Name: The Social Shift: What Marketers Need to Know
Uploaded: 2025-01-30T16:46:04.530Z
Duration: 30 min 4 s
Description: The Social Shift: What Marketers Need to Know

Transcript for "The Social Shift: What Marketers Need to Know": Hello, and welcome to Yext Insights. We are excited to present to you today about marketers and what they need to know in the ever changing world of social media, providing you, our marketers, with actionable strategies and insights into leveraging social media as a key component of your digital presence strategy. I'd love to introduce you to the presenters today. I'll be kicking off this session and excited to be with you all. I'm Meghan Menasale, senior director of product marketing. And later in the session, you'll hear from Amanda Schaffino, senior product marketing manager, and Sam Hogue, advisor at Desjardins Insurance. We are thrilled to have you join us today, Sam. I can't wait to hear about your social program. And with that, let's kick it off. Today, we're gonna explore the social media landscape for marketers and how it can be used effectively for localized impact, and then we'll have a real life example from Desjardins Insurance. Alright. Jumping in. Social media is no longer optional. It's now a fundamental channel for businesses. 88% of customers look on social media platforms for more information about a brand. Social has rapidly transitioned from a supplementary tool to a critical part of marketing and sales. This makes it essential for multilocation brands to manage their social presence effectively. However, managing social media for 100, if not thousands of locations and people has unique challenges and requires a tool tailored to these needs. So why does this matter? Because localized social media allows brands to build authentic connections, leverage real time engagement, and tailor content that resonates with specific communities and audiences. Still don't believe me? Let's talk about some proof. And while social media has started, you might say, as a simple engagement tool, it is now much more than that. It's where brands build communities, answer customer support questions, and convert new business. 73% of marketers say social media is an important part of their brand's local marketing strategy. With more consumers expecting personalized experiences, almost 3 out of every 4 consumers, having a local strategy is crucial. This shift drives brand awareness, customer loyalty, and real time responses to local issues or trends. Empowering local teams to tangible results and impact. Later in the session, as I mentioned, you'll hear from Sam about how Desjardins successfully engages their local audiences via social media. But we know this isn't easy. Social is a large undertaking, as I mentioned, across 100, if not thousands of locations. But we often see that multilocation businesses face 3 main challenges. First, multilocation marketers often struggle to scale social media efforts across those numerous locations. With limited resources and bandwidth, you're unable to take full advantage of all the potential opportunities available when marketing locally. There are limited resources from budget constraints that we're well aware of to personnel and headcount. Teams at local levels may lack the autonomy, the tools, or the support or training to create impactful location specific social content. And each local team operates in a unique market, creating challenges and aggregating all of those insights and adapting to shifting audience needs in one market versus the other. 72% of brands say social media is important to their customer acquisition efforts. But among them, 37% struggle with resource constraints and developing content at scale, and 48% use multiple tools to manage social. That means multiple platforms, multiple logins, and multiple places to put together your data and understand all of those insights across all of your locations and all of your people. Worse yet, 68% of social media marketers have had a hard time maintaining brand consistency across local brand pages, and 56% of local managers or require support from the corporate teams for social media activities on a regular basis. So why is it important to overcome? Because 63% of marketers use customer feedback for local social media insights, and they rely on regular feedback from local teams for their social media strategy. So that was a lot. But just know that we feel your pain. We understand the challenges that you're going through. And with that, we know it's a lot. So while scale and insights are very important challenges and we understand that they are, today, we're gonna be primarily focusing on enabling your local teams. And, of course, the impact this can have on your social media efforts. 45%. So you think about that. Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers. I know for 1, I'd like 47% more opportunities in pipeline as a brand. In addition, 51% of sellers who use social media are more likely to hit quota. And we certainly want our sales and revenue teams hitting quota. Additionally, 78% of salespeople that leverage social selling outperform their peers. And that's huge. So empowering local teams directly correlates with stronger results. When local managers and local users have tools and guidance, they create more opportunities and deepen customer relationships. So how this works in practice and what enables us empowerment? Tools such as centralized content libraries, automated approval workflows, and AI powered tools for customizing local content. These tools can significantly reduce the effort required to create locally relevant content. And social media interactions are actually driving up the median client age. Now 40, up 5 years since 2018, suggesting that social media users are becoming a more diverse, mature, and influential demographic. And 1 5th of insurance customers report that social media interactions are most the most influential in their purchasing decisions. Exciting. However, we do have an insurance customer that's