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The podcast is proudly brought to you by Inter-Dev, an international B2B digital marketing agency dedicated to helping businesses navigate the digital landscape. We'll bring you insightful discussions, expert advice, and the latest trends in the industry.
Intro:
Welcome to another episode of the InterDev B2B Digital Marketing Agency Podcast.
Jack:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of our B2B Digital Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Jack Lunz, and today's episode is on Marketing Attribution and Social Media Marketing. To discuss this, I am joined with Emeric Ernoult, the founder and CEO of Agorapulse, a social media management software. Thank you for joining us, Emeric.
Emeric:
Thank you, Jack. Very happy to be here.
Jack:
Great to have you. So, I just wanted to first, I think some people may not know exactly what marketing attribution is. So, can you just go over what is marketing attribution and how is marketing attribution evolved with the advent of social media marketing?
Emeric:
Well, it's, it's definitely a very hot question and a very hot topic. Marketing attribution is basically giving marketing credit for whatever value it is delivering. So, if you are sales led, it is how many of those deals that you closed were initiated by a marketing activity, by a marketing campaign. If you're.
Emeric:
Product or inbound led is how many of that, those signups and how many of those conversions of those signups, so many visitors and, and, and leads you got from marketing activity that could be SEO, paid ads, webinars, podcasts like this one, this is a marketing activity, for example, so it's basically. It is the science of giving credit to this activity for the future deals and the future sales pipeline, the future free trials, the future revenue that you're going to be able to track back to this activity.
Emeric:
That's, that's what it is and how it has evolved. Well, it has interestingly enough before the digital world. So, before 1995, attribution was probably not even a thing. Because it was very, very, very complicated and difficult to do because there was no direct technical link between a viewer of an ad on TV and that same person going to a supermarket and buying the product that's still on TV.
Emeric:
So, attributing the increase in revenue for a search and search product based on advertising campaigns that were run in journals, newspapers and TV shows or radio shows was very, very hard to do. It was. Kind of possible in a certain way, like roughly, but very, very hard to do since the digital era, obviously you, you click on something and because of cookies and all sorts of technologies, we're able to track your journey online.
Emeric:
And then the mobile came in and it, it, it made, it made. More difficult to track the journey because between mobile and laptop, if you are not using the same browser or you were not connected to an account across those 2 devices, we would lose you. So, we would lose the connection between the initial event and the conversion event or the revenue event and then.
Emeric:
Social and forums and what we call dark social now. So, if I go on a Facebook group and I say, oh, you should try this. So, you should use that. Or someone go and ask the question and people go in because they are, they have a relationship because they're an affiliate, because they are an ambassador, like for whatever marketing initiatives, they are representing the company in that.
Emeric:
Social media space, they are recommending you and nothing is being tracked because they're not using, you know, specific links or specific technologies that allow for the tracking. So, the tracking went from none in 1990 to almost everything. If you, if, if you were working in a digital business like we are in, in 2002 or three to now a very spread around and cluttered word where there are pieces and pieces and bits of things here and there, but it's really, really hard to have the overall journey, which makes it, which makes it a challenge for marketers.
Emeric:
Because they want to do it. They try to do it. They put a lot of efforts in place to do it, but then it keeps breaking here and here and there, but you still have to live in this world and make the best out of it. And it's hard to follow everything that's going on, you know, especially in social media, especially in social media, find where exactly, you know, how the buyer's journey gets to the final conversion, which is obviously the most important thing for marketers to understand what that journey, that path has been. So, it's important, like you're saying, now there's tons of data. Like we didn't have data before. Now there's overwhelming data.
Jack:
What features do, Agorapulse, like what do you, use to Help in market attribution in social media marketing, are there, are there features to help figure out that buyer’s journeys path?
Emeric:
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, attribution is, is the possibility to do at marketing attribution is created by one simple thing, which is. A link to a web property with elements in the link that allows to the web property to track where the link is coming from to insert that into an analytics software.
