Forging deep partnerships with the people who use our products day-to-day is the only way to build solutions that make a meaningful difference.
When I was a Product Director at Google, we were shifting our suite of Drive and Editor tools from serving predominantly small- and medium-sized businesses to meeting the needs of enterprise customers. On a tight timeline, we were under intense pressure to design a comprehensive roadmap and outline product priorities.
Our task was made more complex by a particularly strategic (and demanding) enterprise customer we were at risk of losing. They pushed us to come up with highly advanced capabilities and more intuitive experiences to meet their business requirements. If we had stuck with our status quo roadmap and product development processes, they would have churned. Instead, we sent a team of 30+ product managers and engineers to their global headquarters so we could immerse ourselves in their needs and pain points in order to build scalable solutions.
Customers that hold you to a remarkably high standard are a product team’s greatest gift. Innovation comes from rising to the occasion and employing true empathy. Often, when you meet the most advanced organization’s needs (elegantly and with simplicity), all your customers benefit.
Meeting with customers and understanding their goals is my favorite part of the work I do, and what I’m most passionate about in my new role as Sprout Social’s Chief Product Officer. As we map out Sprout’s continuous evolution, we are focused on providing an even more effortless and cohesive user experience. Here’s an overview of a few of our key areas of focus and the customer insights that inspire them.
Everything goes back to our customers
As the social landscape evolves, it’s more important than ever to continue walking alongside our customers. We’ve always been a company that prides itself on offering a highly intuitive platform. But we must continue to strive for greater simplicity to guide brands into social’s next era, which will drive company-wide value.
I’m incredibly proud to say Sprout was named #1 Best Product by G2 this year. This award is a reflection of not only the exceptional work Team Sprout puts in every day, but of the way our customers are transforming their businesses with the power of social. Accolades like these only happen when you aim to deliver the very best technology that is built, supported and used by teams at the top of their game.
There’s a myth that sophisticated platforms have to be clunky, but it’s our mission to dispel this by building solutions with both usability and advanced capabilities in mind.
Building with customer zero
While the collaboration we foster with our customers is critical, at Sprout we’re lucky to have an in-house customer who is able to supply continuous feedback: our own social team. By working closely with “customer zero,” we get to put our tools to the test in real-time and take an active role in an internal case study.
Our social team enables us to push the very limits of our own social strategy and bring those learnings back into the product. Along the way, we discover usability gaps we need to address, new use cases we want to build, new insights that help us raise the bar in how we optimize return on investment for our customers.
This keeps the people who use our products at the forefront of our roadmap and helps us build a product that works better—not just for us, but for our customers. It’s been instrumental in identifying areas for product investment and improvement.
Product priorities defined by customer goals
We believe in delivering roadmaps defined by what our customers find most valuable—that meet their most sophisticated use cases and aspirational business outcomes.
That’s why we launched Breaking Ground this year. During these virtual events, we bring our customers up to speed on our most impactful, highly-requested product updates and breakthroughs so they can stay a beat ahead on the latest in social innovation. Plus, we share exclusive sneak peeks of our product roadmap—a precedent we’ll continue next year.
Looking toward 2025, we are prioritizing long-term value and our customers’ biggest objectives. We want to give our customers even more visibility into what we’re building, why we’re building it, and help them best prepare and plan. Here are some of the biggest customer-informed priorities we delivered this year and what we hope to achieve next year.
Delivering the company-wide value of social insights
Social is strategic to all parts of a business. It touches every division inside companies—whether leaders are aware or not. It’s integral to everything from providing customer care and engagement to sourcing executive-level insights, to driving strategy and refining product development.
We build reporting capabilities that extract the data that matters most to leaders and stakeholders. Our recently announced updates to My Reports ensure you can deliver the insights and data your business needs to make informed decisions.
Our partnership with Salesforce and our Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector take it a step further by combining social data in an omnichannel view, customized with the exact visuals and metrics needed to demonstrate social’s value. It delivers rich data options that give users a complete view of their customers and their journeys—without time-consuming work.
Demonstrating the company-wide value of social continues to be an area where marketers need support, so we are focused on helping them tell a compelling ROI story.
