Social Media Strategy
As social media best practices continue to evolve and user-behavior on the platforms shifts, brands are looking to establish themselves in the social space. With all the major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter defining what successful content is, advertisers and marketers are actively managing consumer engagement and brand success. There is a need for brands to establish an online community that can directly support said brand's goals. I believe that brands can play a vital role in consumers’ daily lives on social media in a way that feels natural and non-invasive.
And through research on user behavior, we know that consumers want to showcase how their favorite brands play a role in their daily lives. Consumers expect their favorite brands to engage with them on social media when appropriate. They want to see brands' heart,' 'favorite,' and share their content. To truly create content that resonates with a brand’s audience, we as marketers must first understand how a brand positions itself in its respective category.
Positioning Your Brand
Think about how consumers perceive a brand in the real and digital world. There are many schools of thought when it comes to establishing a brand story. During my agency days as a Social Media Strategist, one school of thought focused on 3 Fs, Fame, Feeling, and Fluency. Let's take some time to address each of these to understand better how a social media strategy can support each F.
For Fame, this is tracked by how readily a brand comes to mind for a consumer. Fame is also known as unaided awareness and can often be an indicator used to determine the current market share of a given brand.
How do you apply the concept of Fame to your brand and its role within its respective category?
If your brand readily comes to mind when consumers are thinking of a specific category, that means it is likely the right choice for most consumers, driving Fame.
It often takes brands decades to acquire the Fame required to be a "Top 5 brand,” regardless of category. That's real equity earned day in and day out, across multiple distribution channels.
Feeling is the emotional aspect of how consumers feel about a brand. We've talked about how social media is a mixture of art and science, where we evaluate both the quantitative and qualitative performance of content.
Feeling focuses on the latter, the positive, neutral, or negative emotions associated with a brand. Feeling can often be an indicator of future market share. As a consumer, if I feel good about a brand, that means I am comfortable giving my hard-earned dollars in exchange for their products or services.
When looking to understand which brands evoke the most intense emotions within a category, market research analysts look to have consumers associate facial expressions with a given brand. These facial expressions are then directly attributed to specific feelings like Happiness, Sadness, Disgust, and Neutral.
Last but not least, Fluency. Fluency focuses on the cues consumers pick up on in their everyday lives, specifically, if a brand is distinctive compared to others within the same category. From a logo to an iconic tag line like "Just Do It," these distinct assets help consumers recognize a brand. Compared to Fame or Feeling, Fluency is used throughout a brand's life cycle to grow or sustain market share.
The distinctive cues associated with a specific brand drive a higher 'score' when evaluating Fluency. A brand with distinctive assets will typically have a tag line or imagery attributed to said brand. Brands with a high Fluency enable consumers to make quicker mental connections between a specific need and a brand that answers that need.
For iconic brands, often a logo or tag line is all consumers need to know about what a brand stands for. For Fireball Whisky, showcasing their iconic label or the Dragon is how consumers know it’s going to be a wild night.
How To Uncover Your Brand's Social Media Strategy
Establishing the following will provide the foundation to help your brand's social media strategy.
Brand Character/Essence: These are the words associated with a given brand, often agreed-upon internally. Think punchy, emotive words like "Bold," "Energetic," and "Caring."
Brand Personality: This is where you can provide a little more context compared to a brand's character. Descriptors like "party-starter," "old-fashioned," or "trusted friend."
Consumer Insights: Use social listening, focus groups, Google Surveys, and any tool at your disposal to uncover insights about your target consumer. What do your target consumers think about your brand?
When you have a firm grasp of where your brand plays in the space and then leverage insights based on your consumer, you can narrow down the type of content that will drive the most engagements.
Types of Content
As we navigate life during COVID-19, our behavior as consumers continues to evolve. Recent studies have shown that online consumption continues to rise, with consumers spending nearly 2.5 hours daily on social media, with almost all of those polled (98.5%) stated they use at least one social media platform daily.
Taking what we've established above with brand positioning and social media strategy, I want to switch gears to cover various content pillars that most brands can apply to their social media strategy today.
Let's dive in:
Evergreen (Branded) Content
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Activity Calendar Content
Culturally-Relevant Content
Educational/Informative Content
Evergreen (Branded) Content
Evergreen (branded) content solidifies a brand's voice and tone while using distinct assets, like a brand's logo or flagship products in the creative. All to garner brand awareness and advocacy.
Product-focused content or content not tied to a specific campaign is often considered evergreen content. Evergreen content is also known as "Always On" content. You’re leaving a piece of a creative in the digital world that tells a consumer everything they need to know about a brand or product, no matter when the content is viewed.
