For a few years now, a feeling of insecurity has been creeping its way into how marketers view their competition while planning and executing strategies for brands. They allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the hybrid algorithm of ever evolving social media platforms that may or may not actually affect their strategy. The only understandable reason behind this trend seems to be ‘Real Time’.
We live in a world where it is considered unnatural to switch your phone off or not be present on various social media platforms. While half the world does not pay too much heed to any of it really, the other half (mostly consisting of people that remember life before the Internet took over) believes that social media is doing strange things to us.
However, if you think about it, all that they are doing is what we have been doing since time immemorial-evolving according to the current environment. The environment, at the moment, is such that it is random but highly opinionated. Whether you’re selling software or ice-cream, there’s a bunch out there that is obsessing over things that are mostly outside the periphery of interest of many around us. See below to put things in perspective.
Credit: Berlin based Digital Artist, Tony Futura.
It does not end with just this much though, the bigger problem is that everyone is a social media specialist and by that virtue, also an expert on content. We believe that our content consumption and behaviour and reaction to what’s out there is similar to the rest of the world’s. This is a very naive way of looking at this phenomenon. What one needs to do to make any strategy worthwhile and effective is invest in research to understand audience reaction and be open to experimentation. If we keep recycling old ideas, how will we ever make way for new ones? If we always play safe, how will we know where the limit lies with the audiences? As guardians of a brand’s identity, we should value its individuality, just like we value the perspective of people we look up to. Proper research and contained experiments with social behaviour of audiences can open our eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. We need to react to their behaviour with content that is aligned with our brand voice, but at the same time packaged in a way that calls out to them and says what is needed, as promptly as possible.
Let’s take a simple example, If your target audience is 26-35 year old working women in tier II, it doesn’t mean that you create content that resonates their habits in the real world like watching dramatic household TV series (respect), or how you perceive they behave on social. Instead, look at these simple things:
- How can you say what you want to say in as humanly pleasant way possible, that absolutely fits with your brand’s content strategy and identity?
- How do you secure the attention of your fans in less than one second (figure of speech, guys). Put that extra thought into exploring interesting ways of showcasing your perspective, trust me, it works every time!
- Pull up your socks and reach your paid audience quickly. No point spending on that #MondayMotivation masterpiece in the second half.
- Lastly, don’t be too critical, it’s just an emoji for God’s sake.
[Source:-ET BRAND EQUTY]
