Why Social Media Strategies forget Brand Consideration?
Steal this social media strategy to win more business. Plus, spend less time worrying about algorithms and trends.
Social media marketers are either the most pliant people in the world, or they are surrounded by a bunch of NPCs who don’t get social media. It’s both.
In the past few years, Marketing budgets got cut, marketing efforts were paused. But marketers never stopped to revaluate how social media apps have been blocking their road to brand consideration.
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What’s happening: The road not taken.
You have been told social media is about brand awareness and more you generate it. The further you get, it’s true if you see it this way. But it doesn’t work on social.
Increased exposure on social media doesn’t equate to increased purchase intentions.
Design influences user behaviour. Your TV or Laptop screen doesn’t shift every week. Every nudge on social media takes away something.
Formats and profit, whenever something new arrives on social media. Like Reels on Instagram, the platform adds another block in awareness-to-purchase journey.
Not all platforms are banking on the same emotion as your brand. As Snapchat’s CMO puts it, banking on happiness isn’t as profitable as using consumer anger and sadness.1
Unless you pack all the emotions into creative every single time, platforms aren’t necessarily helpful in carrying the brand emotions. A TV Spot does that.
Social holds more attention, but as the study linked above highlights, more attention doesn’t entail more influence.
You can never have enough awareness on social media. The biggest stars have fallen from the peak.
A deep dive into history of Meta is enough to confirm how their growth works against the users and brands.
The Road you have taken is filled with social media apps fooling you.
This past week, Instagram’s advice of not creating reels over 90 seconds went viral. That is a clear case of misguiding marketers and creators. In the same slide, IG mentioned getting authentic engagement. If your content is authentic, why should you care about 90 seconds limit?
I am not saying don’t care about algorithm. It is meant to highlight how brand consideration and brand awareness are two paths divided & disrupted by Instagram and others.
Building a new social media strategy
The Problems with current social media strategies
1/ Our strategies aren’t selfish enough.
The equation is we market to people. Not at them, it’s annoying. We don’t market for them, it’s threatening to our business. We rarely market with them, it’s the best but you don’t get there immediately.
This is the problem: We aren’t marketing to people. Platforms constantly scream at marketers to do marketing for consumers. That ends up with creators/brands bending at every point.
A brand’s job is to market for their own benefit. Not for consumers, that’s what best brands do. It’s the same as putting yourself first, self-care.
The opposite is brands thinking people need them or they are providing value through 3 tips about hiking. It’s being self-important.
Creators are going through same bullsh*t, organised by platforms. This past day, Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro shared his concerns about Google stealing content.
2/ 90% of businesses don’t even have a strategy, they have tactics.
The most popularised strategies like Gary Vee’s $1.80 or AIDA, Content Retention Scripts. These aren’t strategies, I would classify them as tactics or tools. Then, we have a lot of gimmicks and facts we use in social media strategy.
LinkedIn or Instagram prompting you to post 3x a week isn’t part of your strategy. You may think, we know these aren’t strategies. But count how many of these random tactics/tools make up your strategy? If too many, you need a clear strategy built on solving a problem. Not growing followers.
Stacking tactics on tactics without clear strategy is worthless.
3/ Social Media Marketing is a Mess.
Many social media marketers never try to learn marketing psychology or advertising strategy. This is a low-pay and mentality problem.
Some brands and traditional marketers don’t take social seriously.
Consumers have a media literacy problem, causing brands to stress their brand efforts.
Protecting Brand narrative on social isn’t a one-person job.
We need to be more calculated about how much we influence others.
How these problems block your road to brand consideration.
1/ Social Media Platforms are narcissists, and you allow them to be one.
Every brand complains and changes their strategy for a new platform update. Not realising, another step was added to their journey to brand consideration.
This came into realisation for many publishers after Google announced SGE AI. Publishers continued to bend in, and now it’s another risk tasking case for them to bend and change. The same thing happened on social media, publishers lost the long term battle.
Publishers failed, Brands will too.
The new trend is brands need to have content business, like Liquid Death. That leads you onto a similar path like Publishers. Your budgets for content will increase, but how much of that will come back? A little.
Plus, You can’t become Liquid Death. It’s a business built by creatives, yours isn’t.
+1 block ▇ added in your journey to brand consideration.
2/ Shiny Object Syndrome: Don’t post links on facebook or twitter. No one reads?
If the idea of awareness is to not post links on facebook. Only to post a carousel & add a website link in FB stories and get the same amount out of traffic.
Or awareness is to jump on every new meme/trend. Only to feed your audience into doom-scrolling and never make them hang outside.
You will end up worse in two ways.
It causes brands to rely on content strategy to build consideration. As their social strategy is stuck in awareness stage.
People won’t value your existence/content. Too much of anything is bad, if X trend doesn’t align, skip it.