Harnessing the potential of AI
As generative AI exploded this year, the potential for AI came into focus. But we know that understanding how to use AI day-to-day and build an AI-driven culture can be less clear.
That’s where Sprout comes in. Our human-centered AI solutions accelerate business processes and drive strategy, helping you deliver world-class customer experiences. As you’re challenged to do more with less, you’re still expected to meet customers’ high expectations. With AI seamlessly embedded across our entire platform, we transform social marketers’ ability to work smarter, unlock creativity and increase social media’s business impact exponentially. Our platform makes it easier to derive insights, create content, and automate and elevate workflows.
For example, one of our most celebrated announcements of 2024 was Generate Alt Text by AI Assist, a new time-saving workflow that generates alt text suggestions to increase the accessibility of image-focused posts—making posting more efficient and freeing up time for creativity. This is just one example of the intuitive AI Publishing tools that make it easy for your team to craft the right content that resonates with your audience, at the right time.
Similarly, Analyze Charts by AI Assist summarizes data from My Reports data to help teams tell a more digestible story about their performance and social’s broader business impact.
Analyze Conversations by AI Assist also removes the guesswork from social listening to surface insights that reveal key industry trends, competitor intel and relevant audience conversations. We understand how daunting listening can be. With this capability, marketers can spend more time crafting strategies around important signals and less time mining data.
As AI’s role in social media evolves, we know brands will need to make quick decisions on how best to embrace it—especially regarding customer data use, human involvement and monitoring biases. The pace and complexity of these changes mean you need to trust your software partners to consistently do right by you. With our strong track record of customer trust and the right principles in place, we’re well-equipped for the future and are actively building capabilities that will help you maintain customer trust at scale.
It’s our mission to continue helping our customers capitalize on these opportunities (without the headache of extra training or implementation).
Delivering faster, personalized customer care
Every stage of the customer journey exists on social. For brands, responding to questions is the bare minimum. Your customers want the care you provide on social to feel like white-glove service, distinctly customized to their needs. Consumers say companies should make personalized customer service their #1 social media priority in 2025, per a Q4 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey.
Social Customer Care by Sprout helps you go beyond expectations and deliver customer service that builds lasting relationships. Agents are enabled to automatically determine which messages need replies and send personalized responses that adhere to brand standards.
With Customer Care, your team can respond to messages faster by aligning across your organization and breaking down silos. Automatically classify which team a message is meant for to prevent internal collision and get real-time updates to ensure no customer is overlooked.
Transforming influencer marketing management
As brands go all-in on influencer marketing, they need a partner in streamlining end-to-end campaign management. The influencer marketing industry was valued at $17 billion in 2023 and is expected to to reach $20 billion this year. According to a Q4 2024 Sprout survey of 322 marketing leaders, 60% of brands will spend even more on influencer marketing next year.
Sprout Social Influencer Marketing drives impactful influencer marketing strategies that grow brand presence authentically, engage with new targeted audiences and ensure spend efficiency. Our Influencer Marketing platform tunes out the noise and uses AI to zero in on influencers who are the best match for your brand.
The platform also maximizes the experiences for influencers themselves—which will be a continued priority in 2025. This will benefit all parties, and be especially helpful for companies who want to forge long-term partnerships and leave the best first impressions. We will also continue to invest in securing the best brand-influencer matches possible, making quick work of finding vetted creators and influencers whose content, values and audiences are right for your brand.
Sprout Social is your partner in ushering in a new era of business
Human beings have been using technology to collaborate and achieve things as groups that they could never achieve alone since we first put paint to cave walls. Now that we’ve arrived at the nexus between social media, artificial intelligence and this chapter of humanity, what’s next? What can we empower? What can we unlock?
At Sprout, we’re building a platform to meet the needs of the world’s largest brands, while giving that same power to teams of any size. In lockstep with the needs of our customers, our roadmap delivers scalable solutions that ensure you can handle all of the complexities of social media management.
Want to learn more about the tools and capabilities that make your team more effective and future-proof your brand as you scale? Browse our latest product innovations from our Q4 2024 Breaking Ground launch event.
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