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Written By
John
Bohan
Getting your marketing right is the easiest way to accelerate your brand's growth, and a small window of massive opportunity is open now, but it will close soon.
The easiest way to describe this opportunity is to look at history.
If we look back 30 years, there are short windows of time in marketing and advertising that have allowed savvy marketers to scale their businesses. Then, the rest of the market catches up, and the window closes.
For example,
Time Period The Opportunity
1995-2000 Internet Marketing
2003 - 2006 Behavioral Marketing
2008 - 2011 Facebook Media
2012 - 2016 Influencer Marketing
2022 - ???
The most successful marketers have the foresight to anticipate trends and embrace areas of significant growth early on. This strategic advantage allows them to establish a competitive edge before others do.
That opportunity right now is Creative Strategy and Execution. In other words, how you present and position your brand is everything right now.
99% of brands are still stuck in top-down marketing, where the content they produce feels like an ad. It is brand-centric and either talks about capabilities or benefits.
It feels Boomer at a time when even Boomers don’t like to be communicated with in this way.
Social media, cell phones, and the Creator Economy have rapidly changed the game, but marketers have been slow to adapt.
There are a few companies, however, that are doing it right.
Such as -
Source: Statistica 2023 and Forbes 2023
Notice that all of the above sell products in highly competitive markets, and their products have little to no differentiation.
Superior marketing is the differentiator.
These marketers and ones like them have asked better questions and seek out executives to be on their team who have a deep pulse on social media and speak in a language that refers to hooks, suspense, and payoff. It is a different language and focus altogether.
These marketers also focus on the customer-first approach and keep their immediate brand needs second.
I know it sounds simple, but to truly think like this, you must have a lot of faith, hire the right team, and have a little patience.
These brands focus on creating fun, relatable stories with creators (aka influencers) and run superior social media content based on 3 and 15-second views, as well as other metrics aligned with the goals of the social platforms. They are incredibly aware of what is working in social media so that they can game the system.
Their ads do not “tell and sell,”; rather, they entertain, inspire, and educate.
Sales follow because the brand's content is so good.
These brands have transformed from the content interrupter to the provider.
Think about Red Bull for a second. If you like Extreme Sports and you see an athlete with a Red Bull logo, you watch because you know something amazing is about to happen.
If you see an article written by Patagonia and you care about climate change, you read it.
If Nike is providing a training video, you watch it.
Would you like to be the next amazing marketer in your industry and accelerate your business right now?
If so, follow our 5 Steps to Cracking The Social Media Code. If done correctly, you will build massive brand equity and drive sales of your product or service -
Build out the core reasons that your customer should believe in you.
What does your brand stand for beyond your core products and services? For example,
What is it that you do? Find your Simon Sinek’s why.
Build your archetypes, your values, and your emotional and functional points of difference around this purpose
This process is not hard, as you already know all the answers; it’s a matter of finding the right brand strategist to guide you through a process that allows you to see yourself on a single 8 ½ ” x 11” piece of paper.
Leading with social media is easy for emerging brands as they lack the budget to do much else.
It is harder for larger brands whose executives have extensive experience developing creative strategies that use 15, 30, and 60 commercials as the foundation of the brands. These highly defined ads dictate everything else, i.e., radio, billboards, streaming, and social media.
This is an easier path to execute because everything is linear, planned well in advance, and doesn’t change much throughout the year.
But it is not nearly as effective as starting with social media.
Great modern-day marketers like Wendy's and Dunkin' create experiences they can test in social media and successfully extend outward. For example, most people agreed that Dunkin won the Super Bowl ads earlier this year in a highly competitive field.
That’s because they tested Ben Affleck as a Dunkin employee on social media with great success and then extended the campaign to a much larger TV campaign on the Super Bowl.
The beauty of this campaign was that the ads on TV were not even the best part. It was the BTS that everyone liked most, which ran on social media and YouTube.
People want to hear stories from others, not companies and bots.
After our basic needs are met, humans yearn to connect to other people more than anything.
Carefully select the creators you want to represent your brand and build content that helps them accelerate their lives while promoting your brand.
When choosing a content creator, focus on whether the creator develops content that suits your brand and caters to a target audience in your demo/physiographic. Several tech tools allow you to see audience profiles, engagement rates, video view rates, etc.
Use the creator’s follower level in social media only as a tertiary metric of future success.
Spend time in their Reels to see how skilled they are at social media. If a content creator is a traditional celeb, strong Reel content is key, as some are dialed into social media, but many are not.
Once you have chosen the creators, you need the right creative strategist to generate ideas for execution. This is a critical step to success. You may have the right Creators but you need breakthrough ideas to succeed; otherwise, you may waste a lot of money.
At Socialtyze, for example, our creative strategists are leading social media creators with millions of followers.
To accelerate brand equity and capture customer attention, focus on these platforms.
Most emerging and established brands could focus on these platforms exclusively for massive growth.
They are the most effective platforms for building brand awareness, creating consideration, and driving sales.
Unless you and/or your team have lived and breathed in the ads manager for many years, please find a pro to help you.
Just because we can all drive does not mean we should race in the Indy 500.
Meta and other platforms all have self-serve tools, but if you want to be a leader in your space, you must find experts to execute paid media; however, you can save some money by having the buyers on your team and tapping leading paid media strategists as consultants.
To measure the effectiveness of your marketing, license a dashboard that will allow you to easily measure all your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in one spot.
Speed and efficiency are key to maximizing success.
Short-form video is the key driver of your success in today’s social media world, and the main upper funnel KPI’s to focus on are -
Run DR ads to retarget all engaged users and focus your lower funnel KPI’s on landing page visits, leads, and conversions.
As you consider dashboards, we would be happy to help. At Socialtyze, we built a leading dashboard that can be customized specifically for you. It pulls all the key metrics in one easy-to-use interface.
Best of luck in capitalizing on this window of opportunity before it’s shut. If you execute the above with the right team and have a lot of faith and a little patience, you will succeed.
If you don’t have the resources, time, or expertise to follow through quickly on the above, contact us for an exploratory call. If it’s the right fit, we’d be happy to help. Our team has empowered over 250 leading brands to win in social media.
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