Creativity in social is imperative – and creating content that excites and moves your audience to action is the goal of any campaign. But, breaking through the noise of social means more than adding your voice to the latest tiktok trend. So, without breaking the bank on every piece of content, using social media to instigate engagement and action takes a content strategy that is deeply targeted, highly customizable, and positively trackable.
The best approach to social instigation is to break the strategy up into three parts:
- Deeply understanding your most valuable audience
- Deeply understanding the content they want to see
- Backing up the results with data and testing
Deeply understanding your audience means defining your “most valuable audience” (MVA). Notice that we didn’t simplify it to “who is your audience”. This is an important distinction. For most brands, the overall audience for the product or service is in the multi-millions, but trying to reach all of them in a way that resonates only works with a bottomless checkbook and unlimited time. In the real world, and with real budgets in mind, the best first step is to truly understand the audience with the lowest cost per acquisition, highest likelihood to become a brand loyalist and is reachable through targeted messaging. Luckily, there are some incredible tools available to brands that can make this process relatively painless.
Deeply understanding the content they want to see is the most important part of a creatively intensive process. It requires a deep look at what these consumers are currently consuming and how. Learning when and where they engage is simple. Discovering the messaging, concepts and types of imagery that impact their core thoughts and process is more in-depth. A/B creative testing, brand lift studies, messaging testing and data are your best friends here.
Backing up your work with data and testing is the final piece. Taking the guess work out of impact means trying a wide variety of different ideas and, through analysis and data, seeing what sticks and guiding decisions. It’s extremely important to stay agile and ready to shift in real-time. The best part of digital is that the feedback is almost immediate and brands that are ready to adjust quickly can achieve much more efficient long-term results through simple short-term testing.
As with anything, the hardest part of social instigation is to get started. So please, consider this our invitation.
Also published on Medium.
