The Total Economic Impact™ Of Sprout Social

Social Media Team Time Savings

Evidence and data. Before adopting Sprout Social, interviewees’ organizations faced several challenges in managing their social media profiles. They struggled to keep track of conversations and mentions across different channels, which hindered their ability to identify and respond to customer feedback. Moreover, manually posting content on each platform consumed staff time and made it difficult to maintain a consistent posting schedule, resulting in missed opportunities to reach their target audiences at optimal times. Additionally, their disjointed approaches to planning social media campaigns, which involved directing different employees to post on various platforms, left their teams overwhelmed and lacking strategic planning opportunities to enhance their content. The interviewees’ organizations leveraged Sprout Social to resolve many of these challenges:

• The interviewees shared that Sprout Social’s publishing calendar helped their organizations save time by providing a centralized platform to schedule and automate social media posts, eliminating the need for manual posting on multiple platforms. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency stated: “The publishing calendar was one of the best things for us because we’ve been able to let everybody see what’s scheduled and what’s going on. … Two of our employees are just working on publishing all day. Each of them is saving 4 hours a day [with Sprout Social]. We would need another publisher without Sprout.”
• Interviewees also noted that Sprout Social’s central scheduling and publishing features helped their organizations’ social media teams efficiently respond to unexpected issues, such as brand crises or outages. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency said: “Yesterday, our cloud provider had an outage, and our website links went down. We didn’t want to push any posts out that had links in them. Pre-Sprout, we would have had to stop all of those posts and then manually reschedule them, but Sprout has a pause button in times of crisis. That single button probably saved us 4 hours yesterday because, otherwise, somebody would have had to go through each platform and cancel and reschedule every post.”
• The director of social media at a SaaS organization confirmed that Sprout Social saves their company time when managing its social media profiles: “It makes my head spin to think about not [managing our social media accounts] with a tool. I would have to at least triple the size of my team if I didn’t have Sprout.”
• Interviewees praised Sprout Social for enabling their organizations to plan campaigns more efficiently. They said that with Sprout Social, they could quickly identify which content resonated with which audience segment and focus their time on content that works. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency described the productivity boost: “We use Sprout to provide insights back to the teams that are running campaigns. People are seeing: ‘Okay, this wasn’t working before. But this poll performed well, and those videos are performing well, so I’ll start doing more of those.’”
• The digital marketing director at a nonprofit also stated that their organization leveraged the time savings from Sprout Social to improve its overall social media strategy: “We are now able to put some of the time that we would have spent executing on social media into now saying, ‘What’s next?’ We may be moving away from this social media website, but it can help us move onto a new platform.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 10 employees on its social media team, including social media associates, managers, and a director.
• The average fully burdened blended hourly rate for an employee on the social media team is $57.
• In the prior environment, employees on the social media team spent 70% of their time scheduling, publishing, listening, replying on social media channels, and planning campaigns. This totaled 28 hours per week per employee.
• With Sprout Social, the composite organization streamlines these social media management tasks, which enables it to efficiently plan and execute campaigns.
• Each social media team member sees a 60% productivity lift from using Sprout Social.

Risks. The time savings for social media teams will vary depending on:

• The size of the social media team.
• The fully burdened hourly cost of employees on the social media team.
• The amount of time each employee devotes to scheduling, publishing, listening, and planning campaigns.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.1 million.

Time Savings On Influencer Management

Evidence and data. Some interviewees reported that their organizations had begun to use Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, which helped them more efficiently identify, manage, and measure the impact of influencer campaigns. They explained that with a streamlined influencer management process, their organizations were able to scale their influencer channels, which drove brand awareness and engagement.