Emeric:
So, the one we're working with is Google analytics for, because that's the one that's being used by 80 percent of businesses online, but you can use others like, you know, I heard Matomo is being used in Europe more and more and a couple of others. And the characteristic of that, which, which, which we.
Emeric:
Commonly called UTMs, but they can have other names and other forms. But that's basically it's in your link. You have elements of the link that are telling you this is coming from this source. This is coming from this kind of media or medium. This is coming from this name campaign, that campaign name.
Emeric:
This is coming from that type of content. So, you're basically inserting into the link elements of historical data about where it's coming from. So, for example, let's take a theoretical example. If you create a blog post and you put a link in that blog post to your product, you're going to put the link.
Emeric:
You're going to say the source is my website. So own website or a Gorpal's website or AP website. If you want to make it shorter sources, AP website, and the medium is blog because that's the medium. That's how that's, that's the channel that we got this lead from. And maybe the content is, let's say the, the article is about marketing attribution, so the content is marketing attribution article.
Emeric:
So, you have blog, you have article attribution article, and you have my own website as a source. And once that click goes into the system, into my product and they sign up because the UTM says that, and the link tells me it's comes from my website and on my website, it was my blog and, on my blog, it was this blog post I’m, and this will go into GA so GA will know that and keep that data in, into its memory of big data.
Emeric:
And once that person will do something specific, like check my pricing page or whatever, you will be followed by GA and recognized by GA and GA will be able to attribute anything that that user is going to do on my product or on my website to this initial source of, you know, of marketing activity that, that is how attribution is done.
Emeric:
Across the board in paid ads, on Facebook, on meta, on Google ads through email marketing campaign, anything you do, if you use HubSpot or Salesforce or Marketo or any kind of marketing automation tool, they all work the same. They work based on links. Those links contain parameters. Those parameters allow you to know where the first click came from, where the person came from.
Emeric:
And from there, they follow the path and the journey of that user and they're able to know, oh, when they came from this, that's what they did when they came from that, that's what they did and so on and so forth. And by querying Google Analytics or any analytics software that you're using, Adobe Analytics or any other analytics software, by querying them through their API, you're able to repatriate all these parameters and start building a story on that blog post did this.
Emeric:
That post on Facebook did that, that message on LinkedIn did that and so on and so forth. So, the key is the link. And first of all, the key to attribution is sending traffic to a property that you want something to happen, some kind of conversion to happen. You want them to read a page. You want them to watch a video.
Emeric:
You want them to watch a webinar. You want them to subscribe to a newsletter. You want them to sign up for your product. You want them to. Anything that is a first step to having them closer to your ecosystem and that link is going to give you the source and that way you're going to start being able to attribute that source that that activity to a source i.e. a marketing campaign or something you did marketing wise that triggered that person to Pay in to pay attention to you and what you do. So, we've not invented that, that marketing automation software, the hotspots of the world, the sales Salesforce, the marketer of the world, the part that they always, they've done, they've been doing that for 15 years.
Emeric:
What we've done in social media is like, what we noticed is nobody in our world was doing any of that. Nobody in social media was doing that. And we thought this is silly because that puts people working on social, on marketing, on social media in a weaker seat than if they are doing paid ads or if they are doing marketing automation or email marketing, all of these marketers doing email marketing, marketing automation or paid ads.
Emeric:
They get credit for the work they do where the marketers and the people are working on social media, they get zero credit for the work they do because they cannot track anything and they cannot attribute any business value to the work they do. So, we thought this is wrong. And we basically imported the practice, the technical technological practice of how you do that on HubSpot.
Emeric:
We included it into our software. So, nothing, nothing. groundbreaking in terms of technologies, just taking a technology that works in email and paid ads and, and, and using it in social media, basically. Now there, you know, we're not going to get into that because there are a ton of challenges.
