Channing Ferrer Accelerate Your Business Growth Through Social Media

Welcome back to another exciting episode of Sidekick Strategies Expert interviews, inbound talks edition. Hey, I'm your boy, George B. Thomas. And today we're thrilled to have a very special guest, Channing Ferrer, the chief business officer at Brandwatch. Channing is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience scaling global technology companies and in his expertise spans across building growth businesses, revenue leadership and strategic advisory roles. Today we're diving into his inbound 2024 session which feels like yesterday and a year ago all at the same time. Accelerate your business growth through social, where he broke down how businesses can leverage social media as a key driver for top of funnel demand, competitive insights and long term business growth. Channing, welcome to the show.

Great. Thank you, George, for having me. Pleasure.

Yeah. Without you it wouldn't be much of a show. So I'm glad you're here too. How the heck are you doing today?

I'm good. I'm doing well. Yeah? Yeah. Feeling good.

Good, good. I like to have a guest who's ready to rock and roll. So let's go ahead and dig into the good stuff. You've been in the tech and SaaS space for over two decades. How have you seen the role of social media evolve for businesses over that time? So.

As you mentioned, been in and around kind of the martech space for a while now and social, of course has always been a key component to the marketing organization. It's set kind of right as one of those key elements for a long time within marketing. What we've seen over the years, it really evolved to be a core component of marketing. I think that the most interesting thing is recently social has become not just a core component of marketing, but really a core component of the whole organization. So it's, it's become multidimensional as I kind of think about it. And social is an element, of course, how we think about driving demand is an element of how we think about building our brand. It's an element of how we sell. It's an element of how we collect product feedback. It's an element of how we engage with our customers for customer care, customer support. So thus I call it kind of this multi dimensional element now to a business. And I think businesses that aren't thinking social first are the ones that are falling behind right now. So that's really kind of the transformation that I think we're seeing around social. And as social has gone well beyond just a, an element of marketing to become again that core component of the business.

I love that statement and I hope people are Jotting down their note. If you're not thinking social first, you're falling behind. And it's interesting, Channing, because I think this ties into the next question that I wanted to ask about your inbound talk. And you had shared this idea of insights on how social data can provide actionable intelligence. Right. So social first, because you can get actionable intelligence out of it. Can you just take some time to elaborate on how businesses can use social media data to, like, track brand competition, like maybe even customer preferences? Because it seems like it might be complicated, but how do they think about this or how do they get started?

Yeah, so I think you can go to whatever layer of depth you want to kind of get to through social. We have such vast array of information out there. You can just skim the surface with kind of doing basic listening. And when we think about listening, it's understanding your audience. If you want to know more about product evolution, you can do various searches, I'll call it, throughout your social data set to understand what are people saying about your product. But then you can also slice and dice that data a lot deeper. You can go back in history, see how trends are happening. You can look at different parameters around your consumers or your buyers to really narrow in on certain subsets. So there's a variety of tools, of course, out there to help you slice and dice that social data that's available. But I think the most important thing is looking at it through a variety of lenses. Companies can leverage social to help figure out how to build the product. So a lot of product teams are out there looking and listening through social lens. You can do that in communities. You can do that through just simple subreddit channels. But you can also do that across a variety of platforms of social platforms. You can do searches and screens that allow you to cut across X to meta, to Instagram to see what are people saying across those different platforms. And I think that's where it gets really interesting is when you begin to kind of gather information across different subsets and bring that data together to say, what are people saying about my product? What is this cohort of customers? What are they saying? What's their preferences? And how can we evolve that product? So I'd say product evolution is a really big component of how I'm seeing companies use social. And that product evolution can be at the consumer level. It can be at the B2B level. It really varies a lot. We see our customers using social in a variety of ways. The other one is customer care. That's really interesting. Customer care just allows you to engage with your customers when they have frustrations or when they like your product, rather than waiting for them to come through your channel that you've set up that might be off of your website, it might be an email channel, it might be kind of something rather basic, I might say. You can go to them, you can meet them where they are, and they're living in a variety of different social platforms. So you can meet them where they are and have either automated or customized responses to where to what they're saying about your products. And again, that's kind of the customer care element. You can do that both on the positive and the negative, of course, depending on the feedback that you're hearing. So those are just two simple examples of what we're seeing our customers do with social data.

