Faceoff: Social Media Marketing Suites vs. Specialized Marketing & PR Tools

More than two-thirds of ardent social media marketers surveyed by Forrester Research believe that buying all their social tools from a single vendor is more effective than buying social point solutions from several different vendors. Social media marketers and PR specialists love the convenience – or at least the idea of convenience — of a single vendor. Learning four different tools and repeatedly logging into different platforms seems to be a hassle best avoided.  

Vendors maintain that managing social programs through one platform will improve sharing and collaboration among staff, thereby improving productivity. Marketers have accepted that argument. A remarkable 69 percent of marketers agree or strongly agree that using a single vendor is more effective.

Here’s the rub: Although social suites sometimes perform well, they suffer from uneven quality and inadequate integration, according to a new Forrester Research report, “Buy Social Point Solutions, Not Social Suites” by Nate Elliott. Even the best suites have just as many inferior tools as good ones.

The Integration Challenge

Only 64 percent of surveyed purchasers of social media management suites agree that the tools they purchased live up to vendors’ promises. Many cite a lack of effective integration as a problem. Vendors sometimes acquire other tools in an effort to offer additional services, but find that combining disparate technologies is extremely difficult. The integration plans rarely succeed, Elliott warms.

In any case, Elliott questions the value of integrating different social tools. “Just because social ads, Facebook pages, and branded communities are all called “social” doesn’t mean they have much in common,” he explains. “Each targets different users on different sites with different messages to drive different behaviors.”

Most vendors started as specialist in a single category. Many now offer two or three types of social tools. A few offer products across the spectrum. Social suites, according to Forrester’s definition, include platforms for social listening, social reach, social depth and social relationships. Only three vendors, Adobe, Salesforce and Sprinklr, offer solutions in all four areas. None do all jobs well, according to Elliott.

“Marketers using social suites are significantly less satisfied than those using social point solutions, and many feel they’ve been misled by their vendors,” Elliott states in the report.

Point Solutions Rated Better

Clients of point solutions rate their vendors much higher than clients of social suites in features and functionality, value for money, and nearly every other parameter Forrester tracks.

Forrester’s recommendations for social media marketers include:

• Buy best in class social point solutions. Marketers gain no benefit from buying one social tool that does everything.

• Buy social reach platforms that can plan, buy and measure social ads in coordination with other digital ads. Social ads are just like any other kind of ads. They help you deliver messages to audiences who may not otherwise pay attention to your company.

• Seek social depth platforms that connect to other website tools. Customer reviews and branded blogs serve the same role as the rest of your website. They tell shoppers more about your products and help you turn prospects into customers.

• Buy social relationship platforms that integrate with other relationship marketing tools, such as email service providers and other relationship marketing technologies. Your Facebook fans and Twitter followers are probably existing customers or prospects.

In most cases, the integrated social suites are almost certainly “good enough” for most PR and marketing organizations.  Suites sell the major advantages of service integration and of clients having to learn and use only one user interface. But suites aren’t usually the best solution for most organizations. Specialized online solutions that focus on doing one task really well are almost always more effective and easier to use than a module that does the same task within a suite of services.

A media monitoring and measurement service like CyberAlert, for example, offers more coverage, greater accuracy, and more useful bells & whistles than the integrated suites. The same is true for other marketing functions built into the suites. Specialized software tools perform each function better. In today’s competitive environment, using the most effective PR and marketing solutions makes the most sense – and ultimately delivers the best results. That’s especially true for client organizations that need only one or two of the multiple functions in a suite.

Specialized marketing tools also have other advantages: They are likely to add new features more quickly than suites; they can be more easily customized to each client’s specific needs; they are usually less costly; and it’s far easier to switch to another service if a specialized tool doesn’t meet expectations.

Bottom Line: Social media marketing and PR services trying to be a jack of all trades rarely perform all trades well. For most client companies, purchasing best-in-class specialized services for PR and marketing from different vendors is the more effective and cost-efficient solution. Marketers believe they’ll be more productive with an integrated platform from a single vendor, but the reality typically falls short of the promises. Research shows that most buyers are more satisfied with social point solutions that focus on providing a first-class product in one niche.