• The social strategy director at a professional services firm praised the influencer search capabilities of Sprout Social and said they led to significant time savings for the social media team: “We were using another creative marketing tool for a year before we switched over to [Influencer Marketing]. It would have taken us a lot of time to vet and select influencers in the prior process, and Sprout just has a much more robust search function that allows us to find the right creators faster. Our [influencer campaigns] can move at a much faster clip.”
• The same interviewee estimated the time saved on recent campaigns: “Recently, we had two complex campaigns that required 360 employee hours across two months. It’d probably be another 100 to 150 hours with our legacy [influencer management] tool.”
• The same interviewee reported that using Influencer Marketing helped their organization run more influencer campaigns and that they performed better than paid campaigns: “We’ve been running campaigns with creators that we identified via Influencer Marketing, and the creator content is outperforming the traditional paid media content. [Creator content] is two times as efficient in terms of CPM and four times more efficient in cost per click.”
• The director of content experience at a trade association said that beyond the capabilities of Influencer Marketing, Sprout Social’s social listening features helped their organization more easily find influencers that matched its target audience and brand voice. They said that with social listening, the organization was able to identify emerging trends and potential influencers before they became widely recognized: “I think the social listening element helps us to identify key influencers, as well. The baseline tools that are available help us engage with influencers in a way that would be much more difficult to do outside of having a tool like Sprout.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization works with 50 influencers each year.
• The composite devotes 80 hours of internal labor per year to each influencer marketing campaign. Internal labor consists of searching for influencers whose audience aligns with the organization’s target market; providing influencers with guidelines and creative direction; and tracking the reach, engagement, and conversions from each influencer campaign.
• With Sprout Social’s search capabilities and centralized platform for influencer management, the composite’s social media staff manages each campaign with 25% less internal effort.
• The fully burdened hourly wage for a social media staff member is $57.

Risks. The time savings from Sprout Social’s Influencer Marketing tool will vary depending on:

• The number of influencer marketing campaigns the organization runs annually.
• The organization’s legacy approach to influencer management.
• The fully burdened hourly wage of social media FTEs.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $128,000.

Revenue Growth From Employee Advocacy Program

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that their organizations enrolled some of their employees into Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy program and that this equipped these employees to become brand ambassadors for their organization and share brand content on their personal social media pages.

• Some interviewees noted their organization had a legacy advocacy program in place but that the prior tools were difficult to use and saw little employee adoption.
• Interviewees reported that Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy program was easy to use, which led to high rates of employee adoption. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency stated: “To be allowed to use Employee Advocacy, we created a 90-second video to show employees how to use it because it’s very easy. It’s probably the easiest platform I’ve ever seen.”
• The same interviewee went on to say that while their organization only deployed Employee Advocacy six months earlier, more than 90% of the employees onboarded into the program actively use the platform and promote content on their personal pages.
• Interviewees noted that most of the employees brought into the program were individual contributors tasked with amplifying brand content on social media. A subset of the employees in the Employee Advocacy program were curators who helped create and tailor the content.
• The director of content experience at a trade association explained that Employee Advocacy not only led to employees actively promoting brand content, but that it also saved their team time on planning and executing campaigns: “We adopted Employee Advocacy because we weren’t using a tool previously, and it was all manual. There was an individual hosting meetings weekly, and they would share links in the chat and say, ‘Go share this out on social, and when you’re done, let us know and then we’ll move on to the next one.’ It was a very clunky and manual process, and it also wasn’t tracked. … It’s so much more efficient now. It’s wild to me that we were ever doing something so manual.”
• The manager of social media at a credentialing agency reported that Sprout Social’s AI features helped employees to more easily use the Employee Advocacy program. They said, “[Sprout Social’s] AI assist can generate alternative captions and things like that, which we do use for advocacy.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite onboards 15% of its employee base into the Employee Advocacy program (450 employees) in Year 1. This increases to 18% (540 employees) in Year 2 and to 20% (600 employees) in Year 3.
• Of the employees onboarded, 75% actively promote content on their personal social media profiles.
• On average, each active employee advocate creates or shares 3.1 posts per month.
• Each shared post has an average of 1.7 clicks per post.
• Of those clicks, 1.5% translate to a closed deal.
• The organization has an average deal size of $1,500.
• The composite organization has an operating margin of 11%.⁴

Risks. The revenue growth from the Employee Advocacy program will vary depending on:

• The number of employees onboarded into the Employee Advocacy program.
• The share of employees who actively share content on their social media profiles.
• The average annual reach for content shared by an employee in the program.
• The organization’s social conversion rate.
• The organization’s operating margin.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $130,000.

Time Savings For Customer Service Specialists

Evidence and data. Interviewees said Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce allows customer service specialists to view and resolve customer inquiries directly within the Salesforce platform and that this eliminates the need to switch between multiple tools. They also said customer service teams leverage key Smart Inbox capabilities (e.g., message filtering, saved replies, task assignment) to efficiently respond to common customer inquiries.