User-Generated-Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content, or UGC, is an excellent way to share engaging social content and promote conversations around a brand. UGC enables companies to build brand affinity and foster community growth through additional reach and engagements.
In turn, this User-Generated Content helps highlight individuals that embody a brand's essence, encouraging other consumers to share their content using branded hashtags.
Regardless of size or marketing budget, brands are leveraging user-generated content (UGC), and I highly recommend you start incorporating into your content calendars if you haven't. This cycle of consumers driving brand advocacy via engaging with UGC amplifies a brand's messaging, transforming these consumers into unofficial 'brand ambassadors.'
Activity/Holiday Calendar Content
An activity calendar can help fill in the gaps for any brand’s social media content strategy. They can be more broad, such as holidays that most brands create content around, like Memorial Day, Halloween, or the 4th of July. An activity calendar can also include more category-specific holidays, like 4/20 and the concentrate-focused holiday, 7/10, when thinking of the cannabis category.
Note that brands do not need to show up for every holiday, let alone every relevant "National Insert Your Favorite Food Day." If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Culturally-Relevant Content
From a cultural standpoint, what culturally-relevant moments can a brand show up authentically? This content is often reactive to whatever today's hot topic is, from the Netflix phenomena "Tiger King," to all of the playoff-magic within the NBA's bubble in Orlando.
If a cultural event sparks up across social media and other mediums, there is an opportunity for brands to join the conversation. When a brand creates culturally relevant content that is engaging but relevant, it is essentially introducing itself to consumers who might not otherwise interact with this brand. Educational / Informative Content
This increase an online consumption means that consumers are craving more content. Specifically, content that educates, entertains or inspires consumers.
Creating content that touches on these interests helps a brand build brand equity and social authority. By doing the work in the upfront so that when it's time for your target consumer to take action, there should be no doubt surrounding whether a specific brand or product is right for a consumer.
Content-driven videos are a great way to reach customers during the first two stages of their journey — "Awareness" and "Consideration." For example, hook consumers with valuable, content-driven video and then convert them with a targeted video ad that's more sales-driven.
Pinterest is an excellent platform for educational content, especially around recipes or tutorials. Recipe content is another perfect example of content that thrives on image-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
Tip: Want some more content ideas? Think about how the following ideas apply to your brand:
Animated GIFs or Looping Videos
Contests, Giveaways, Sweepstakes
Prompting discussion by asking a question
Polls, Quizzes, Reminders
Spotlighting brand advocates or favorite customers
Product-specific content like this Fireball Firebox is extremely relevant during Tailgating Season. To help raise awareness and move product, we ran paid ads targeted at college and professional football fans throughout both sports’ seasons.
Ad Spend and Paid Social Strategy
Paid social media is another form of advertising, like Out-Of-Home (OOH), SEM, or experiential.
As consumers increase the overall time spent looking on their devices, brands have an opportunity to invest more in paid social ads. This increase in overall screen time is also shaping us to be more comfortable with completing transactions directly within the feed using key features like Instagram's shop functionality.
Paid social content that targets new audiences on social media can help move consumers through the conversion funnel. Brands use paid social content to:
Drive conversions (mostly CPG / eCommerce brands)
Generate leads for retargeting efforts
Promote deals, events promos, or partnerships
Understanding how and why paid social media should be used, how do we apply our learnings to a brand's social media strategy?
Once you’ve established your target audience and objectives for a paid social media campaign, the next step is to establish where your social ad spend will occur.
While most brands advertise on a combination of the major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there are other digital mediums where you can run paid ads. Does Pinterest or YouTube make sense for your brand more so than a platform like Twitter?
After researching your target audience and their demographics, I suggest diversifying your budget to align with that demo. For example, if one of my clients were a skincare brand, I would recommend allocating the largest portion of an ad budget for Instagram, an excellent medium for visually-arresting creative with an audience that skews more female.
Diving deeper, we can dissect how to utilize an ad budget across multiple platforms. During my time working on a particular spirit brand, we took our client's allocated budget and set up a "40/60 split" for our paid ads.
40% of our ad budget would be for our evergreen or "Always On" content. 60% of our ad budget would then be set aside for "campaign-focused" content. Think about the Firebox Backpack above.
We’ve gone over a lot today, and there’s so much more to discuss. From establishing your brand’s positioning within its respective category to evaluating what types of content to prioritize for your brand.
What other tips would you give to marketers when it comes to social media strategy?
