How Cornerstone Building Brands scaled social intelligence across 35 brands
With 35 brands supported by lean marketing teams, Chelsey Godfrey (
Using Analytics, Competitor Analysis and Social Listening in Sprout Social, Chelsey centralized disparate analysis approaches into automated, brand-specific reports, freeing teams to act on insights instead of building executive decks and wading through raw data.
Turning reporting into a shared strategic asset
The gap wasn't a shortage of data: Cornerstone Building Brands already had strong analytics, competitor intelligence and listening in place. The issue was that individual teams didn't have the time or resources to consistently turn that data into usable insights or actionable recommendations. By centralizing the analysis and tailoring automated reports to each brand's specific goals, Chelsey made the insights easier to surface and immediately actionable for marketing teams and executive leadership alike.
"Rather than asking each business unit to become experts in social intelligence, we centralized the analysis and delivered customized, automated reports tailored to each brand's goals and challenges." — Chelsey Godfrey, Social Media Marketing Specialist, Cornerstone Building Brands
The how
Chelsey built a system that turned social data into decisions teams could act on across the multi-brand portfolio:
- Replacing manual reporting with automated, brand-specific reports: Instead of asking every business unit to gather and interpret their own data, Chelsey centralized reporting and customized it to each brand's goals, cutting out all of the manual effort that had previously delayed decision-making across all 35 brands.
- Letting performance data override assumptions: While reviewing the Home for Good project campaign, the team found that static posts performed best with employee advocates, but videos and carousels consistently drove stronger engagement with the broader audience. That insight led to a format shift, with videos and carousels for external audiences, and static content reserved for employee advocacy.
- Reframing social metrics as business questions: Rather than reporting likes or impressions in isolation, Chelsey tied insights to the specific questions each business unit was already trying to answer: what content resonates, how competitors are performing and where audience interest is shifting.
- Using competitive and listening data to spot opportunity, not just track it: By pairing competitor analysis with social listening, the team gave leadership a way to see where content strategy could shift before a campaign underperformed, rather than explaining it after the fact.
The business impact
The Home for Good project campaign became the clearest proof point: after shifting format approaches based on the data, campaign impressions grew 122.4% year over year (to more than 3 million!), engagements rose 75.3%, and post link clicks increased 42.5%. Beyond the impact of that single campaign, automating reporting across 35 brands gave Marketing teams back the time previously spent on manual data-gathering—time now spent optimizing content, identifying competitive opportunities and answering the specific business questions each brand needed answered. For leadership, the shift meant a consistent, enterprise-wide view of social performance, one built for strategic planning and resource allocation across a multi-brand portfolio that goes far beyond simple campaign recaps.
What could this look like for your team?
If your team is spending more time building reports than acting on them, what would centralizing that analysis free you up to do instead? What questions does your business need answered that social could respond to? We'd love to hear what a brand-by-brand view of social intelligence could unlock across your own portfolio.