Emeric:
Like how do you that on Tik when you cannot add any link, in your posts, right? Because on Tik TOK, you cannot, well, you cannot, but you can, because if you do a story on Instagram, you can put a link. So, what can you do with stories that. That will create some kind of attribution and tracking when you use a link in your bio, which a lot of people do now in your Lincoln bio, you can some put, check the link in my bio for more information on this.
Emeric:
And now you can do that on Tick Tock can do that on Instagram. So without via the Lincoln bio, you can create that attribution. So, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. And our philosophy and mantra are that whatever you can track. You should track it because at least you're going to see the tip of the iceberg.
Emeric:
And I have this quote that I keep sharing with my team. You have to check the tip of the iceberg. I understand this is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of conversion, a lot of activity is going to happen under the surface of the water, the sea level, right? A lot of the stuff is the part of the iceberg that underwater, it's, what is it?
Emeric:
Like eight tenths of the size of the iceberg. I understand that. But if you don't see a tip. How do you know that there's an iceberg beneath it? Like, if you cannot see anything, you're blind. So, you're, you're take the image comparison with the sailboat. You're in your sailboat. You don't know where the icebergs are.
Emeric:
How, what kind of route should you take? What kind of path should you, you have no idea. Once you start seeing the tips, you can say, we can go more this way or that way because we see a tip. So, there's a tip, there's probably an iceberg beneath it. So, tracking those tips at the iceberg is in my opinion, absolutely crucial.
Emeric:
And I know that it is, it can be controversial because some people say you shouldn't track anything and you should have a multi touch attribution, yadda, yadda, yadda, or no attribution at all and create demand. And I don't think this is right. And I think we need to; we need to track what we can track so we can start have insights about.
Emeric:
What looks like it's working and what looks like it's not working at all. Because if you run social media, if you run campaigns on social media and you do this kind of tracking and you get zero, trust me, there's probably nothing much happening there. Right. So at least now you guys are giving marketers a better idea of, let's say the ocean of social media, because.
Emeric:
Before our software or other softwares like it, you weren't able to see where the tips of the iceberg, so to say, were in the, in the, in the ocean. So now it gives them a better idea of, uh, you know, what, what possibly is working. So also interesting is that this could be the understanding the path for the.
Emeric:
The purchaser or the user can help with the sales team to understand they went to this, uh, blog. They went to that blog and understanding a little bit more of where, what they've seen and that kind of thing. So, you know, it gives a, you know, a lot of information that, that, you know, accurate information of where these users are actually using it.
Jack:
Can you tell us about like some of the early days of Agorapulse, like what, like, how did the idea sort of come up?
Jack:
Was there, was there something that, like, frustrated you? Like, you wanted more information and couldn't get it. So basically, invented your own software.
Emeric:
Yeah, very interesting question. Which actually made me realize recently that we totally connected the dots in the very early days of Agorapulse were.
Emeric:
All about ROI and return on investment and how we can help people starting their journey on Facebook. Because when we started in 2011, we were only focusing on Facebook and we saw those people basically running contests and promotions on Facebook. That's what we started. That's where we started.
Emeric:
We, we, our software allowed people to run sweepstakes and quizzes and photo contests and video contests on Facebook. And the idea back then, it's not technically possible anymore because Facebook has changed the way they identify user and they give user identity to vendors like us. Now they have a hashed ID.
Emeric:
So, we don't know. We don't know the real Facebook idea of a user when they come and install an app, a Facebook app, for example. But back then when they were installing a Facebook app, we would get their real Facebook ID and we would able to match that person who just entered my app, my, my sweepstakes, for example, is the same person who commented my post two months ago and sent me a private message last week.
Emeric:
And so, we were able to kind of have the whole journey and know who these Facebook fans are and have their email because we were running a sweepstakes and, in the sweepstakes, they were. In order to enter and participate, they would like the page, they would give us their email address and they would give us their Facebook ID.
Emeric:
And because of that, we were able to link the Facebook engagement they were having with their email and their real identity. And any, any other kind of information you could ask as a qualification, qualifying information in your, in your form, in your sweepstakes. So, the homepage of Agorapulse in 2011, when we launched it in August, was your Facebook fans aren't worth anything unless you know who they are.
