Moen’s social marketing stack used to include everything but the kitchen sink.
“We used seven-plus tools to facilitate our social media program and I always say ‘use’ is a very strong word because we certainly weren’t leveraging all those tools,” said Brittany Neish, senior social strategist for kitchen and bathroom fixture manufacturer Moen.
And because Moen’s agency used its own tool to run paid advertising on social, Moen didn’t get direct access to paid insights since its analytics were managed agency-side.
“Our agency is wonderful and would give us reports whenever we liked, but our team really likes to be able to peek under the hood, see results in real time and get into the nitty gritty,” Neish said.
Neish’s first mandate was running a social marketing audit when she joined Moen’s brand marketing team just less than two years ago.
“My goal was to find a tool that would allow us to bring all of our different needs together from a social perspective and create efficiencies,” she said.
Moen also wanted to create more transparency in its paid advertising program. It still wanted its agency managing social, but Moen’s internal team needed to be able to log in and make recommendations or changes, Neish said.
So while Moen’s agency still buys programmatically on YouTube and a few other platforms, Moen uses Sprinklr as its social advertising hub.
By reducing its stack from seven-odd vendors to one, Moen was able to connect insights from its customer care teams more closely with marketing and advertising, reducing some of its existing silos.
When Moen’s marketing team got a complaint on social, they used to request the customer’s contact information through direct message and then pass that information on to the care center. That process once took about 72 hours; now it takes about four hours.
Consolidating around a single tool also let Moen proactively apply social data for targeting – for instance, it can quickly identify consumers likely to remodel their homes.
When it comes to measurement and optimization, Moen can A/B test different types of creative across different platforms – for instance, whether a video ad works better as autoplay on Pinterest or on the Facebook news feed.
Moen also created one consolidated ads manager using Sprinklr, which allows it to set benchmarks across social platforms using a common rules engine and dynamically reallocate media budgets across platforms based on real-time performance.
Getting stronger at social has allowed Moen, which primarily sells its products through third-party distributors and retailers like Amazon, Wayfair and Home Depot, to build its brand despite lacking a direct line to the consumer.
“It’s really hard for consumers to know the differences between products in the plumbing vertical, so for us, it’s a great challenge to come up with innovative ways to create awareness with really unique content,” Neish said.
Moen’s strategy is to get in early – and often – on platform betas and emerging channels. It was among the first beta testers for Instagram Stories, and is diving into voice activation with its smart shower, U by Moen, which is compatible with Amazon’s Alexa and Siri.
“On the wholesale and ecommerce side, we work closely with our partners to find ways to talk about attribution,” she said. “But from a social perspective, it really is about building brand awareness and we’ll be looking at doing brand lift studies with our social platform partners this year.”
