core platform that is, you know, making these bookings happen. It's also directly influenced by advocates. And a lot of times, majority of the time, majority of any of our revenue is a direct result from advocates.
43:44
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for sharing. We got another question in from Jessica. What tool do you use for advocacy and to measure leadership boards and how are you doing that to whoever wants to take it?
43:56
Matt Churchill
Oktopost.
43:59
Madeleine Dudas
Yeah, I would say Oktopost and also Salesforce. I have a dashboard that that's built specifically to organic social reporting. So things that are important, as I mentioned, for measuring things that align to our business goals, such as, you know, leads, our people report. So any new accounts who are interacting, top target accounts that might be interacting, bookings, anything of that nature, I have it all in one space. And then when I'm thinking about content specifically, a lot of times I'll lean more into Oktopost.
44:36
Alina Dallal
Amazing. We have a few questions that lean into employee advocacy. I know, Matt, you also have an amazing employee advocacy program at Aviva and I know Maddie spoke about hers, so both of you can take these ones as well. Jessica asked, how many pieces of content are you sharing weekly or monthly with your advocates?
44:54
Matt Churchill
We share a lot of content. I don't know a rough number, but it's like 20, 30 pieces of content a week. And the reason for that is, as I kind of touched on earlier, we've got a highly matrix organization. So we've got stakeholders all around the world in lots of different areas. We've got, and I'm probably going to get this wrong, so please forgive me any of evens. We've got like 125 different products. So we've got it. It's probably more than that now. I've since we started this and, and all of those have got their own kind of little stories to tell. So we've got A lot of content to publish. But what we do is we segment those different stories according to the different interests of our advocates. So for, so for example, I'm really interested in the space technology stuff we do, sustainability and what our senior leadership is talking about. So I get alerts that say, hey, we've published a piece of content around some supernovas that we're trying to find. I'll then go and share that through the advocacy platform. So we're not just kind of of blasting lots of content to everybody. It's a discerning approach that we take and we empower our advocates to choose their own adventure almost. We want to make sure that their network is getting value out of the social content that they're seeing. So we really say to our advocates up front when they join the program and throughout, we're constantly refining these different topics. What are your audiences really, really interested in? Don't post something that's totally uncredible. So we give kind of as much kind of flexibility in terms of what content and what stories you want to share. So it is a lot. And it might be that in your instance, for example, you might only have, you might have 10 advocates and you might have three pieces of content a week and you want them all to share that. That's cool. That's great because you're building that program and trying to scale it. So it's very much a case of you've got to kind of adopt a case by case basis on it.
46:52
Alina Dallal
Yeah, amazing. We've got another question in from Brianna. She said any advice for one woman social media team on maximizing tracking and getting buy in for execs for social media or one woman one man team as well works. If either of you would like to take this one,
47:12
Madeleine Dudas
I would say I'm also essentially a one man team for social media or at least that's how things started when I was brought into paycor. And so for me something that was really impactful and I think impactful for the overall business was being able to put together a strategy and kind of look at things that what we have, what's the current state and where do we want to go? And then also doing more of a competitive, not even a competitor analysis, but looking at top performing accounts, accounts whether it be B2B or even B2C trends and just seeing like the impact that those are making and then from there being able to take that present on it to different stakeholders, that's really where I started, was just really establishing like what do we Want, what are the goals we want to get out of this strategy? How can we achieve them? And then being able to share, like, what's that impact going to look like for us? And that's where I say it's really important to take a look at what your overall objective are. And they might not seem like your social media is going to necessarily align to them. For example, like customer retention. How the heck is social media going to impact customer retention? Well, I can actually help work with our customer experience employees and hopefully help to get them to be advocates, essentially by sharing online posting their experiences with Paycor. And that's something that, that was a part of my key metrics this year to achieving that goal.
48:47
Alina Dallal
Yeah. And that in itself builds trust and builds a relationship with the customers. We have another question, Matt. I think this one's more to you from Rhonda. It's. There's two parts to it. So the first part is how are you getting your celebrities or execs to regularly post? So do you have access to their accounts? Do you ghostwrite for them? Do they write it but give you suggestions? And the second half is, then how do you get the metrics from their social profiles and how are you monitoring it and the results?