Emeric:
That was, right? Yeah, no, totally. That was, so it's, it's like, it's 12 years ago and so 12 years ago already, our passion, our vision was we have to do better at making sure that what we do on social media, on Facebook at the time and on social media overall today is valuable. And not getting a bunch of strangers who will never be customers of ours liking our page and liking our stuff, because that alone will dry down and, and prove not to be value.
Emeric:
So, we have to go the extra mile and prove that it is more, it's more than likes, and it's more than engagement. It's actually potentially business value in the end. So, it's, it's always been the driving force behind the company since we are a bootstrap company, meaning we've never raised a ton of money, like most of our larger competitor.
Emeric:
It took us time to build our vision and to make it a reality. But we think now we're still not where we want to be like every person who builds a product, but getting, getting much closer to what our vision looks like and, and be more excited about the value we can create through that.
Jack:
Talking about some of your competitors, what is the significant feature of Agorapulse that, that kind of makes it stand out compared to its competitors?
Emeric:
Yeah. You know, basically all are. So, if you look at the landscape in our industry, you, you have the all-in-one tools like the Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Meltwater, like the, they do everything, everything being publishing, monitoring, listening, and reporting. We're all the same and all different. I. E. If you want to do local marketing with managing TripAdvisor reviews, if you're a hotel or, or Yelp, if you're a restaurant, you know, we don't have them yet. So, you're probably going to be better off with a Sprout Social that has Yelp and TripAdvisor already.
Emeric:
If you're a super large company and you need a very granular set of roles for dozens and dozens of users, we may not have the granularity that you need right now. So, there are small, you know, tiny differences that matter that don't matter to you and me, but will matter to a certain type of customer on the, on the core, on the foundation, we're doing all the same things.
Emeric:
What's going to separate us is that we're going to do something really, really well that the others are not doing. So. The reason we're still here and we're bootstrapped despite all these companies having raised a ton of money is because in 2014, we invented the social media inbox. So, we were basically the first social media management software who presented comments, private messages, and every incoming content from social media into an inbox like feature where everybody else at the time were displaying columns and columns and columns and columns like dozens of columns based on the profiles and the type of content and it was what it was all one column which made things very chaotic and difficult to manage when you had many profiles and lots of activities on them.
Emeric:
So, we invented something that everybody used to know which I have an email, I have Gmail, I have mail. And I know how it works. It's a feed of messages. And I just like check them, read and reply and done. And mark as done and get a sense of inbox zero at the end of the day. So, our motto back then was social inbox zero.
Emeric:
We were, we invented social inbox zero. So that, that took us to, from 2014. I think Sprout Social copied the inbox in 2016 and Hootsuite copied the inbox in six years later, so it was like 2020 or something. So, it took them some time to do that, right? Yeah, but they, they eventually also had an inbox.
Emeric:
So, since 2020 we didn't really have a differentiator, so we, we worked. really hard on, and we still have that vision of proving the value of social media. So, we, we work really hard on that social media ROI technology and reporting, which is now our unique feature, which is patented in the U S. So, like I filed a patent for it, just so it’s less easy to copy us moving forward.
Emeric:
It was easier in the past, but we were smaller, so it was, it was hard to spend the money to get a patent filed and that would be the unique thing you will not get. For example, with us, we're going to tell you this post. Generated that much money for you. That person in your team generated that much money for you or that many conversions to that event or that many downloaded that white paper.
Emeric:
We can tell you post by post social profiles by social profile. So, if you have multiple Facebook pages or groups, we're going to tell you which ones are working and which ones are not. If you have multiple team members, we're going to tell you which one is generating conversions and which ones are not at the end of the day, the level of detail information that you can have been unique.
Emeric:
Sure. If you have an employee advocacy program, we're going to tell you who's, which of your employees who are sharing your content on their own LinkedIn or their own social profiles are generating what kind of traffic, what kind of conversion, what kind of revenue as well. So that level of tracking is unique to us.
