Social strategy lessons from SURREAL, Figma and Progressive Insurance
We did it. We did a second webinar around social strategy, and another great success! Guests this time around were Roxanne Parker, Christian Harrall-Baker and Heleana Blackwell, with the again excellent moderation by Berk Genel. Thanks all!
Below is the video recording, and notes on the most practical things we ended up discussing. Plus, if you want to spend more time chatting to our guests, you should join them in our private community.
Key points to take away (steal for your next deck!):
Start with the fundamentals of the brand and business before jumping on fancy new trends.
Pick your references wisely. It’s better to aspire to brands who are slightly ahead of you in terms of maturity, than trying to copy industry leaders with much larger resources than you have right now. In other words, “Be more Duolingo” isn’t helpful.
Brands like SURREAL are best understood if you combine not only their social performance with the fact they’re growing in brand measures, but also that they’re growing physical distribution in mid and upmarket retailers, which will nudge sales much more than ads or content ever could.
Whenever someone asks about the role of social, it is your duty to establish the role of everything else in the marketing and communications mix. Remember, strategy chats are highly contextual.
One of the most potent arguments for doing social content that gets shared is that you’re building familiarity through the endorsement of others. In other words, more people sharing is only a means to an end which is greater reach and frequency. But the result of that is greater potential for your brand to be remembered or at least recognised.
For the previous point to be effective, though, the more you can tie your social content to some semblance of category entry points, so that your brand is more likely to be remembered around buying situations, the better positioned you’ll be.
Sometimes the brand platform you’re working from is enough to brief a social team, and you don’t need much more social-first creative strategy on top. For example, Progressive Insurance’s platform is “You’re not your parents”. You can see the social scripts writing themselves immediately.
If you’re working in a low-resource environment, focus on identifying where there is already existing demand that could give you content ideas. For example, look at social search and existing UGC as starting points for tensions or problems that your content and brand could possibly help alleviate.
If you’re revamping a social strategy, it’s a mistake to try and nail every channel at once. Instead, pick one core channel you’ll focus most of your energy on for a number of months, aim to get good at it (and by good i mean also effective, have results to show for it), before moving on to something else. Multiple channel multipliers are real, but only if you’re able to maximise each channel’s strengths.
Don’t be afraid of repeating content just because some people might see it twice. Organic reach is so low on average that, if you’re lucky, you posting the same thing multiple times increases the odds of most followers will get to see it once. And even if they do see it twice, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of frequency of message to make sure it lands.
Don’t be afraid of taking one content concept that worked in one environment and executing it in another way. For example, a stellar TikTok you did might be the basis for your next great Instagram carousel. You won’t know if you never try it.
The cost of failure in social is so low that 80% of your time should be focused on experimenting. Unlike a high production cost TVC or integrated campaign, there’s very little to lose if a TikTok bombs. So see how far you can go, even if some things will bomb. Some of them will definitely hit.
If your social strategy relies on humour, consider hiring a professional comedy writer instead of simply expecting a copywriter to do the job.
Don’t obsess over profile grids, most exposure and engagement happen in-feed. We see similar patterns even with brands like the Premier League, which is a high interest category. So next time someone says the grid looks this or the other, it’s your duty to point at the data of what real people see. Customer orientation 101, yeah?
Be as specific as possible when describing tone. “Unhinged” or “human” are non-words. If you’re funny, explain what kind of funny you are. If you’re like a warm friend, describe what kind of warm friend you are. Use short clips as references, as everyone will have a different interpretation of what a tone of voice-related word might mean.
We’re already thinking about our next event and got some ideas of how to change things, but if you have specific requests please let me know by emailing rob@salmonlabs.co.
