Social media strategy
Posting every day but can’t say what social returns? Social Sugar is an Auckland social media agency and Australasia’s social-ROI specialist – we build strategies that turn social into sales, leads and measurable growth for NZ and Australian brands.
84+ brands
trust us to make social pay – since 2015
Why most social media doesn’t pay
If any of these sound familiar, you have a strategy problem – not a content problem.
PROBLEM 1
Unclear ROI
You’re spending time and budget on social, but no-one can say what it returns – so it’s the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
PROBLEM 2
Time-consuming ops
Your team is stuck on a content treadmill, chasing formats, algorithms and the next post, with no clear plan for what each one should achieve.
PROBLEM 3
No real pipeline
Likes and followers go up, but leads and sales don’t. Social isn’t connected to the rest of your funnel, so interest never turns into revenue.
How we fix it - plan, execute, track
Our proven 10-Step full-funnel process gives every post and campaign a clear job – and a way to prove what it returns.
Plan
Your funnel
Audience & customer insight
Brand positioning that stands out
Channel plan for Meta, LinkedIn or TikTok
Execute
Tested ads
Content pillars & creative platform
Ad angles tested across formats
Campaigns built to isolate ROI
Track
ROI reports
Full-funnel KPIs agreed up front
Tracking set up end to end
Simple, actionable reporting
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
“Jeremy and Sugar were pivotal in the development of NZHL’s Mortgage Mentor positioning and full funnel brand response marketing programme. Together we took an unknown opportunity to a known one, we doubled leads and drove tangible growth into the business.”
Lenska Papich
Former Brand & Communications Manager, New Zealand Home Loans
Helped 84+ brands grow
Since 2015 proving how to make social pay
#1 specialist social-ROI agency in NZ & Australia
READY TO CHAT?
Book an obligation-FREE 30 min strategy call
Ready for a social strategy that actually grows your business? More leads? More e-commerce sales? Less wasted time & money on content creation? Book a 30 min chat with our Managing Partner. We'll:
Ask about your business objectives, opportunities & challenges.
Nod to specific strategies we might use.
Share ROI examples relevant to your business.
See if there's a nice fit.
No obligation. Book a call now.
JUST BROWSING?
Get the FREE guide
Download your free copy of “How to make your social make more money” and learn how to get social working for your business.
Learn how to:
Follow a simple 10-step path to ROI - fast.
Stop chasing ‘vanity metrics’.
Take a full-funnel ‘money-in, money-out’ view.
Build a repeatable social selling system.
Avoid all the common mistakes. Get the FREE guide now.
-
![Evolution Healthcare logo]()
“The Sugar team is that rare breed of creative and digital marketing agency that focusses purely on what we need to get the result. From great brand strategy, through to detailed social strategy, brand identity design or simply day-to-day studio support – they simply fit in with what we need on a practical and flexible basis - with our best interests at heart.”
Laura Blackburn
Group Marketing & Communications Manager
Evolution Healthcare -
![NZHL logo]()
“Jeremy and Sugar were pivotal in the development of NZHL’s Mortgage Mentor positioning and full funnel brand response marketing programme. Together we took an unknown opportunity to a known one, we doubled leads and drove tangible growth into the business. Sugar are more than an more than an advertising agency partner, they are your support network and delivery partners - days, nights and sometimes in the weekends!”
Lenska Papich
Former Brand and Communications Lead
NZHL -
![Love Taupo logo]()
“I’ve worked with Sugar&Partners as my advertising agency partner for over 25 years across a wide range of innovative travel and tourism campaigns for various destinations in both Australia and New Zealand. The results, in terms of measurable ROI and the longevity of our relationship, speak for themself”.
Jane Wilson
Former General Manager
Love Taupō -
![VENZ logo]()
"More than just a digital marketing agency – the Sugar team helped us helped us step-up to serious social lead generation in short order. In the first four months we’ve generated nearly 100 high value leads with a total potential sales value in excess of $4M."
Pablo Brizio
Venz
Vacuum Elevators -
![Square One logo]()
“The Sugar team helped us position the SquareOne™ brand for incredible growth - and on a start-up budget got social & digital campaigns up and running to deliver over 80,000 sign-ups in just 8 months.”
