Not having a social strategy is no longer an option. But social is changing fast and it’s hard to keep up. There are new features, guidelines and standards being introduced each week. It’s a full time job just to stay on top of the platforms, let alone ahead of the whims of consumers. And let’s get real here. Consumers don’t care about your brand nearly as much as you do. They are busy, and they have their own problems to deal with. So what does a brand marketer do?
Respect Your Audience
This is about respecting their time and their interests. Don’t ask them to make a mental leap to understand what you’re selling - be honest and upfront. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the time find out what makes them tick: once you know their interests, it’s easy to serve up a content mix that is genuinely engaging and motivating. Depending on your brand narrative, you can arm your audience with insider intel, inspire them by revealing an aspirational lifestyle, offer unprecedented access to things they care about, simply catch their eye in the feed, galvanize them to a deeper cause or frivolously entertain them. All these angles are ways of respecting your audience, their time and their interests.
Ask Yourself: What’s the quickest and easiest way to show my value to my audience? What do my audience care about above anything?
Respect Your Brand
Show your brand some respect and invest in building, not buying, a real following. This may feel like a hard slog at the beginning, but will accelerate growth and drive engagement from the onset. To help your message be heard, focus on sharing your message with an audience that you know are interested in what you have to say. This means investing in promoting posts targeted to them specifically. Finally, many brands make the mistake of hiding what they are trying to sell. They create a string of pure content posts, and then apologetically and sheepishly reference their product. You might be surprised to learn that top performing content often revolves around product heavy posts. According to Little Arrows’ proprietary data, posts that feature the product at the center perform 30% better than posts focused on more generic content. Be proud of your brand! If you show your brand respect, others will too.
Ask yourself: what does my brand truly care about, that we want to share with others?
Respect The Channel
Rather than thinking about social media as an afterthought to your marketing campaign, show social media some respect by building a strategy designed purely for the channel. That’s not to say that social exists in a vacuum - with some savvy planning, social will become a critical amplifier for the rest of your 360 media efforts. This means leading with social, and building campaigns specific to platform. That said, a Facebook campaign should not be approached the same way as an Instagram story campaign. As well as treating each channel individually, you should constantly take stock of what’s working and what’s not (through real time feedback) and adjust your strategy accordingly. Many CMO’s don’t take time to track digital ROI, which creates knowledge gaps that intimidate and deter them from doubling down on social in their marketing mix.
Ask yourself: what does each channel do best and how can I leverage that exclusively?