gonna talk to us about that. So think about that. 1 5th of insurance customers report that social media media interactions are the most influential in their purchasing decisions. Underscoring the need for authentic, responsive social interactions, which I'm sure Sam will talk about in a bit. We realized that customers have shifted from seeing social media as purely recreational to recognizing it as a source for reliable, real time engagement with brands. The question is then, how can marketing leaders such as yourself, 48% of whom are using 2 to 3 tools to manage social, build a brand presence that meets rapidly evolving customer expectations especially at the local level? So let's talk a little bit about the power of local social. Advantages of local social provide productivity. It empowers your local teams and increases their productivity so that they can hit the quote the quotas that you have. Social tools designed for easy posting, easy social selling, and responding increase that productivity across multiple locations and across your local teams. In AI for local relevance, automated AI tools enable local managers to adapt messaging without losing brand consistency, tailoring content to resonate with regional events or trends. And a centralized inbox helps for engagement. By centralizing responses, teams can quickly manage interactions and approvals from one platform, cutting down response times. And using these centralized tools reduces the need for redundant work, allowing local teams to focus on high value customer engagement activities. You need an easy to use platform that allows you to plan, post, track, and optimize your social strategies at scale, reducing your manual tasks and devoting more of your attention to strategic planning, audience engagement, and content analysis. Refine your social content with detailed analytics and insights to create posts that resonate and improve the impact of your local social strategy. Foster corporate and local collaboration to aid in consistent branding, timely content delivery, and efficient cross functional coordination. There are different methods, however, to execute your social media strategy as a marketer for a multilocation brand. Let's walk you through those options. Option 1, centralized. Corporate headquarters fully controls the social strategy from posting to responding. This ensures consistency, but it limits local relevance. Option 2, decentralized. Local managers handle all social tasks, fostering local autonomy, but potentially leading to inconsistencies and brand messaging if you don't have the right platform with the right approval workflows. Option 3, the hybrid approach. This model has corporate providing resources and oversight while empowering local teams to customize content and responses. It offers local teams flexibility while maintaining brand standards. It allows regional or franchise managers to address specific local trends or events without corporate approval delays, and it reduces potential brand risks by setting boundaries for local customizations and providing corporate approved content libraries. So let's move to the part you've all been waiting for, seeing how this comes to life with our amazing customer Desjardins as they discuss practical applications of these strategies and tools in action. Over to you, Amanda. Thanks, Megan. Hi, everybody. So as Megan mentioned, I'm Amanda, the senior product marketing manager for Hearsay Social and Yext Social. I've been with Hearsay for over 2 years and officially joined Yext in August following the completion of the acquisition, and I'm so, so excited to welcome one of our amazing customers to share their unique experience and perspective. So I'm going to welcome Sam Hoag from Desjardins Insurance. Welcome, Sam. We're so happy to have you. Hi, Amanda. Thank you so much for having me today. Yeah. So let me start by giving, everybody a bit of background on Sam and the amazing work she's doing. With over 7 years of experience at Desjardins Insurance, Sam has developed a robust expertise in digital and social media marketing. Currently serving as an adviser for more than 3 years, she has worked to enhance the strategic approach to digital initiatives like their agent social program. She is passionate about leveraging data driven strategies to optimize marketing efforts and deliver impactful results. And now let's get to know a bit more about Desjardins Group, where they're driving innovation and making a difference in financial services. Desjardins Group is the largest cooperative financial group in North America and the 6th largest in the world with assets of 444,300,000,000 as of June 30, 2024. They've been named one of Canada's best employers by Forbes Magazine and by Media Corp. To meet the diverse needs of its members and clients, Deja D'in offers a full range of products and services to individuals and businesses through its extensive distribution network, its online platforms, and its subsidiaries across Canada. Ranked among the world's strongest banks according to the Banker Magazine, Desjardins has one of the highest capital ratios, one of the highest credit ratings in the industry. Desjardins has been a hearsay customer for 6 years and has 600 advisers and agents on their platform. So to kick things off, Sam, could you share a bit of an overview of your social media strategy, and how does your program help drive engagement and support your overall business goals? Definitely. So we do have multiple lines of business actually using the Hearsay platform. But, specifically, I focus on our agent network. So this encompasses about 470 agents, who are all using individual social pages, as well as they all have team members that to use these pages as well and help them with their posting. So our agents focus on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn right now for their social media pages. I think our main focus when using organic social media is really to get our brand out there. Brand awareness, I would say, is probably our top