StatSocial Achieves 1063% Social Engagement Growth: Thanks to Their Engaging Content!

We all know that audience insights fuel our marketing efforts. When marketers can identify, reach, and engage with the audiences that matter the most, they are on the right path to making apt strategic decisions. 

That’s exactly what StatSocial does. The firm delivers the industry’s leading social audience insights platform, Silhouette™ which empowers marketers with quantifiable social audience data that fuels their strategies. 

The platform offers over 95,000 attributes, allowing marketers to build their audiences based on brand affinities, interests, passions, preferred media channels, and more. 

Doesn’t all this sound interesting? 

Let’s know more about this from David Barker, the CEO of StatSocial. 

StatSocial’s Success Highlights

• StatSocial solely relies on content & SEO for its inbound lead generation strategy. They fuel their lead generation through content marketing that spills over to support all organic and paid activities across social and searches. 
• Their content brings awareness to social audience insights and the marketing use cases that Silhouette (their martech platform) supports including market research, influencer audiences and attribution, earned and PR audience intelligence, and social audience retargeting. 
• They also focus on Social Audience data. To raise awareness and educate marketers on the subject, the organization prioritizes building relationships with thought leaders. 

David, thanks for taking the time to tell us about StatSocial and how you and your team leveraged content to boost your social engagement. We are keen on learning more about this achievement! 

To begin with,

Can you share a bit about how it all started and your expertise?

StatSocial was founded in 2014 by our founder and Head of Product, Michael Hussey who looked to build a solution that would allow marketers to harness rich and public social data to understand who their audience was outside of their CRM. 

StatSocial’s martech platform, Silhouette™, is powered by a patented Identity Graph that maps over 1.3 billion social profiles to 300 million verified individuals across major social platforms. In addition, Silhouette’s taxonomy is made up of over 95,000 segments of self-declared information like interests, passions, preferred media channels, and more. 

Since its inception, StatSocial has enabled Fortune 500 brands and global marketing agencies to harness social audience insights to fuel marketing initiatives from market research and paid media, to earned and influencer attribution. 

Our Silhouette™ platform is the industry’s only social audience solution that provides marketers with a holistic view of who their customers are and what motivates their purchase decisions based on their interactions across major social and community platforms. While we have competitors, most rely on social listening or Twitter alone to source their social audience data. 

During my tenure at Cision, I focused on building a better way for communication professionals to view the revenue derived from earned media. Social media remained a critical gap in the attribution landscape, sparking my interest in StatSocial. 

I worked with our team to build a solution that maps social identities to purchase data, finally allowing marketers to see the ROI impact of their social and influencer campaigns.  

What’s been your strategy when promoting StatSocial? 

To be honest, our marketing team is fairly new, less than a year old in fact. Up until the spring of 2021, we mainly focused on growing our pipeline through sales outreach. Additionally, before and during 2021, our sales pipeline was mainly fueled by referrals and key industry partners. 

Now that we have a small but mighty marketing team in place, we’ve seen an increase in inbound traffic to our site. All of our marketing efforts for 2022 center around lead generation and brand awareness. 

We fuel lead generation mainly through our content marketing strategy that then spills over to support all organic and paid activities across social and searches.

Most of the content we focus on brings awareness to social audience insights and the marketing use cases that Silhouette supports including market research, influencer audiences and attribution, earned and PR audience intelligence, and social audience retargeting. 

We are working on building relationships with media contacts and partnering with marketing thought leaders to educate researchers and marketers on the benefits and capabilities of social audience data.

Can you tell us a little more about Silhouette™?

Let me explain this using a client case study. We worked with a major at-home fitness company that was looking to better understand their competitors’ audience to fuel future targeting and ultimately capture market share. Using Silhouette, they were able to create social audiences representative of their audience and that of their competitors to identify key similarities and differences. 

What they found was their competitor’s audience was largely made up of diet and exercise enthusiasts and serious athletes. They could then leverage Silhouette to identify which media channels (websites, podcasts, magazines) and influencers their competitor’s audience had higher affinities for. 