Emeric:
And that's why I filed a patent because I wanted to protect the, the invention, but that's the main differentiator for us.
Jack:
Social media has been sort of a third wheel to B2B marketing. Some people don't see that much value into it. So, what is a feature that in Agorapulse that they can use? I mean, already you're talking about ROI conversions, understanding your team, who's doing better, who's sharing stuff, you know, you tell everybody in the, in the office, share the post.
Jack:
And you know, you see. But, that kind of a thing. So, it can definitely help with a, with a B2B business. What are some of the other features or something that like? How would B2B clients use your software to improve their marketing.
Emeric:
The difference between B2B clients and B2C clients most of the time is the time it takes to convert the leads to a buyer, to a customer and in a B2C environment, it's, it can be a matter of minutes, right?
Emeric:
It can be very, very fast. They're a lead at 3:12 and they're a customer at 3:17. It can go really, really fast. When you're, when you're in a B2B environment, that three, four or five minutes. Can go to two weeks, two months, sometimes a year. So, like, depending on the size of the deals you're going after the timeframe between the moment they get, they become aware of you to the moment that they become a customer of yours can vary a lot and can be very, very long.
Emeric:
So, what you want to measure in B2B is not necessarily revenue because it's very, it's going to be down the path and it's further in the future. But you want to measure all the steps that people are taking to get to that revenue. So, what we measure when it, when it comes to website traffic, we measure people visiting our pricing page that gives us intent.
Emeric:
So, we know that these people had intent. So, they go to our website and eventually they visit our pricing page. We will, we'll value that. We'll give like a dollar value to that or 2, something like that. What we value as well is any kind of lead. So, what you want to do in B2B, you want to create. Really, really helpful, amazingly helpful content that you share with the audience and that you invite them to if it's an online event or a webinar that basically stuff that they would be willing to pay for because it is so good that you're promoting and say, hey, we're offering this to you and social media is an amazing place to.
Emeric:
Offer value to an audience, LinkedIn, especially new B2B environment. And you want to track how many of them took my gifts and how many of them signed up to my online event. So like right now we're, we're organizing an online event for agencies, um, about Pinterest marketing. We have, you know, Pinterest who comes to speak as a keynote speaker.
Emeric:
So, like the level of quality of the content that's going to be delivered, it's going to be super useful. We pay for everything. We spend an incredible amount of time and energy to. Make sure the content is amazing. Speakers are amazing. Like all that we do it for free with the intent that we provide so much value that the people are going to, the B2B people are going to be exposed to that value are going to be more willing to talk to us and say, yeah, that was very interesting.
Emeric:
Thank you. Oh yeah. I'd like to talk about my social media management software. I have a need where I may have anything in the future and. What you can do on social media, especially on LinkedIn, and especially if you get your team and your employees or your ambassadors or influencers you work with to help you promote this free, amazing quality event is definitely going to give you an idea of how much social media participated to driving eyeballs and traffic into that amazing free value that you offered in, in your, with your content.
Emeric:
And once you have the, the leads, the people who signed up for this content to view and consume this content, and you are able to convert them from them from needs to MQL, to SEL, to SQL, and so forth, you're going to start having an amazing clarity on, okay, when we do this event and we promote it on social organically or through our Teams and through our ambassadors and influencers, this is the value we create and eventually it's hard.
Emeric:
It is hard to do like it. It's taking us a lot of efforts, but once you're able to go through the whole funnel with the attribution to step number one was to get the promotion on to get the content promoted on LinkedIn or on Twitter on. X. Sorry. Then you can start to see value B2B marketing value in what you do on social media.
Emeric:
So, that's the difference for B2B versus B2C is you're not going for the sales. You're, you're going for the engagement, the attention to an amazing piece of content. That's going to make you look professional, serious, legitimate, and probably a good potential partner for the future. For my future needs off for us, it's going to be social media marketing, social media management, but it could be email marketing, could be any type of marketing activities or other activities that as a B2B business, you're going to need.