It's interesting because Channing, when you're talking about this, it's my brain goes to a couple things. You're actually paying attention to the humans that are engaging with your brand. And there's almost this level of voc or voice of customer customer based on some social listening that could be done. I think it's super smart. Again, if you're social first, if you're paying attention to that intelligence, if you're listening and pay attention to the humans that you're trying to help. Like, these all are kind of lining up to be good business ideas or business pieces. Speaking of which, Brand Watch's social media management maturity model provides a framework for assessing a brand social media capabilities. Can you kind of take some time? I know that was in your presentation at Inbound 2024. Can you explain, like, what this model is and how businesses can use it to level up their social strategies?

Yeah, I think it's a really nice. I love frameworks, first of all, so I'm always a big fan whenever I hear frameworks. It kind of just gives you an understanding of where am I in relation to others. That's why I think frameworks are great. You can kind of benchmark yourself. And that's what the social maturity model allows companies to do, is come in and benchmark themselves on where they are in relation to others on that social curve. And I think of the social curve as an evolution. Often companies might be at the starting point. You might be just kind of beginning to do some listening, beginning to just post and monitor. That's kind of the basic starting point. And then they might begin to do deeper listening. You might begin to slice and dice the data. Maybe not over long histories, maybe not in deep ways, but you begin to kind of look at it from different lenses. Look at cross channel. That's the next layer. As you kind of mature a little bit, you begin to listen a little. Then you can do deeper listening. And deep listening gets really interesting. When you begin to go and run historical data sets. You can look over longer periods of time. You can slice the data across a variety of channels with a variety of parameters kind of built into that data. You need usually tools, pretty complicated tools and sophisticated tools to be able to do that. But you can get a lot of insights out of that. And often teams and organizations will have people dedicated to do that kind of deeper analytics within social. And then the layer beyond that is creating regular insights off of that social. So you can kind of build deep insights and there's teams, consultants and so on. You can do this in house. You can bring external support in to create kind of monitoring of social, but in very deep ways. So we have very sophisticated customers of ours that are doing this and we will help them even in some cases. But that's the maturity model. You kind of start at a very maybe basic level and then you can evolve into very deep analytical based listening. And companies will fit anywhere on that spectrum. People might fit anywhere on that spectrum. I think, as I said, social is an element of the company, not just the marketing organization. So it's often interesting to look at it either through the organizational lens, but also through the individual lens. Executives often want to hear a little bit more about what's being said in social channels, but they might be early stage and they're listening and they can evolve through that journey as well.

Yeah, I love that model. I love the view that it gives us too. It's funny because the deeper you got, the more you kind of started to talk about these insights that you can gleam from them, which I think many times insights impact our strategy. So I kind of want to back up a little bit and ask you about the humans that are at the beginning stage of social media maturity. Like organizations at that point, oftentimes, Channing, they struggle with a lack of strategy. It's like, let's just go post some stuff and. No, don't, please. Like, what are some simple steps businesses can take to start building an effective social media strategy? Like right out the. Even as a beginner.

Yeah, it's a great point. Often people think kind of just go and throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what sticks. And that's not necessarily bad, but it's not also the best strategy. So the first thing is, I do think the social strategy actually needs to start top down. What's the business strategy? What are the executives within the organization, the CEO, what is he or she thinking and what do they want to drive? And then from there that should impact how you think about your social strategy. So for example, if there's a certain theme, a certain product launch, if there's a certain topic that you want to vocalize, of course social is a great way to magnify that voice that you have out there. But also if there's certain things you want to learn more about and certain themes that you're trying to build towards over time, I think again, that's where social fits in. So for example, we see our customers doing anything from magnifying the message that they want to send, magnifying through social. That's just your basic posting. But I think more importantly, we see them trying to determine where they should take their strategy 6 12, 24 months into the future. And they can do that by really deep listening. So again, learning, driving those insights, understanding what customers are doing, understanding the trends that are in their marketplace, and then trying to meet the customers where they're going, not necessarily where they are today. So social allows you to kind of have that variety of data so you can begin to think into the future and meet those customers, how they want to be met in that future state. Again, that's through product lens, through the go to market lens, through just the customer, customer response lens.

Nice. I want to back this train up just a little bit further because we got the people who are beginning, but we might even have the people on the fringe that are like social. I don't know what's the ROI of that. And as soon as I say that, I think about years ago when Gary Vaynerchuk was like, what's the ROI of your mother? So let's just dive into this because it is one key issue that you mentioned in your inbound talk with was this underestimation of social media's value to an organization. So let's talk about Roy. Let's talk about roi. How can social media managers, marketers, whoever is in charge of this, demonstrate the ROI of their social efforts to like, senior leadership, where it actually makes sense and senior leadership gets it?