Acting on this information around their audience and their competitors, they could validate existing buyer personas and create new ones based on their competitor’s audience, tailor messaging to this new audience, adjust keywords and paid ad messaging, and purchase ad placements on media channels their competitor’s audience engaged on most.

How do content marketing and SEO fit in StatSocial’s overall brand strategy?

Our content marketing and SEO strategies are what fuel our inbound lead generation. From a content planning standpoint, we create more content around the product use cases we’re looking to drive higher revenue in. 

We count on gated content like eBooks, whitepapers, and webinars as well as blog content that we can then push to organic and paid social and search campaigns. 

We use a handful of platforms that have been effective including Hubspot, SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Adwords. What’s cool is that we leverage our platform, Silhouette, to identify audiences (in our case, marketing executives) and the media channels they engage with most to fuel our messaging as well as validate any paid media buys and partnerships. 

We can also take these audiences created in Silhouette and distribute them through our partners at LiveRamp for activation across social channels.

With our paid and organic initiates across social and search combined, we went from 99% of new leads coming from sales outreach in Q4 to now 25% of our leads coming from marketing efforts in Q1 across email, paid search, paid and organic social and SEO improvements. 

Our social engagement has exponentially grown by 1063% in Q1, due to more engaging and regular content, and paid efforts that spill over to increased followings across our channels. 

What’s your link-building strategy been like?

Our link-building strategy is a work in progress. Currently, we are working on taking a full inventory of our existing links through tools like Google Search Console and disavowing any spammy backlinks to ensure we continue to capitalize on all our SEO efforts. 

We also work with industry partners, like Cint, to build reciprocal relationships, which include link sharing on each other’s sites.

Some of our latest strategies include working with other SaaS platforms to exchange guest posts on blogs, as well as ensuring that our platform is listed on any directory site that is relevant to the services we provide.

Is there any piece of content that you own (ebook/ whitepaper/ podcast) you’d like to tell us about? 

We recently partnered with marketing thought leader, Jay Baer and his team to educate marketing professionals via webinar on the difference between social listening and social audience insights. 

We find that most marketers think of these two as synonymous, but they are completely different. Social listening captures trending conversations on social media, whereas social audience insights can capture the individuals behind those conversations and draw actionable insights into their interests, passions, brand affinities, preferred media channels, and more. 

We also created a recent eBook around social audience insights as a unified data solution where we dive into our product use cases and real-life examples of how marketers are using Silhouette to better reach their target audience. 

Any advice you’d like to give to marketing professionals, especially in the SaaS domain?

I think the biggest piece of advice or hurdle SaaS marketers have to overcome is making sure their solution differentiates from those of their competitors, and one that offers an excellent user experience. 

While this is easier said than done, it’s key for marketers to have strong relationships with their product and sales teams to identify competitor features, user experience, and product positioning to stay ahead of the curve and adjust the product offering accordingly. 

SaaSy Tidbits from David Barker

• SaaS firms need to make sure that their solutions differ from their competitors in terms of features and user experience. 
• It is key for SaaS marketers to have strong relationships with their product and sales teams to identify competitor features, user experience, and product positioning. This will help them stay ahead of the curve and adjust the product offering. 
• Both social listening and social audience insights are critical for SaaS businesses. But SaaS marketers often treat these two terms as synonymous. 
  • Social listening captures trending conversations on social media
  • Whereas, social audience insights put a face to the social conversations, allowing marketers to draw actionable insights into their interests, passions, brand affinities, preferred media channels, and more. 

As a SaaS content marketing agency, we realize the significance of sharing engaging content to fuel lead generation and boost audience engagement. That’s why we found StatSocial’s narrative truly insightful and inspiring.

StatSocial has indeed set high standards for those in the audience intelligence domain. If you want to know more about the platform, we recommend connecting with David on LinkedIn. Alternatively, you may visit their website to learn more about their social audience insights platform.

Author

Hazel Kamath

Hazel Kamath is a Senior Content Writer and Strategist at Growfusely – a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.

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