49:12
Matt Churchill
Great question. So it's a bit of all of those things. So we have kind of a comms plan for each of our execs so that we can understand what they're publishing, when they're going to publish, and how that fits into our overall positioning and the stories we want to tell. Because there's no point in an exec talking about topic ABC over here and we're Talking about topic 12 beta over here. So it's all totally integrated and totally aligned and we work with them to create the content. So they'll draft something, we'll draft something, we'll have a back and forth and then have the final piece of content that either we publish on their behalf or they publish, depending on their schedule. And in terms of kind of getting the metrics back, we've got access to accounts, sometimes they share them with us. It really varies on an exec by exec basis. It really depends on how comfortable they are with handing that access over. For example, some folks may well be like, I don't mind you go and run it. Or some might be, no, I want to be intimately involved with this. So it really varies across your stakeholder group. The best approach I've found is to do it collaboratively and do it transparently and do it openly and to do so with good humour as well is also really helpful.
50:35
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And supporting them through it, as you're saying, and helping guide them through it, making them feel comfortable is also super important. There's another question we got from Alexis. Which metrics do you use to demonstrate roi?
50:46
Madeleine Dudas
Maddie, I think this one's for you specifically. We use things such as bookings, any leads that are created, people report. So that would be any new accounts or new contacts who are then interacting with, you know, maybe they see a post on social media and then they go back a couple days later and they fill out a form on paycor.com or something. So then those will be attributed back to Oktopost and then we're able to pull that data from Salesforce.
51:25
Alina Dallal
Yeah, thank you for sharing. I can see we're running out of time. We have loads more questions. If we don't get to them, we're going to reach out to you after with the answers. We did get a question, which me and Matt has actually recorded a podcast on, but somebody asked. I run an internal advocates team and after about 12 months, the enthusiasm and interest in the team has drifted off. What incentive can I use to bring them back? Matt, if you want to take this one quickly. Although I know we have a podcast episode coming out soon, so that will also. You'll also hear more from Matt on
51:57
Matt Churchill
that great plug, by the way. That was excellent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's preaching to the choir. We, we have regular touch points with our, with our advocates, so we will email them like once every couple of weeks. We don't want to bombard them, but we'll email them all the time, say, hey, we've just published this great piece of content. Have you checked it out yet, by the way? It's on Oktopost. You might want to go and refresh your settings. And we kind of run regular sessions every quarter, ish, to try and find new folks to be active and as Maddie was saying, gamification and that kind of competitive spirit is really underutilized, maybe underappreciated. If someone sees that a particular advocate has grown their profile, they'll be like, oh, that's interesting. Why is that happening? And they'll kind of see that and they'll follow it up. So within our kind of training sessions, we talk about why you should be active on LinkedIn full stop, let alone the part of an advocacy program. So it's all around, you know, networking, profile building, being an ambassador for the company you're working for. And ultimately we're kind of saying, like, don't be a part of this. If you don't feel like you are comfortable in doing it, don't post content for the sake of doing it. You've got to be credible, you've got to be authentic. So if you've got kind of a group who are maybe it's a maturer group and they're becoming disengaged again, think about the context around the environment that they're within. Like, is it because you've hit kind of a number of different events where their time has been pulled across? Think about the stories that you can tell to engage them to think about, like the amount of time that they need to invest in this. One thing that we found works really well is to have another advocate who's particularly active share their story and say the benefit, talk about the benefits that they found. And then that kind of, you know, that that'll be a light bulb moment. So. And it's, I think that, you know, like, social advocacy is its own separate function within social and you could have an entire team dedicated to it. Like, Maddie, I'm really passionate about this and it's difficult because you've got to kind of do your day job and you've got to keep the advocates engaged. So it's just having that kind of multiple touch point piece. Put a marker in your diary every two weeks to send them an email, go, hey, we just posted this thing and sort of start small and sort of ratchet up from middle marginal gains.
54:31
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. There's so many different tactics that we can employ here. We can say, because there's a lot and we could definitely do a whole webinar on this. So definitely keep an eye out for Matt's episode on behind the Post. Before we leave, I just want to say thank you, both of you, so much for joining me and sharing everything that you do. Social analytics is not easy. You guys make it look easy and you've left us with a lot of valuable tips and a lot that we can learn from. So thank you to everyone for joining us and thank you, Maddie and Matt, for joining me on the panel.
55:00
Madeleine Dudas
Thank you so much for having me.