Yeah, this was a question that was raised up in my talk as well. Actually. We had a good little dialogue about it. A couple, a couple social media managers were there towards the end, we were talking through it. And it's tricky sometimes to measure that impact as we know in marketing in general, it's often tricky aside from your demand oriented marketers where you can very clearly kind of measure metrics. When you get into brand though, brand is a lot harder to measure and social cuts across both of those. So social, you can look at it through the demand lens. You can understand how much demand you're seeing come through your social channels. There's some very focus metrics like that number of followers, followers that convert and click into a variety of links that you might put in front of them. So you can start with just very simple metrics that show follower base. That's a simple starting point. The challenge with followers though is you can get a lot of followers, but they might not be buyers of your product. They might just be kind of interested and usually there's an element of the followers will eventually turn into buyers. But you really want to understand who are those followers. So I think that's the most important thing is understanding what's your ideal buyer Personas and then how many of your followers map to that ideal buyer Persona. So that I think is really the unlock for social is being able to say I've got this amount of followers that fits into my ideal buyer Persona. So the more detail you can understand around those followers and then of course other elements of engagement are additional drivers. So you can create that follower base, you can measure that, you can share that back to your, your executive team explaining how your ideal customer profile fits into that follower base and then you want to show the engagement which is a, an indication of conversion. I kind of bring everything back to demand oriented marketing because I think it's very easy to look at the numbers through that lens. So engagement is going to drive towards conversion. What I love about social and I think it's a little different than your more kind of traditional inbound marketing. I know HubSpot well, of course, and I love the model. But the difference is you can't always see how deeply and how quickly people are engaging. Yes, they might download some of your content, but you never know. They can be downloading content for years until they decide to buy. I think when you look at it through the social lens, once likes begin to pick up and the volume of likes pick up, it's a very clear indicator of buyer preferences. So again, I think likes are good mechanism to understand how conversions are going to occur.

I love this conversation so much. I think there's so many valuable pieces, we might have hit a rewind spot there too for people to pay attention to. Because getting leadership to understand the roi of anything is important. And also I think that this next question even helps double down on that because so many times we think of like social media as social media or social media as marketing. But even in this interview and in your inbound talk, you kind of talked about social media being part of marketing, social media being part of customer success. Heck, I'll even go out a limb and say social media could totally be, it is for us, part of sales. Now the question when you start to think of that mindset or that model is how can companies foster better cross departmental collaboration in their social efforts? I'll just leave it to social efforts. I could probably just ask the question, how can humans work better together but collaboration in their social efforts. Channing, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, definitely. So I think the first thing there's is aligning on the themes. What are the themes that we're trying to get across when we think about our social message? And George, I would 100% agree with you. Social selling is key these days. But if you're not aligned with your marketing message, with your product message, with your customer care message, then your social selling is going to go in one direction, your product message is going to go in a different direction. You've got to just get alignment. Alignment is the core. And this goes beyond social. I mean, in any business, I think alignment trumps strategy. I've often said it's one of those things that you just need to have. So if you can get alignment around that social message that you want to get out there and there could be multiple social messages at the same time, that's okay. But make sure that your product or your marketing org, your sales org are all aligned on the same themes and topics. And to get to that alignment, it's really simple. But you got to communicate internally. We got to say here's what we're messaging. Top down, CEO executives should be a part of that as well. And when you create that alignment and when your executive team posts in relation to that topic that you're trying to talk about, everyone will kind of follow in. So the really simple to do on this, I'd say is get some executives posting a little bit in social on the one or two topics that you care about and then people will follow from there on out.

In other words, leaders be leaders, even in your social media. I love that so much. All right, so up until this point, Channing, people listening this conversation or watching this conversation could be like, oh, well, obviously they're talking about organic social. And yes, we probably have been. But I also want to dip our toes into the idea of paid social and Channing. Paid social is often seen as a tool for fast growth. But what are some best practices you recommend for brands looking to kind of incorporate this paid social with their organic social in their social media strategies?

Yeah, it's a great point and it's a great call out. Both are important. Both work actually very well. Obviously it depends a little bit on what you're trying to position, what are you trying to sell, what's your intention and who's your target audience. So the deeper you can understand where your audience lives within social, the better you can leverage your paid social. So paid social, for example, I'm an advocate of Instagram. I often click way too frequently on Instagram ads because it's so targeted to me as we all fallen into, I'm sure a bunch of good Instagram ads if you end up buying something. But that's because Instagram does a really nice job at helping those businesses to identify their audiences. So I think the more you can really understand who that audience is, slice that audience a lot of different ways and then leverage that paid social to drive what you're trying to convert on or what you're ultimately goal is. So I think paid social is a really big component and part of it. Just make sure you're really cutting that audience down to, to be clear on who that, who that ideal buyer and ideal buyer Persona really is.

