For good and bad reasons social media marketing has continued to grab industry headlines this past year, but how are serious marketers changing their strategies as these platforms evolve?There’s probably never been a more interesting time to be a marketer, nor more new opportunities to build brands, but there’s also probably never been so many ways to completely waste marketing time and effort. Here are five ways in which I think advanced marketers should be adapting their strategies going into 2017.
1. Plan your content
Plan your content around your communication priorities, your key sales moments and when you most need to be front of mind for consumers; above all plan, your content around your budgets and only create what you’ll have money to promote.Desperately trying to post something about every topical event is a sure-fire way to be lost in the noise, and is irrelevant to most brands unless it happens to be their positioning.Even advanced content approaches like YouTube’s ‘Hero, Hub, Hygiene’ concept only work when supported by similar paid media plans.
2. Plan your media together
You may need a different content approach but there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be thinking about how your social channels fit in with (and build reach alongside) the other channels in your mix.If you’re a big enough advertiser to buy TV spots then it’s definitely time to embrace a more open ‘AV’ strategy, using YouTube, Facebook and other online video platforms to extend reach to lighter TV viewers.
3. Adapt content to platforms
While you may be able to plan your media together that doesn’t mean the content can be the same. It’s a hugely different environment to be sat back on the sofa watching an hour long TV programme with integrated ad breaks, to scrolling down your newsfeed past occasionally promoted posts, to playing a YouTube video and seeing an ad you can skip after five seconds.On Facebook the vast majority of people will see less than a couple of seconds as they scroll the past, so whilst the platform may be ‘video’ dominated it is often simple animations or subtly moving ‘cinemagraphs’ that actually best communicate there. Make less content, but focus on making it work harder.
4. Don’t be afraid of the dark
For a few years ‘dark social’ has loomed at the edge of marketing conversations as a potential threat to social advertising – it refers to private sharing by email, message or mobile app where it becomes hard for a content owner to track how they are being shared
At the end of the day if they still find your content interesting, noteworthy and valuable they’ll still choose to share it here, though the more personal a channel becomes the more personal the content might need to be.
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