By Rupert Boddington, Co-founder, POCKLA
With the ever-rising influence of social media on consumer behaviour, there is a growing opportunity – and need – for brands to engage consumers on their terms.
The potential to drive high engagement and share of mind is high. An overwhelming 90% of consumers rely on social media to keep up with trends, while the average user hops between six social platforms per month. Yet, as feeds are flooded with content (Instagram alone has a daily quota of 100 million new photos and videos), cutting through the noise is getting tougher for brands.
Brands able to stop the scroll aren’t only those running brave and quirky campaigns. They are also the ones that have developed a solid social-first marketing strategy rooted in granular understanding of not just who their audience is, but also the optimal way of creating meaningful and mutually rewarding connections. Or, put simply, entertaining them.
Pure entertainment as a north star objective for your content sits at the very heart of a social first strategy. However, successfully entertaining is no mean feat, given the level of competition from other content on consumers’ feeds designed purely to entertain. So, let’s explore what brands need to know to determine if going social-first is right for them and how to tread this path.
Why go social first?
Though traditional problem-based marketing that speaks to defined customer issues and illustrates how products solve them will likely always have its place, brands relying entirely on this strategy are already struggling to keep up. In part, that’s due to the rise of purpose-led buying, with 84% of global consumers only using brands they feel share their values. But there is also the increasing difficulty of fuelling results using conventional messaging.
Modern consumers have access to an endless array of content that’s solely designed to entertain. For brands delivering classic sales initiatives, this is making it harder to stand out against more fun and captivating competition, especially in social spaces where users keen to fill spare time have huge numbers of niche creator accounts and outputs to scroll through.
As a result, achieving social cut-through now depends on harnessing methods that meet the growing appetite for truly enjoyable media and put real engagement first.
A good strategy is always multi-faceted
While the basic blueprint for social success is simple – a two-step process of capturing attention with organic and converting with paid marketing – brands must still be careful to align with key best practices. For starters, phase one isn’t just about setting commercial goals aside and aiming for pure awareness; attracting meaningful attention involves tapping into what actually resonates with audiences.
Making content hyper-relatable by reflecting everyday audience moments is crucial for cutting through, as well as fostering positive brand associations and memorability. The trick is ensuring experiences link to who brands are and what they offer, without slipping into overt sales mode. For example, this may include a travel booking company nodding to the everyday moments sitting just to the left or right of their actual product, such as when work stress triggers holiday cravings, finding the dream destination, waiting to collect luggage after landing, and jumping onto a hotel bed.
Once brands are able to consistently capture the attention of an audience, either through organic or paid marketing, paid marketing remains hard to compete with when it comes to conversion. And this time, the objective is straightforward: driving consumers to conversion, and ideally, repeat purchases. Ensuring optimal effectiveness, however, requires disciplined learning across the three core pillars of a high-performing ads campaign.
When taking a closer look at social ads, we see that a successful campaign requires strong performance across the trifecta of creative, messaging, and audience data that paid marketing provides. So often, brands have one or possibly two pillars in a good place, but the missing third pillar lets the side down entirely. For example, there might be a defined audience that responds well to a clear message, but it isn’t stopping the scroll to see enough of that message due to the creative.
A well-designed campaign spits out useful data across these three pillars on a daily basis. These powerful combined insights can inform decisions at every level of a business.
What makes the best brand fit?
Effective social media strategies require a brand to craft a sincere and distinctive persona that earns true credibility — as supported by the finding that 44% of consumers have decided to hide or unfollow companies due to inauthenticity.
Small challenger players are at an advantage here, having more freedom than well-known brands to experiment with their image, style, and tone and find what works. Equally, however, bigger firms have had massive success by creating a zany voice. Dr Pepper is one of these – and its “Try more weird” campaign is a great example of this – as is Ryanair, a brand that has continuously embodied provocative brashness.
In contrast, there is huge scope for inconsistent or off-key activations to miss the mark. Burger King’s infamous International Women’s Day post is a perfect example of the challenges that can come from branching out into wider conversations without earning the right to be there. Many may also remember the challenges surrounding Pot Noodle’s slurping TV commercial that led to a raft of complaints and even a £10K compensation pot for consumers.
Ultimately, what matters is driving intentional communications that stand for something clear and tangible, as well as aligning closely with the brand and its target audience.
What does the future of social hold?
As AI rapidly makes execution across the content value chain quicker and cheaper, there will be even more of a premium placed on originality, authenticity, and brand. The rise of agents also means that keeping pace with trends and changing consumer needs is also becoming easier and easier, so finger on the pulse, reactive content will fall behind the need to create and own new audiences gathered around a shared interest.
Executing smart social-first strategies that blend organic and paid messages to cultivate lasting connections will go some way towards meeting this requirement. But AI will likely also have a further notable role to play.
As brands reduce reliance on software-as-a-service tools and start working alongside smart agents, co-piloting is set to level up data-driven decisions. Machine assistants that can quickly drill through vast volumes of real-time social chatter will save time and help brands get a step ahead of trends, enabling brands to proactively engage relevant audiences, at prime moments. Or in short, optimising the right time, place, and message equation with help from intelligent tech.
Smashing through constantly swelling tides of cross-channel content has been a struggle since the start of the digital age. As content creation abilities and consumer expectations continue to evolve, it’s becoming ever more essential for brands to be bolder and embrace a new approach. By adopting strategies that prioritise entertainment, persistent authenticity, and agile data-driven activity, they stand a stronger chance of thriving in the social-first era.