focus to align with, especially when we're creating these social pieces for our agents. So we do ensure we focus on creating pieces that not only our agents want to post, but also creates a message that the clients would want to share and learn more about. So ensuring that we align these with our brand of business goals is definitely most important to us, especially when we have clients that are potentially out there sharing as well. And we do this by having, I would say, multiple areas within and outside of marketing, review the content, and help with the actual creation of the pieces. In total, I would say a standard social piece would touch anywhere from 8 to 10 people depending on the actual piece. So this can include brand, legal, team leads, underwriting, actuarial, and some other internal people that may seem like jargon to others. So I'll leave them out for now. But overall, having this many touch points does seem like a lot, but it helps us get all perspectives before going to the hearsay platform and having those pieces live for our agents to post. Yeah. That's great. You manage a lot of agents, and I really like that you touched on the balance of types of content. And I know we're gonna get to that, further down our chat because I think managing a social program is very much a balancing act. So my next question is, can you share some examples of how your social presence has helped strengthen your brand's identity and help your agents reach new customers? So one example that really sticks out to me with this question, was when we were testing out an Instagram pilot with hearsay, actually. So about 2 ish, 2 to 3 years ago, our agents had a big interest in being on Instagram. So what we did is we actually worked with our hearsay customer service manager closely, and we were able to work together to organize a pilot for some agents. So this consisted about 30 to 40 agents on the platform, and we closely were able to monitor their performance, and we were able to create content specifically for them to use during this pilot. So we have what we call internal marketing advisors, and they're actually dedicated to assisting agents specifically. So they have a certain amount that they're all in charge of, and they, help them with all of their marketing needs. So they are kind of their day to day point contact when it comes to any marketing help they need. So one day, one of them was on the call with an agent and actually that agent told her that he has never had more calls and closed so much business in the last month on social media since the pilot started. So that was definitely a big win for the agent on social media. And for us as a brand, it definitely helps support our decision and opening up Instagram for all agents, which we have done since. And it's been our best performing platform, engagement wise for sure. Mhmm. Time and time again, we see Instagram get the best engagement. And I was actually I was going to email you, but I ran out of time. I found an old business review with some such great stats from that pilot, and it was so impressive how much engagement you guys drove that year, and how much of it was attributed to Instagram. And I think that was the year that you all won, one of our our Hearsay Customer of the Year award. So it makes sense. And going on the same line of content, what do you see that clients expect today from a brand like yours on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram? And how do you how do you balance that act? How do you make sure that content aligns with those expectations of customers? So what we've really learned, with being on social media is that our clients want content that feels tailored to them, that feels authentic, and feels personalized. Of course, when you're following your insurance agent, you want to see them as more of a person than just an agent, we've learned. So we really try and create content that feels that can feel personalized for those clients when they're seeing it, when they're scrolling maybe on Facebook or LinkedIn, Instagram. We don't want it to feel so robotic. So lately, we've actually been testing out more modifiable content on the hearsay platform. So just having fields that maybe an agent can fill up their town, just to feel a bit closer to home for those clients. We have actually seen higher engagement since doing this, because they wanna see that their agents involved in their community, that they're there for them. And it's not just your standard, content that you're seeing across, you know, 470 agents of the same. So definitely personalized content as well as they do wanna see still that standard product focused content. You need to know what your your insurance agent is selling. Right? So we do try and mix that in, but we definitely try and do a focus on lifestyle pieces when we're creating them just to give some more, personal content for the agent. Mhmm. That makes a lot of sense. We have our annual content study and modified content. Original content forms the best, and then modified content is really the next best option when it comes to driving engagement. Because we know that, you know, you you're never going to get every single agent or adviser creating their own original content, and that's, oh, totally okay. But how can we make it more authentic, which goes nicely into my next question because I know that your agents are creating original content. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And I wanted to see, you know, what challenges you all had in in really decentralizing this part of your social media program from just corporate marketing to your agents really having the autonomy to create their own content, and how did you get them to adopt social? So we definitely had an increase in interest across our company, with hearsay within the last couple of years. Once other areas began to hear of hearsay and what it was used for, I actually began doing a lot of presenting our insights from the agent network, and give them an agent perspective to our other areas and the benefits of adopting the use of hearsay. So I think we have approximately 5 business lines within the hearsay platform now. So once I started presenting those, it seemed to be a no brainer for them. But when it comes to our own agents and trying to consistently keep growing the usage of the platform, we really work with our customer success manager on this. We work together a lot to come up with relevant presentations to make the, to make to the agents to show the benefits of using the platform. Our agents are salespeople at heart. That's what they do. That's what they know. So we have to ensure that we're tailoring our message to support them in their own goals as well. It's really important to us. So we definitely found recently that probably one of our most popular presentations of hearsay that we use is the social selling one. I think we've used it probably once every year, and we just kind of update, upgrade it with what we can. But we find that one grabs the interest of the agent and really helps them learn to use social media to sell themselves. So I think tailoring to their interests, I find is really helpful to get them to adopting and using the platform. And also our, internal marketing advisors who I mentioned earlier, they're they're really great with explaining to the agents the value of hearsay and using the platform. So and also as compliance, it's getting a bit more complex as the industry changes and evolves. So I think without hearsay, we really wouldn't be able to be on social media because the compliance queue is such an important piece of us adopting and using hearsay, is that compliance queue. It's a really big thing for us. Mhmm. Yeah. Especially in regulated industries. Right? Like, financial services, it's just without compliance, it's a nonstarter. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you are such a great partner to work with. I, you know, spoke to your account executive and your CSM to get some background, and they, you know, told me all about all of the trainings that you do together and how you work to really increase the usage of the platform. And not only just adoption and getting folks on, but getting them posting the right content, subscribing to campaigns, and all of those great things. And something that we talk about with a lot of our, customers and prospects is how do you measure the success of your social media program? Everyone kind of does it a little differently, is what I've noticed when I talk to customers. So I'd love to see kind of how you guys at Desjardins, measure your success. What metrics do you track? What are you keeping an eye on to see how the program's going? So we definitely work with the customer success manage manager every year, probably in around, like, January February. I feel like we kind of started up again, and they really help us set our KPIs for the year. We take a look at our previous year, what we can grow on, what we can build on, and they really help us set attainable goals or goals that are maybe just out of the reach, but they help push us to make content that's going to hit those goals. And again, we'll we'll kind of look at, you know, using the tailored tier training program and where we can hit those goals and what specific months, and can we get a training out that's gonna really help us hit that KPI in those certain times. And then we'll we really focus on our engagement rates and then as well as our impressions. Because impressions, like I said before, is gonna give us that brand awareness piece, which is again the most important piece, I think, to us when using organic social media. So I think that's the main metrics that we use. Yeah, and just the different types of content that, are being published. We'll take a look at that and we'll continue to either grow, change, modify so that we can hit those KPIs. Got it. And for folks on who might not know, Sam mentioned our tailored tier training, and we have a user maturity model, where we can kind of see where all the users are on this model and then apply specific training to move users up that curve and increase their social media maturity. And it's been really successful, and it's a it's a true partnership between the firm, and and the technology provider, us. So thank you so much, Sam. This was really valuable insights on your social media strategy, and it's it's inspiring to see how you approach this balance of personalized content with brand content, lifestyle content, and how you engage customers in meaningful ways. So I wanna go through a few key takeaways, that I have from their program, from talking with Sam, from talking with our internal teams. First one is try hybrid. So if you are trying to get your local locations to start posting, your, distributed teams to start posting, the balance that Sam talked about of, brand content, library posts with getting them to post original is a great way to get started. Next is, test and iterate. So try new things, see what works. The algorithm's always changing. Your audience is changing. Maybe you need to try a new network like Instagram, or maybe it's a different type of content that you haven't tried before. And then last is partner with your technology provider. So they should be experts in whatever you're trying to accomplish and help you reach your program goals. And now as we continue our session, you'll have a chance to dive deeper into the topics that matter most to your organization. So what we're doing is offering 2 breakout options that you can choose from. So first, for more insight into that power of local and strategies to help you get there, join Tim. He's the best, our content expert in his think global act local session. And then if you're ready to see how Yext manages social media for multilocation businesses, join our wonderful product manager, Sunny, for a demo. So take a moment to pick the one that resonates most with you, and let's keep the conversations going. Thank you so much, Sam, and great job, Megan. And we'll see you all later.