The Regular Question to ask: Do you work for social media apps or your brand? Doing new trends or having no links isn’t wrong. But why not post a link and old meme to build consideration?
Yes, It is a hassle to win on social media apps without giving into their best practices. But that’s platform strategy, what about brand social strategy?
How different brands are winning with strategies focused on brand consideration?
On Social, Brand Consideration is built through 4 main elements: Community, Product, Content & Storytelling. Having all four is the best, but content is the weakest element and storytelling is the strongest. Be Aang, The Avatar. 🧹
1/ Why content is the weakest element in strategy?
Time: Content’s life is short. When people get busy its influence dies.
Form: 90%+ of content is you moving information, 3-10% is originality.
You can either be Kendrick and moving the same information creatively or be drake and read the exact words to fail.
Platforms: They hate when you repurpose that content with 5% originality. Even though the Time factor wants you to repost.
Psychology: The Shiny Object Syndrome causes us to copy each other.
Reality: Social Content also brings you unwanted audience.
Your content needs a healthy amount of product in it. Don’t be Duolingo. It’s a platform with enough gamification in App UI/UX to keep people hooked and distracted from its flaws. You don’t have that, including more product is crucial.
2/ How to confirm your product should be the focus in strategy?
Treat your product like music. If you promote your music (product), and people watch the content but don’t engage. You are in the wrong market.
If people hate it on the first listen, you have a bad product.
If people don’t get the music style, you have a content/community/storytelling problem. You would need one of them to make sense of your music in the beginning of your career.
It is sustainable for you to play with the product. Crocs vs Surreal
For Surreal, playing too much with product is a risk. As they are selling expensive cereal to general consumer. Crocs isn’t expensive and they have a huge catalogue of products.
You have the In-demand product, Rhode hit the jackpot with their cover in Q1. It was lip kits for Kyle when she launched her brand.
Big Budget, You can hire big influencers and borrow only their identities to put products in the center.
That’s what HUGO did, using all the Gen-Z influencers but not using their creativity or styles. Works, but not my favourite.
Do the social listening and product testing.
3/ What is storytelling on social media?
It’s controlling and creating new narratives whenever it is needed. It’s to an extent what Viola Davis shared, “i'm no longer shrinking to be digestible. You can choke. - respectfully.”
IMMI Ramen shares it’s about real-time experiences and stories.
ZYNE proves background music and visuals are enough.
Loewe shares storytelling transforms in many forms like memes if your product is hot.
Schick believes you can partner once with a creator like Hunter Prosper.
Nuuly shows you can use captions and diverse influencers to connect products with stories.
Lyft shares you can play with new trends, but have content series like Influencer rides to win the audience.
Dua Lipa vs Taylor Swift, you need lore to get people engaged and talking.
For McDonald’s incredible storytelling is a form of distraction.
The Empire State Building highlights stories from the past.
All the brands ranked above use stories aligned with their image. But you can easily catch other brands copying or riding the wave. LOEWE played with their name first, other brands took the inspiration.
It’s not wrong, but the question arrives: Is it aligned enough to make people relate to our brand? Are there enough consumers experiences about not getting our name right?
4/ Community is the ultimate reward of your efforts.
A good product builds culture like ZYN.
Great storytelling builds connection to make people work with/for you. (Oiselle)
Great content either leaves space to make people create content about you or you inspire them to do so. (Topicals)
If you are familiar with Topicals, you might say, it’s not content alone. They have great culture and products too. A lot of brands do, still consumers don’t voice their opinions unless they feel the need. That is achieved by leaving a space to be filled, let the community market for you.
What not to do with communities:
Don’t focus on a reward system early on, always better to start naturally.
Adding everyone to community space is a mistake. You need to add contributors and engagers before you invite lurkers.
Communities do generate referrals, but you shouldn’t rely on the natural process. Prompt them!
Don’t use the same communication lingo everywhere. Communities act differently on different platforms.
Never abuse @everyone on discord or slack.
What to do? A lot can be done. But communities are best to be built with the mentality of you know everything and nothing about your members. Be Curious?
The Pulp: Building consideration
Behind-The-Strategy: Insights
Content: You can’t create influencers like Santina or Sam. It’s the Gen-Z culture speaking in them, do the research to find your match. Brands asking me so too about creating for Gen-Z, my answer is always you can’t manufacture generational habits. SIMPLY HIRE GEN-Z!
Storytelling: The Goal is to keep the focus on the task/activity in story-driven video. Coca-Cola paid Mr.Beast to clean the ocean, one of the biggest plastic polluter had everyone praising them for a moment. How? Mr Beast kept the audience both attentive and emotional throughout the video.
Product: Don’t chase complex ideas or jargon-filled creative details. That Complex Idea worked in real life because your whole real-time store experience was enough to simplify the message. Don’t be like Loro Piana.