Jack:
Can you give us like maybe a, a success story that may be like a, you know, sort of like actually they used Agorapulse and it changed their sort of either marketing strategy or you know their marketing attribution, like,
Emeric:
Yeah, I have. Totally. I have one on top of mine, which is a B2C customer.
Emeric:
They sell plant-based medicine and it's a very small business. It's like a 10 people business. Very, very small. And they do all of their sales through social media. Why? Because the people who are passionate about healing themselves and staying healthy using plants versus chemical medicines, uh, medication are very, very passionate about this way of.
Emeric:
You know, staying healthy. They are exchanging a lot of tips. They're discussing a lot of forums. They're part of a lot of communities and Facebook groups and so on and so forth. So, for them, it's an amazing distribution channel and what they have done, which has been very, very successful for them. And that's, that's, that's an inspiration for everybody else is every time they post something on their social media, Facebook groups and pages and, and, and Instagram, they never tried to sell anything in the main content.
Emeric:
The main content is always informational about the disease, about the infection, about, you know, the kind of health issues you can be confronted with and facing. And it's only in the comments that they say, if you want, if so, now that you've read the value, the value-added content, if you are interested about a possible cure for this problem that we told you everything about everything we know about, here’s the link that you can, you can check and buy our product.
Emeric:
So not. Not using the main content to drive traffic to the product, but using the main content to provide value and the comments to drive traffic, very efficient for them, that they're generating, close to. 45 to 50 K a month of revenue directly attributable to social media. And, again, it is the tip of the iceberg.
Emeric:
You remember like tracking is not tracking everything. So, it's probably much more, but what, from what they can track it's from 40 to 15. Using the main social content to provide amazing value and using the conversation to provide the, the sale. You could call that social selling. Maybe that's what social selling should be or should look like.
Emeric:
So that's one thing they do. And the other thing they do with most of their social media sales, they come from Instagram and they're attributed to Instagram by the attribution system that we provide them with, which is quite crazy when you think about the fact that. There's no links on Instagram and the way they do that is through stories.
Emeric:
So, the stories again, they're about the affection. They're about the disease. They're about the health issue. The whole story is about giving information and value to better understand what is the disease about? What is the affection about? How can you recognize it? And, and, and what people say and how many people have it and like information about you have this thing.
Emeric:
Let me tell you everything I know about this thing through a story on Instagram. And at the end of the story on Instagram, the button is. You want to learn more about possible cures, send us a message. And it's a, it's a call to action. That's calling to a DM, to a mess, to a private message. And so, through the DM, people say, yes, I'd love to know more about possible cures through the DM, they're going to engage with them.
Emeric:
They're going to answer their questions. They're going to make them feel comfortable about the fact that it's based. On plans and so on and so forth, and the sales going to happen from there. So, they're going to send them the link to, hey, you can buy it here. And he will go through a DM that is a CTA at the end of the story.
Emeric:
So even from Instagram with a strategy like that, you can create amazing content in a story at the end of the story, say, hey, want to learn more? Send us a message, send us a message. And then through the conversation, the link will come and the link will be tracked and that allowed us to tell them among their team members who were engaging in those conversation, which ones were selling the most, which one were converting the most, the most revenue.
Emeric:
And that was really groundbreaking for them because suddenly they say that person's doing 9, 000 a month of revenue directly in Instagram DM that person 600. There's something person number two can learn from person number one. And you know what happens in sales teams. I mean, if you've run or if you've known sales teams in the past, that's what sales, that's how sales teams operate.
Emeric:
They have quota, they have to close a certain amount of money. And every week there's a deal review. Well, every sales team sits down with the sales manager and they go through the deals and they go through their quota and their quota attainment. What percentage are you on? They take someone who is doing really, really well.
Emeric:
And they say, okay, show us how you did it. Give us more details. Like, you know, show us the call. They look, they listened to the call that was very, very successful for those sales. Basically, use that little tug of a competition between the sales team to give everybody their recipe about how it works for them.