Yeah. The amount of things my wife has purchased off of TikTok, I'm like, do I need to ground you from this app? Like, come on. Anyway, that's not why we're here. We're here to talk about that. Those people are getting ROI out of their social. Let's just be honest. Here's the thing. It's funny you mentioned Instagram, I mentioned TikTok. There's also now threads like there's. There's always seems to be something new. It either stays or it doesn't. Listen. It's this increasing complexity of like, where do we manage how, where do we need to be? Multiple platforms and so help it help bring it down to earth to us. Like, how can businesses make sure they remain efficient while scaling their efforts to like all the places that we feel that we need to be nowadays?

Yeah. This is why it's so important to be leveraging all the social channels out there. If you're just living in one or two social channels, you're missing a lot of information, really good information. For example, I'll just talk themes for a moment. Reddit sub threads Reddit sub threads are all about complaints often, but there's really good information in those complaints and people kind of will go deep on why something didn't work and a problem that they had. But product needs to be living there and learning from those complaints and then seeing how it can evolve and improve the output. When I think of tips X, for example, X is full of ideas. People are posting simple little thoughts and ideas out there and there's some great ideas that you can gather from X. So and again, each social channel has different elements to it. Of course they all blend together at times, but it's really important to look across the social channels to understand all these different themes and data points and then look at that through the lens of who's my ideal customer profile. So my ideal customer profile cuts across all those social channels and then you can gather really good information from each social channel and each one will have different tidbits of information for you. So I think that's why you really need to be looking across the social channels evolve and change. And as I make a statement that I see a lot of complaints in Reddit sub threads, that's going to change over time and that will. And as we look at Instagram, the content and information that we capture and we see our customers captured off Instagram is evolving very quickly. Meta very clearly evolved with Facebook threads obviously is up and coming. So again, lots of great information and it's important just to look across all of the channels.

I love that. And you know, having that kind of 50,000 foot bird's eye view and being able to diagnose patterns and all sorts of crazy stuff, I want to double click into something because my brain won't let it go. You've mentioned it a couple times. I even use the word voc after one of the times that you mentioned her voice of customer. But I also know that over the last six to eight months, HubSpot has made some dramatic input into being able to do the thing that I want to ask this question around, and that is social listening actually realizing we have two ears and we can use those two ears in a digital or a social realm as well. But Channing, how important is social listening in shaping a company's social media strategy and how should brands incorporate that into their planning moving forward?

So I really think it is core. As we were talking about earlier, social is kind of sitting at the center, I would call the epicenter of the organization nowadays. And it's become multi dimensional. And when it becomes multidimensional that means we have every element of the business that needs to pay attention to what's going on with social. So social listening leveraging tools like Brand Watch or tools like what HubSpot can offer to allow the product team, the customer success team, the engineering teams even to learn more about their customers through social listening is so important. Social listening can be done at different levels. And this goes back to what we talked about earlier, that evolution of social. So as people go through their journey and learn more about how they can leverage social, you have some people that are doing very deep social analytics, you have some people that are doing kind of lighter weight social listening and both are very useful. But I think again, it fits across the organization. Your engineering team can do social listening to better understand what the customers are saying. So when they're building the product, they know a little bit more. But they're not going to be maybe as sophisticated as maybe the marketing organization. But that's okay and that's important. That's why I think again, social needs to. Social listening specifically needs to sit broadly across the organization.

Yeah, I love, I love the idea of across the organization. You just kind of triggered something in my brain about organizations. We've helped, we've seen this phenomenon happen where like there's the business strategy and then there's over here somewhere on the side is the social strategy. And you're like, wait a minute, shouldn't they be together or understand each other? So my question to you is how can businesses make sure that their social media efforts, social media strategy is aligned with the overall business goals and not just focused on like this kind of side tantrum vanity metrics like how do we bring social strategy and business strategy together to live in harmony?