• Interviewees shared that before adopting Sprout Social, their organizations’ customer service teams spent several hours each week connecting with social media staff and searching online to see if customers had raised any concerns or if their issues were resolved. The director of content experience at a trade association described how Smart Inbox enabled their organization’s customer service team to efficiently track these interactions: “[We are] able to respond to and manage our community efficiently through Smart Inbox. You have all these messages that are coming in every day and, with Smart Inbox, we can apply certain rules and use saved replies to reduce the amount of time spent [managing inboxes].”
• Interviewees said that because customer service representatives gained the ability to respond to customers more quickly, their organizations boosted their customer satisfaction scores. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency said, “With Smart Inbox, what we have seen is that customers are less frustrated because they’re able to get responses from our customer service team within 24 to 48 hours.”
• The same interviewee said that streamlining customer service led to both time savings and an improvement in the agent experience: “It’s much more calm now. People are writing in, we’re answering them, and working things out a lot faster.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has eight customer service specialists who use Sprout Social.
• With Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox and social listening features, these employees experience time savings of 10% (roughly 4 hours per week) on managing and tracking customer interactions.
• The fully burdened hourly wage of a customer service specialist is $44 per hour.

Risks. Customer service specialists time savings will vary depending on:

• The size of the customer service specialist team and the amount of time dedicated to social media monitoring.
• The average fully burdened wage for a customer service specialist.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $164,000.

Cost Savings On Consolidating Legacy Social Media Tools

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that part of the rationale for adopting Sprout Social was consolidating their organization’s social media tools onto a single, all-in-one suite. They reported that after implementing Sprout Social, their organizations were able to retire a number of redundant social media and listening tools and eliminate the associated licensing spend.

• The digital marketing director at a nonprofit reported that Sprout Social’s native capabilities helped their organization replace a number of tools with more narrow capabilities: “We had a separate tool for managing LinkedIn. But, when we found out that’s included in Sprout Social, we said, ‘Oh great, we don’t have to use that anymore.’ There were some discussions about a review management tool, but Sprout Social has a tool for that too, which is included in our plan. It’s another value add of Sprout.”
• The same interviewee said using Sprout Social also allowed their organization to replace its primary legacy social media tool, which it retired due to limited reporting capabilities. The interviewee stated: “We wanted to report back on KPIs and get a better sense of how our network is doing on social media. That was really the reasoning behind migrating [to Sprout Social].”
• The manager of social media at a credentialing agency noted their organization was able to eliminate three social media tools, including an advocacy tool with little adoption and two posting tools. They said that, despite limited internal usage, two of the tools each cost more than $30,000 per year.
• Interviewees emphasized that Sprout Social’s tools and capabilities met almost all of their social media teams’ needs. The director of social media at a SaaS firm reported that since implementing Sprout Social, their organization has seen a sharp decline in the number of employee requests for new tools. They said, “We have cut down a whole lot of new requests for tooling since [purchasing Sprout Social].”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization eliminates a variety of social media tools after adopting Sprout Social.
• These replaced legacy tools previously cost the composite organization $100,000 per year.

Risks. Legacy cost savings will vary depending on:

• The number of legacy social media tools eliminated.
• The annual costs of the company’s legacy social media tools.
• The speed at which the company is able to bring its legacy solution costs to zero.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $224,000.

Reporting Time Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that prior to adopting Sprout Social, their organizations struggled to aggregate data from different social media platforms because each platform had its own reporting system. The lack of real-time data updates made it difficult for the organizations to track campaign performance and make timely marketing decisions. As the organizations’ social media teams would share their findings with leadership, executives would often request more granular information, which forced employees to manually source additional data. Interviewees said that with Sprout Social, their organizations overhauled the reporting process, which led to significant time savings and improved their understanding of which marketing campaigns were resonating and which were not.

