Pillar Marketing Corporation boosts brand equity, drives $1 million in incremental revenue
The Challenge
For LA-based Pillar Marketing Corporation, marketing is not about creating content for content’s sake — it’s about fusing performance with creative frameworks to tell stories, build brand community and drive revenue.
The full-service digital, design and brand consulting company is home to a team of historians and trend analyzers with a shared goal: to deliver impactful strategies and designs that seek to effectively connect brands with their audiences.
With a roster of clients ranging from Dennis Rodman and Cheech & Chong’s Global Holdings to Jones Soda and its subsidiary Mary Jones, Pillar manages as many as five social media accounts for each client, with over 100 million followers across accounts. “With the reach and ecosystem of brands we work with, every single detail must go according to plan,” says Ben Mason, founder and CEO of Pillar. “The approval process has to be easy, post publishing has to work correctly and the social listening and analytics tools need to be on point.” Pillar’s previous social media management tools created roadblocks to approvals, publishing, comment management and distribution efficiency. For clients to approve a post, Pillar would incur additional costs for every seat, even if the user simply had to click “yes” or “no.” If a third-party social solution updated its APIs, Pillar would experience compatibility issues that interrupted publishing and commenting. These tools couldn’t support Pillar’s robust processes from concept phase through distribution and reporting. “I tried every social media management solution on the market but none of them were able to deliver on our needs,” Mason says. So he sought a new solution that could:
- Simplify the post approval process with transparent costs
- Solve publishing issues, including format and API compatibility
- Efficiently manage thousands of comments across platforms
- Create a seamless workflow between Pillar and its clients
- Effectively manage distribution for Pillar’s extensive reach
The Solution
Sprinklr Social Self-Serve now powers Pillar’s campaign scheduling and publishing, content library, community engagement, social listening, competitive benchmarking and reporting.
For agencies that distribute as much content and provide as much data and insight as we are required to do, there is no other solution that is robust enough. There’s simply nothing out there that operates at this level and does what it says it will do.
Founder and CEO, Pillar Marketing Corporation
Having worked with Sprinklr in a previous role, Mason turned to Sprinklr’s unified social media management solution. “When I saw that Sprinklr had developed a non-enterprise offering, we immediately jumped on it,” he says.
Simplified approval process for high-volume content
Pillar uses Sprinklr to schedule posts up to a full quarter in advance, relying on the platform’s unified digital asset management system to handle large volumes of creative assets. By providing an organized repository for storing, distributing and measuring the impact of content, Sprinklr helps Pillar optimize strategies for its clients.
“The content library in Sprinklr has been huge for us,” Mason says. “If we do a single photoshoot that produces 1,500 images, we can easily sort, tag, create attributes and manage the approval process for the assets within one platform. It’s incredibly powerful in terms of communication with our clients.”
Integrated community management and benchmarking across platforms
While Pillar’s social media managers occasionally use native apps for engagement, Sprinklr remains their primary platform for community management. With social listening and sentiment analysis capabilities, the team can sift through thousands of accounts and understand where to join the conversation.
These insights also support competitor analysis and campaign development. As Mason says, “We look at competitors’ performance in terms of their content but also what their community is saying about them online. We take those insights and apply them to our planning process.”
Automated analytics, reporting and API integration
To measure all of its Sprinklr-powered activities, Pillar uses built-in reporting dashboards that pull in data through API integrations across all of its platforms. This helps the Pillar team perform post-mortems after campaigns wrap up, providing in-depth analysis of campaign and asset performance.
“No other software that we’ve tried has been able to do this,” Mason says. “With Sprinklr, we get valuable insights on how to optimize creative campaigns for our clients going forward.”
The Outcome
Pillar’s clients have seen exponential growth since the company implemented Sprinklr Social Self-Serve.
Mary Jones, a cannabis beverage brand, has experienced a more than 100% increase month over month in engagement, impressions, reach and website clicks.
For Cheech & Chong’s Global Holdings, Sprinklr helped drive over $1M in incremental revenue in 2023, as well as a 10% lift in lifetime value compared to the previous 12 months. This resulted in an 80% overall increase in engagement rates on content. Since switching to Sprinklr, the Pillar team has also grown Cheech & Chong’s Global Holdings’ reach by 10%. Given that the duo has over 24 million followers across its social channels, Sprinklr has powered a significant engagement-to-impression rate.
“Brands often focus on putting out content that looks good for them, but when you focus your content on yourself, it does not provide value for the consumer,” Mason says. “We focus on building creative frameworks for content that actually delivers value beyond the product itself. With Sprinklr, we’ve been able to accelerate that process to deliver on the promise of value in every piece of content.”