I love these sorts of questions because they seem so complex at first, but in reality it's all metrics. It's all going to be a matter of what's our business goals, what are the metrics that we're trying to align around Often in running brandwatch, for example, the way I think about metrics is we set up our big rocks for the year and we'll establish here the big things we're trying to do. And these usually aren't a lot. This is four or five kind of different things and each big rock has a metric associated to it. So typical businesses, you're going to have these kind of these lofty goals, these goals you're going for this year or a multi year strategy goal. And you should have some metrics tied into those goals. So as we look at those metrics that might be to improve our customer satisfaction score. Let's just say maybe that's one of our goals and that's going to be a very clear metric. We want to move the score from A to B in terms of satisfaction. How can we measure that through social? Well, what are we doing on the social side? What's our. Where are we hearing the complaints? Maybe within social. And then how are we addressing those complaints? How are we getting responses from those complaints? Because we can engage very deeply with those customers. And are we converting those customers into advocates? Possibly. So we can very clearly measure the number of engagements we have with customers. The number of negative sentiments we're seeing seeing across the social channels. Are those sentiments being reduced because we're taking the right action that aligns nicely to that big rock of customer satisfaction. So you can easily tie a lot of what's going on in social back to kind of those big rock strategic initiatives. As long as you've got some metrics in place. Just align the metrics on the social channels.

Very nice. So it's. I'm sitting here listening to you and this interview has been absolutely amazing. And I keep coming back to this is a lot. Like there's a lot which leads me to sometimes maybe it just shouldn't be one person in the organization. You might get to the point where you're doing so much that you need a team. So, Channing, I have you. I want to ask the question as a leader yourself who has scaled multiple organizations, what advice would you give to companies looking to build or grow social media teams and kind of graduate from this, like one human doing it in like a small back closet office in their organization?

Yeah, definitely. So when we think about kind of growing the social team, the first thing I would look at is do we have the right. Let's just say we have one person to get started focused on social. Do we have the right sentiment across the business? Before we start adding people, let's make sure we've got kind of cross functional social sentiment. And what I mean by that is do we have our CEO posting on social? Do we have our head of marketing posting on social? Can we get the right leader involvement? Because if you can't get the right leader involvement, it will be hard to get that kind of cross functional engagement. As long as you can begin to get the right leadership involvement, it doesn't always have to be the CEO. I'm just using those examples. But if you can get leadership involvement and engagement with social, then and by the way engagement, I mean, is doing some social listening as well. So the social listening can be an output of what this one person is producing, sharing that information and having a dialogue around what's being heard and social. So you have to get that right mindset. That mindset needs to shift from being. This is a marketing only opportunity to this is a company wide initiative that's very multidimensional. And again, I think leadership needs to be engaged in thinking that way. And if they're not engaged in thinking that way, I think the next step is to share the opportunities. What we're talking about today, why social is impactful in product, why social is impactful for customer support, and so on. Have that dialogue. Show the data, show the engagements that you're seeing, show the listening that you as an individual contributor might be listening to. And from there then we start talking about. Okay, how else can we leverage social? Where do we want to start? Do we want to start with our product team? Do we start with our customer success team? Do we want to start with sales? Possibly. I think sales is the easiest starting point. Making sure that we're selling through social just as much as we're selling direct to the customer, selling indirect through social. So I would think where do you start? Take one step at a time and engage with that team first and then begin to kind of expand beyond. And as that happens, there will be a natural pull to grow the team. There won't be a push where you're starting kind of forced at heads. There will be a pull saying, hey, we need more support, we need more help, what can we do? And then you begin to outline a plan. And that plan often involves adding more people into the team as well.

All right, so as we land this plane, I have one more question. What's the one piece of advice that you'd give to companies looking to get ahead of the social curve and truly accelerate their business growth through social media? That. Here's the one piece of advice. If you take nothing else away, here's what I want you to have.

Yeah, I would go back and look at where you are in that, that social journey and really understand how fast can you get to deep social listening and driving Deep insights, I think deep insights, there's so much great information there available to people who are willing to kind of take that leap and take that step. Social listening is great, but social insights, again, deep social insights really goes beyond just pure basic social listening. So that's the one thing I would really encourage. I was at a dinner earlier this Last week it was speaking with a bunch of our biggest customers about what they're doing and the sophistication that they have on social listening and social insights is amazing. And the insights that they're gaining is really, really spectacular. And a lot of companies aren't there yet. So the faster you can move yourself through that social curve and begin to go beyond just listening to really insights driving insights. And that means slicing and dicing the data in a variety of ways. I think that's the unlock and that's the opportunity.

Love it. Let the insights lead to action and the action to revenue. Channing, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. If people want to connect with you, if they have questions, where do you want to send them?

Yeah, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Try to, try to stay on that. So feel free to drop me a line on LinkedIn and love to chat more about social.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's clear that social media is not just a tool for marketing, but a powerful engine for business growth. From creating a comprehensive social strategy using data for actionable insights, there's so much potential for companies to leverage social to drive real long term success for you, the listeners, the viewers. If you're ready to take your social media efforts to the next level and unlock its full potential, make sure to check out brand Watch and follow Channing for more insights. And as always, don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy hub spotting along the way.