Emeric:
So, everybody can learn from them and to elevate the whole team by shedding the light on the best practices and on the ones who wins. And with this system, you can now do the same thing on social media, which was impossible before. So, I became more accustomed to. How sales teams operate in the last two years.
Emeric:
And I really saw the parallel here where this, we now can provide the same data that will allow a social media team to know who is doing really good and learn from them and do more of that with everybody else. And, you know, sometimes maybe go with the ones who are absolutely not doing good and try to understand why it's not working, what are they not doing that the others are doing that's working.
Emeric:
So that was one of the most interesting cases that I stumbled upon recently because they were winning at many different areas that were very specific and very real. You could actually touch the numbers and see them, which was, which was quite incredible. And they had no idea before that they had no clue.
Emeric:
They, they couldn't know because nothing was being tracked and none of the software on the market that they've ever used in the past. I have, I have ever helped them with that because they were not tracking anything.
Jack:
We're now on this verge of, you know, getting even more information. AI is a part of it now. What trends do you see, do you foresee for, for social media marketing attribution and Agorapulse?
Emeric:
Well, you mentioned AI, you know, AI is a trend. No, nobody can ignore any more in 2023, and 2024, soon.
Emeric:
You cannot, not include AI into your process. So, AI is going to make everything smoother and faster and more efficient. It's not going to replace any of us. It's going to make us do twice as much as we did in the past. In some industries, AI may disrupt the industry and make it render it moot or, or useless.
Emeric:
It's not going to be the case in social media for one very simple reason is in order to do what we do, you have to connect to all the APIs and the AI cannot replace that those API connections are very, very complex. It takes, they take a lot of time. They're very hard to maintain. Uh, people cannot do what they do with us.
Emeric:
They are not connected to all the social networks that they have, they are present on, so it's not going to disrupt our industry, but it's going to make it much more efficient. It's going to surface things that we couldn't surface with human beings because it would. It would take too much time. Um, so you can see even more of the, of the iceberg.
Emeric:
You know, you're going to see more. You're going to see more of the iceberg. That's a good image. Absolutely. You're right. You're also going to see things that are, if you had to do, figure them out yourself, it would take you two days of work where for AI is going to take a click and it's going to be instant.
Emeric:
So that's definitely going to be very helpful there for, the rest. I do, I, first of all, I, I am absolutely convinced that social media is here to stay for a long, long time. When I say social media, it's not necessarily people think social media always made Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, well, maybe it's Facebook today, but it's.
Emeric:
It's, it's going to be, and now it's TikTok two years ago. There was almost no TikTok. Pinterest is pretty big for certain industries and certain types of brands as well, and, and, and we shouldn't ignore it. Uh, WhatsApp's becoming huge. When you look at, I, the other day I had an issue with my bank. I'm a, it's a French bank and I, I was, you know, trying to contact them and at the bottom of their websites, hey, contact us or support on WhatsApp.
Emeric:
I said, whoa, now my French bank is having WhatsApp as a support channel, which is. Crazy. Like before I thought only banks in Brazil would have that. Like it was very South American, but now it's becoming worldwide now. So, it's definitely changing. The landscape is changing, but it's changing, but that's actually reinforcing.
Emeric:
Like, think about this, having a bank writing support on a social network, what like on social media apps, such as WhatsApp. Five years ago, would have, would have been unthinkable all security issues and brand image and this and this and that, like, let's stick with email and it goes through that and you, we send desk and that's it.
Emeric:
So now they're all opening all the big, even the big brands are being more and more open as to, okay, how can we be present where our people are actually spending their days? And a lot of people are spending their days on what's up and that's, that's the reason. So, I think it's going to permeate. The, the, the society and, and the, the, the human habits, and we're going to see more and more of social media, but it's going to be also very fragmented, which makes things very, very complex for brands and businesses.