Jovan Pavlicevic
Co-founder
SquareOne -
![Scania logo]()
“Sugar and Partners were incredible to work with. I was part of the team setting up a global company locally in New Zealand, and they were my right-hand team right from the beginning. It was imperative that the brand strategy and direction was set, while not losing sight of the global direction. They added a local flavour which really helped build brand love quickly. The team were not only creatives and designers, but took charge of the strategy and implementation of social media, including community management.”
Laura Blackburn
Former Marketing & Communications Manager
Scania New Zealand -
![Dunkin Donuts]()
“Dunkin’ Donuts was missing out on the huge opportunity we had in social. Now we have a creative and digital agency partner who has helped us understand exactly how our investment can drive real business outcomes.”
Tony Lee
Owner
Café Concepts Ltd (Dunkin’ Donuts) -
![Allergenics Logo]()
“Sugar is a marketing agency in the truest sense – they simply recommend and deliver what will get the best ROI. In this instance they built us a profitable Facebook lead generation campaign from scratch in about 11 days – and ROI has steadily improved from there. We’re thrilled."
Rob Berman
CEO Allergenics
Social Media Creative
The biggest secret to spectacular ROI.
Whilst others are filling their social ads or posts full of ‘content’… the best brands and businesses know that highly-crafted, bespoke social creative is has the single biggest impact on ROI. Great creative will stop the scroll, get the clicks, drive huge traffic - and convert many times greater ROI vs. an average ad - for the same media money
Social Media Influencer Management
Social media influencers, brand ambassadors, content creators and collabs can be a powerful way to connect with your prospects in ways that feel far more genuine than ads or mediums. But authenticity is key if you want genuine ROI:
Start with a well-planned influencer strategy
Match your influencer recruitment profile to the personas that represent your ideal customer profile.
Define how and where influencers are best-suited to complement and add social proof within your wider social media strategy.
Identify long & short lists of macro and/or micro influencers that fit your brief.
If working at scale use an online influencer management platform to save huge time on fee negotiation, legals and deployment.
Have a process to approve, monitor and make sure influencer activity is on-brand.
Make sure your schedule is co-ordinated and doesn’t cannibalise boosting investment or audiences in your wider social calendar.
Integrate other social channels with influencer activity to cross pollinate content and boost performance.Have solid ROI-tracking in place to drive clear future investment.
Curate and nurture the most successful ROI performers into long-term ambassador associations.
Ensure those associations drive your overall long-term social and brand positioning in the direction you want and need to go.
Find out how to make Social Media Influencers work for your brand.
Social Media Planning, Buying and Boosting
The bad news is that the days of organic reach (free) are over - with less than 1% of your fans seeing your posts by way of organic placement.
Platforms like Meta are well and truly ‘pay-to-play’ mediums where you have to invest media money to boost your messages to your prospect audience.
The good news is that social is one of the broadest reach, lowest cost-per-thousand mediums the world has ever seen.
There are also a huge variety of ways to draw value from every media dollar with smart algorithms, AI-driven targeting and micro-targeting tools to reduce waste, boost conversion rates and reach just the right audiences:
Audience segmentation, first party data matching.
Custom audiences, look-alike audiences, sequential targeting and action based segmentation.
Low cost retargeting.
Dynamic creative testing and messaging validation.
Pixel management and conversion tracking.
Social Commerce
Hungry for more e-commerce sales? Social commerce and a variety of fast-growing social shopping tools are exciting ways to get more sales-at-the-source - on the social platforms where your audience is browsing your content or ads.
They represent the natural convergence of social engagement and commerce – enabling you to shorten the path to purchase, enhance customer convenience and reduce drop-off in conversion.
Social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok offer in-app shopping, product tagging, and livestreaming.
Facebook Shops: provide a unified store-front across Facebook and Instagram, enabling direct in-app transactions and cross-platform product discovery.
Instagram Shopping: Offers shoppable posts, product tagging, and checkout within the app. Brands can link catalogues from Meta Commerce Manager and run targeted ads that lead directly to purchase.
LinkedIn Product Pages: have tools for showcasing and promoting business software and services directly on company pages, supporting lead generation and conversion tracking.
TikTok Shop: integrates product listings directly within the app, allowing users to complete purchases without leaving the platform. It supports influencer-led sales and live shopping events.
