Cornerstone Building Brands supports 35 individual brands with lean marketing teams behind each one. The biggest challenge wasn’t a lack of social data—it was turning that data into actionable insight at scale, across dozens of business units, each with its own goals and questions. Teams were spending valuable time manually gathering data from multiple sources, building reports and interpreting results, which delayed decision-making and made it difficult to benchmark performance or spot trends.

Chelsey Godfrey, Social Media Marketing Specialist at Cornerstone Building Brands, recognized that marketing teams spent more time reporting than acting on insights, limiting their ability to optimize content and respond to audience needs. Meanwhile executive leaders lacked a consistent, enterprise-wide view of social performance to inform strategic decisions.

The fix came from making the data the teams already had easier to act on. The organization already had access to analytics, social listening and competitor data from Sprout Social. But with lean teams behind each of 35 brands, business units could only tap a fraction of what those tools offered. The reporting work stayed manual and the deeper analysis kept getting deferred.

Chelsey Godfrey
Social Media Marketing Specialist at Cornerstone Building Brands

Proving the value of this approach meant showing social intelligence was more than a marketing metrics exercise. By tying insights to specific business questions and sharing them with marketing teams and executive leadership, the team demonstrated how social intelligence could inform content strategy, competitive positioning and broader business decisions. As teams saw the value of insights built for their specific needs, their adoption of those reports and trust between the teams grew organically.

Chelsey Godfrey
Social Media Marketing Specialist at Cornerstone Building Brands

Before this shift, marketing teams across Cornerstone Building Brands’ 35-brand portfolio spent significant time gathering data from multiple sources and building reports by hand. Using Analytics, Competitor Analysis and Social Listening in Sprout Social, the team built customized, automated monthly reports tailored to each business unit’s specific goals, freeing teams to act on those insights instead. By reducing time spent on reporting, business unit teams could focus on optimizing content strategy, identifying competitive opportunities and escalating timely intelligence to executive leaders to inform strategic decisions. 

One campaign put this approach to the test: The Cornerstone Building Brands’ Home for Good project. The Cornerstone Building Brands’ Home for Good project was launched in 2016 in partnership with Habitat for Humanity and raises awareness and support for affordable housing through employee engagement and partnerships with country music artist ambassadors. Using analytics from Sprout Social, the team looked closely at how different content formats resonated with different audiences during the campaign and found a clear split: static posts performed well with employee advocates, while videos and carousel posts consistently generated stronger engagement with the broader external audience.

The team acted on that insight while the campaign was still running, shifting to video and carousel content for external audiences and keeping static content for employee advocacy. Because the data was there in the moment, the adjustment happened while it could still change the outcome.

Year over year, the Home for Good project’s impressions increased 122.4% to more than 3 million, engagements increased 75.3% and post link clicks increased 42.5%.

“Together, these results demonstrate how social intelligence helped us move from reporting on performance to actively improving it, driving smarter content decisions and stronger business outcomes,” Godfrey says.

One campaign proved the model. Curious what a closer look at your own content data could uncover? Book a demo with Sprout Social.