Content: Your Brand already exists isn’t true on social media. Once you enter a market, your business earns an immediate brand identity. This isn’t the case for social media. Too much noise and saturation, people only care about what’s in the video. In the beginning, you need to focus on messaging and repeat it again and again.
Product: Don’t abandon what made your business. Unless you don’t have it. Take GAP as an example, prices and quality made the brand. But they lost it. The switch was to capitalise on the OG design and Gen-Z culture through PALACE & Tyla collaborations. Use what is left like GAP’s nostalgia.
Content → Community: Marc Jacobs’ strategy proves if you are contributing when culture is celebrating a moment you win. A lot of brands are too late to ride the internet trends. Making them look like engagement gobblers or trend killers. Marc Jacobs is always early and there, the internet community embraces that effort.
Storytelling: You need to be a more of curator, forget being a creator.
The Age of creators never arrived, it was curators making the decisions.
Social is becoming more and more about keeping people in an experience. Everyone has a weird TikTok or Instagram feed with different interests, you need to sneak into those feeds. That task is possible with curation mentality.
Being a curator helps brands and creators to build distribution systems. Imagine instead of building reply/tweet chains. Like Nebula, Brands came together to curate and build distribution.
Product: Influencer marketing is about validation. You aren’t looking for the most followed or always influencing creators. You need to look for creators who either have content do the validation or their identity.
Community: Building a community is more about focusing on the underrated. Most Brands are creating content for the chronically online, which is fine. But the underrated or NPC’s need someone to save them. By save I mean, represent. You should be the one, do the social listening and find them.
Product: Cut costs by letting the internet do the job or DIY by faking it. Your brand can be Bottega Veneta on budget. To build buying confidence early.
BV intentionally had A$AP ROCKY wear the Pre-Spring look to be captured by paparazzis. Then, used those images for the ad campaign.
Airrack & Yes Theory, one of the most creative YouTubers have done stuff like this over the years. But the twist is they do the reactionary job of internet/people to make it seem real.
Content: Be a nerd. The definition of cool changes quick. Not high school quick, Internet quick.
Storytelling: Treat your business like an evil one, even if it isn’t. Fill the noise against you with your own screams (stories, celebrations and customer reviews).
Platforms: The Attention theory of social media is too vague. Don’t chase attention, chase intent. If you scan the world, you will find how different societies think about attention. Everyone values time but the idea of ‘you have to earn my attention’ isn’t universal.
Community: Internet comes a full circle + bad products rarely win: There’s
nosuch thing as bad publicity. Camila Cabello went on a complete PR run, all positive and creative. She’s failing. Drake had more eyeballs on him than ever. His Nike release was a failure.
You can read past insights from the newsletter about social media strategies. Most of them are focused on brand consideration over awareness.
The Juice: The public factors that define your brand personality to social media audiences.
Social Media marketing has the farm to Erewohn pipeline.
You are selling the social media juice to potential buyers. The Pulp part is the same for big brands and small businesses. Erewhon and Whole Foods aren’t different on the backend, it’s the frontend. The Juice part of representation and brand personality. There you need the budgets, bigger teams and more control.
Examples & Suggestions
The Orlando ‘ME’ Baby increasing bookings at Four Seasons hotel. It’s the best example of right emotions packed into one video can lead to clear action. Also, the timing helps. Both factors lead to people taking actions.
Nicole The Intern, She is scaling the brand instagram to 500k followers by 6/10. The strategy is to smash the brand product in every video. She’s at 453k followers now. It’s all awareness, Can you copy her?
It depends, a small business should try this to check if it fits the appeal. For the big brands, you have a long history of marketing + doing this type of boss content can backfire on your company.
Consideration is hidden in awareness. When people know less about your business, this type of content works. As the context builds up, people start to judge and care about what’s happening.
It’s hard but we have to retire terms like content and users. Both are very technical terms, MIT is talking about getting rid of ‘users’. As marketers we should too. Our job is to provide value through digestible medium. Not to create a transaction between users and content. The way we discuss our strategies does matter.
Don’t stress the attribution part. Only do it if it’s like a risky campaign with an influencer or a new experimental campaign. If the brand alignment and strategy is there, attribution isn’t the main concern.
For effective reporting on impact of this social media strategy and your current campaigns. I recommend using this structure from
’s Salmon Theory newsletter about social effectiveness:
Previous newsletters connected to topics discussed in the strategy:
I hope this strategy helps you and your team. The mentality behind it is rooted deep in the newsletter’s mission. Keeping marketers on the right path of caring about consumers while growing at the best levels.
If you have any questions or criticism against this strategy, do share it in the comments or discord. In case you really loved it, do share it with others.
These weren’t the exact words used by her on Uncensored CMO’s. I was paraphrasing what she meant.
Genial 👌. Can I translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a descripción of your newsletter?
a fun and interested pieces of advice for a beginner like me!!