• Interviewees explained that adopting Sprout Social empowered their organizations to move from a disjointed, platform-by-platform reporting approach to a centralized approach, which drastically cut the amount of employee time dedicated to manually aggregating data from different social media profiles. The digital marketing director at a nonprofit stated: “We really didn’t have a solid way to consistently report on social media because it was very piecemeal. It was like, ‘Okay, get this data from that platform, [and] get that data for that platform.’ Having it all in one place now is wonderful. … It’s easy to analyze and glean insights from. It’s easy to share reports with leadership, it’s easy to modify the reports if we need to, and it’s easy to keep track of them. It’s just very intuitive.”
• Interviewees described significant time savings from using Sprout Social’s reporting features, and they praised a variety of specific capabilities. The manager of social media at a credentialing agency noted: “We’ve saved 80% of our time [on reporting]. … The challenge was that before Sprout, we couldn’t get the engagement rate from Instagram without manually calculating it. Sprout has saved us so much time because they do have that engagement rate number.”
• The same interviewee said: “One of the things that I love about Sprout is the way they set up their tags. We’ve been tagging things like content type and region, and now we’re able to pull these from reports.”
• In addition to the time savings, interviewees also shared that Sprout Social’s reporting capabilities enabled their organizations to uncover insights that drove their social media strategies. The director of content experience at a trade association stated: “Sprout keeps updating the reporting tool, and they just unveiled industry-specific insights. They can slice data for me that provides net-new insights to some of those core go-to-market channels that we have. It’d be difficult to surface these insights from all of those individual sources without a tool like Sprout.”
• The director of content experience at a trade association estimated the productivity boost from using Sprout Social’s reporting capabilities: “It went from two days to put together each report versus around an hour, and that’s crazy. It was 16 hours of pulling data and trying to analyze it. Sprout now makes it very easy for us to pull data and then utilize AI to be able to add in some insights, as well.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization creates 17 reports per year on an annual, quarterly, and monthly basis.
• Prior to adopting Sprout Social, the composite organization devoted 22 hours of employee labor to manually aggregating and cleaning data for each report.
• With Sprout Social, the composite organization reduces the amount of employee time required for each report by 80%.
• The average fully burdened hourly wage for a social media team member is $57.

Risks. Reporting time savings will vary depending on:

• The organization’s reporting cadence.
• The total amount of time the team dedicates to manually aggregating data and updating reports.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for an employee in charge of social media reporting.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $38,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Increased audience engagement. Interviewees shared that using Sprout Social allowed their organizations to reduce the amount of time spent manually posting content on multiple accounts, leaving them with more time to concentrate on developing highly engaging content. Additionally, the interviewees’ companies were able to use the insights provided by Sprout Social’s reports to enhance their campaign strategies and audience engagement. The digital marketing director at a nonprofit described the improvement: “We’ve had a significant increase in engagement since using Sprout. Even just this past quarter, year over year, we’ve seen a 600% increase in engagement across our social media channels. We have more time to strategize versus time on executing content, which Sprout Social helps us with.”

• Improved customer satisfaction. With Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox features, the interviewees reported their organizations were able to respond to customer inquiries more quickly and more accurately, improving their customer service capabilities. The director of content experience at the trade association described the improvement in customer experience: “Sprout Social gives us a 360-degree view of the customer. We can understand what support tickets they have put in [during] the past, what they are concerned about, and how we can best serve them in a quick way. It has improved customer satisfaction because of the time to close a ticket.”
  Additionally, interviewees shared that their organizations use Smart Inbox and social listening to track brand mentions across social media, allowing their teams to better understand what people are saying about their products. The director of content experience at the trade association said: “The social listening aspect of things is really helpful for us to know what’s coming, see trends, and be able to adapt our strategies. It’s helped us bridge the gap between what sales is seeing and then what we’re seeing within social. This lets us either corroborate sales campaigns or helps us shift their focus.”

• Partnership with Sprout Social staff. According to a Forrester survey, 54% of CMOs believe customer service support is the most important factor when selecting a social suite.⁵ Interviewees reported that they had close working relationships with their Sprout Social account teams, and they said the teams provided social media staff with ongoing support on achieving marketing goals. The director of social media at a SaaS organization stated: “Our Sprout reps have been ingrained and embedded into our teams as our seatmates. We consider them extensions of our team. They’re phenomenal.” 

  The digital marketing director at a nonprofit also praised Sprout Social’s Premier Success team, saying it provided their organization with guided consulting support to help maximize the Sprout Social deployment: “The Premier Success team has been really great. … Just having an additional team for us as a small team has been great. It’s hard for us to carve out time to go in and figure out tagging and figure out other features. It’s just good to have a partner alongside us for that.”