Pinterest Shopping: expands on visual discovery by enabling product tagging on pins and integrating with Shopify for seamless checkout experiences.
YouTube Shopping: allows creators to tag products in videos and livestreams, with integrated checkout powered by Shopify and Google Merchant Centre.
Snapchat’s AR Commerce Tools: use augmented reality lenses for virtual try-ons and product visualisation, linking directly to e-commerce checkout pages.
WeChat Mini Programs: in China, these apps within WeChat allow full e-commerce functionality, including product browsing, payment, and customer service.
Ready to explore how social commerce can work for you?
Social Insights & ROI Tracking
The Social Sugar team loves the data that comes from great social and the actionable insights it produces.
We’re set up to be media agnostic and flexible - so we can change tack on strategy, creative or media based on real-world ROI results.
In a world where change in tech, trends and customer behaviour and are a constant, there’s simply no other way to operate. Full-funnel ROI tracking is the only way to protect your marketing investment and grow.
It starts with a clear understanding of the ROI equation behind each and every sale; your average value of a customer, lifetime value of a customer (LTV) and campaign break even allowable or contribution margin.
You’ll definitely need a basic ‘impact’ measure of reach or penetration into your total addressable market (TAM).
You’ll need basic funnel conversion metrics from awareness, to consideration, to purchase and retention.
You may want a competitive measure of performance such as Social Sugar’s proprietary Competitive Engagement Rate (CER).
What great reporting looks like:
There are many data points you can track in a single campaign. And that is the problem.
Between impressions, frequency, reach, click-through rate, bounce rate, dwell time, myriad conversion metrics and on-page behaviour… analysis quickly becomes paralysis and no one knows what the next step should be.
The best reporting concentrates primarily on the top 3-5 crucial growth-drivers in each campaign - and uses this data to isolate, test and learn over time.
Spectacular tourism results for Onsen Hotpools - over $92 ROI for every $1 invested.
Onsen Hot Pools needed bookings, bookings, bookings... but had not managed to make paid social advertising campaigns pay. The solution? Highly-crafted Meta ads and hard-graft day-to-day performance management.
The results are amongst the most impressive we've ever seen in the tourism sector; a $92 ROI.
Every brand, category and campaign is different - you need to craft a bespoke set of full-funnel KPI’s at the start and stick with them.
Find out how to get real insight, into real ROI.
Full-funnel Performance Management
Once you have your social media strategy and implementation locked-down, the next step forward in ROI comes from taking a truly integrated ‘full-funnel’ approach across all the other elements of your media and marketing mix.
This means taking a clear, holistic view of money-in the top of your funnel and ROI out the bottom.
It means stepping-away from analysis-paralysis, by setting simple growth-driver KPI’s that actually drive the business - and getting an experienced paid media Performance Manager to manage that funnel, for absolutely maximum ROI, every hour, of every day.
Here’s how the best Performance Managers work:
Healthy funnel, healthy profits. Even if social provides the bulk of your traffic, leads and sales, you’ll find that the changing algorithms behind each different social platform will impact your ROI hugely - so your Performance Manager needs to be agile and ready to shift money fast.
‘Discovery-oriented’ social often works perfectly with ‘search oriented’ AdWords such Google or Bing driven Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Programmatic digital display advertising (banner ads) can be a powerful low-cost remarketing layer or bring brand ‘weight’ and visibility to a campaign.
Video on-demand advertising (ads around your favourite TV show or movie online) can be a powerful way to get TV-style credibility without the broad audience waste of traditional linear TV.
Electronic direct mail (eDM or email) can be a powerful way to nurture repeat sales from your funnel or prompt conversion for people considering making a purchase.
Social content can be a powerful way to help power your organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance for even more ‘free’ organic leads.
Social can even be a powerful way to test audiences, messages and offers before committing to rolling out the highest performing combinations in traditional media such as TV, radio, print, outdoor, or point of sale (POS).
The best ROI comes when your Performance Manager can combine social with other powerful digital marketing layers throughout each stage of the funnel - from awareness, through consideration, to purchase and retention.
Ready to make social pay for your business?
Download your free copy of the “10-Steps to make your social make more money” guide and start building a marketing machine that delivers measurable results.
Fill in your details below to get immediate access to the guide.
By downloading this PDF, you agree to receive further communications from us, including marketing updates.