Emeric:
And that's where a tool like us can be very helpful because the more fragmented it become, the more of a headache it is to stay on top of it. We're going to see more and more value in having all in the same place and making sure that you're not, you know, wasting your life. Um, going from social networks, social network to see what's going on there.
Emeric:
And last but not least, I love getting signs from my, from my people I know very well about what kind of impact social media has on their life. And the other day we're rebuilding our, our terrace, we're hesitating between tiles and wooden floor. And my wife drove to a place where we could have, uh, examples of wooden floors and how they look like and different colors and different size and stuff like that.
Emeric:
And I asked her on the, on the way there, because I'm amazed by how many. Stores that she finds so many different, you know, tile makers and that kind of stuff. I said, why, where did you find all these ideas and this inspiration? So simple Instagram and Pinterest. So, the challenge we have as Agorapoles, the challenge we have to become better giving attribution to that tile floor maker who did an Instagram post and got my wife to go check them out through the link in their bio, like all how, how to put all these.
Emeric:
Puzzles pieces together for me, it's, it's, it's, it's absolutely passionate. It's a passion of mine completely. And I'm like, I'm looking at the future. I said, the future is going to be more complex. So, the value we can add there to prove the value of all this, that's not going away. For sure. It's, it's, it's here to stay.
Emeric:
Like the web is here to stay. Mobile is here to stay. What is social media at the end of the day? It's instead of having. Media or businesses doing one too many publications and content, which was the web of the early 2000s now it's like everybody can be a creator. Everybody can create a YouTube channel or a Tik TOK and become a star.
Emeric:
Like it's, that is social media. That is the power to the people and the power to the people creating a new, new advertising channels that are not really advertising anymore, but now you have to pay someone to promote your product and, and you want to be visible there. So, you're going to buy an ad in a podcast.
Emeric:
So, this is becoming very, very scattered and it's going to go, this is going to accelerate and get even worse if we can say it's bad, that's it. Even more democratic, there's going to be even more social media platforms and different ones and VR and AR aren't here. And, you know, maybe meta will be its own, you know, thing as well.
Emeric:
So. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? You know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there was only one way you could get advertised or three ways. Like you could go on TV, you could go on radio, or you can go in the streets on, on, on big panels on the street, but that was it. And if you were a small business, you didn't have access to that because it was too expensive.
Emeric:
You had to be a big business to have access to that. So having this multitude of possible channels created by. The social media platforms available to you to promote your business is a challenge because it's hard and it's all over the place and it's overwhelming. Yes, I know that, but it's also an opportunity because 40 years ago as a small or medium business, you didn't have access to that.
Emeric:
The thing is when your business mature and become bigger, you have to deal with that. You have to live with that and that you have to manage that complexity because you have no choice. So that's how I see the future more complex, but also more diverse with more opportunities, but you'll have to learn the skills and have the tools that allow you to benefit from them.
Jack:
Great. And what, one of the tools would be great would be Agorapulse. So yeah, I mean, understanding a lot of that data would be very helpful. Great. A lot of good advice, definitely for marketers that want to be able to understand this huge ocean of social media. It definitely allows you to be able to see the tips that might be important and might be able to follow.
Jack:
I hope our audience learns as much as I did, thank you, Emeric, for being here for the discussion. Thanks to the audience for listening and of course. Caring is sharing. So please like review and rate this podcast and share it with your friends that are interested in these marketing skills.
Emeric:
Great. Thank you very much. Thanks Jack. That was a pleasure. I hope we. We helped the audience to learn a thing or two in that they got, they got a little bit of the passion that I have with the topic.
Jack:
I'm sure they did.
Emeric:
I'm passionate about it. And, uh, you know, social media is where the eyeballs are.
Jack:
I mean, that's, the name of the game in advertising and marketing. Great. Thanks a lot.
Emeric:
Thank you.
Jack:
All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you for tuning in to the InterDev Digital Marketing Podcast. Together, we're exploring the future of digital marketing. Subscribe and join us on this exciting journey.
Outro:
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