Episode 61: Serious Social – Making your moment marketing meaningful

Episode 61: Serious Social – Making your moment marketing meaningful

Ep 61: Serious Social – Making your moment marketing meaningful

This episode of Serious Social is all about moment marketing in social media. The people and brands that capitalise in the moments are rarely being agile and doing it off cuff. It can all be done ahead of time. Join CJ and discover how to make moment marketing meaningful for your brand on social with our 5 top tips!

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Full Transcript

Good morning welcome along to Serious Social Live. I’m CJ, Managing Director at immediate future. As always, we’re live across Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And shortly after airing, this gets filed as a podcast as well. So whether you’re watching live on catch up or listening to us in the pod, thank you so much for dropping by and sparing us 10 to 15 minutes. Our title is serious social. And the reason we give that title to this broadcast is as an agency, we are very serious about social media, we believe it’s our job to surface, the finite detail around the complexities of social media and make sense and rationalise those and present that information to you in a way that allows you to understand it, go away, debate, dissect, challenge it, and then come to a conclusion about what that means for your brand and offering and how you take your social media forward.

We only look through the lens of social media, we don’t get distracted by other important digital channels like SEO PPC. The reason we have that laser focus is we believe social media on its own is more than a day job taking care of it. But the focus allows us to invest a lot of time on a weekly basis, literally a weekly basis. Meeting with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snap, TikTok, whatever your channel of choice, we work very hard to get to know the people and understand the propositions and offerings and some of the information that’s been really important in the last 18 months.

The algorithm changes with more algorithms coming into the customer journey, meaning that single ad sets will no longer span awareness, consideration and conversion stage, anyone that’s trying to race to the bottom line and convert off a single ad set, you will be getting weaker conversion and performance, you need to create a content series that warm through awareness consideration, and then retarget for conversion to get those juicy, best in class metrics that are available in social, all of that information has come from meeting with the channels. Other information has come through our collective, I think Katy Howell will tell you that our leadership team has somewhere in the region of 70 or 80 years marketing experience. I tend not to talk about that because people then realise I’m perhaps a little grayer and older than my like people to know. But we take a lot of that marketing knowledge and collided with the information coming out of social to make the information we package tangible and relevant and able to impact your marketing agenda.

One of those is moments within social moment-based marketing, which is a focus of today’s live, I promised you five tips. I will get onto those very quickly. But I wanted to caveat, these five points actually come from an 11 point workshop that normally takes a day to deliver. So surfacing five key elements in about 10 to 15 minutes, and putting them into a live, I really am sifting just top line information for you. If you have questions on interest around what the workshop is, please get in contact with us. And we will talk about what that looks like or even give you more information around whatever your query will be.

The five points I’m going to be touching on today play into moment-based marketing span audience, content, pillars, personality objectives and time. If I asked any of you to call out a moment that meant something to you, some of you might call out the recent Bix and Beans brand collaboration that took place and I’m sure you’d have opinions on the brand that stood out well, early on versus maybe some of the brands that were a day or two late trying to make a call intro late to a party but they kind of missed the bandwagon. Others may call out moments like Mobile World Congress has been back in the past week, isn’t it? It’s good to see that happening again after a bit of a break. And then others may point to the ongoing European Championships or the Tour de France that’s currently making its way across France. Whatever your moment, there’s a bit of work you need to do ahead of time as a brand. Very, very few brands are able to be impromptu and capitalise in the moment and do it well enough to stand out where they’ve haven’t done a lot of work at a time.

Now, in the case of victim means I’m sure there are designers that had to be a bit agile and put together some content in the moment. But there would have been frameworks built ahead of time to discern the brand tone where they can push the boundaries on having fun versus when they need to be more conservative and serious. For example, you even a brand that wants to be playful and humorous, they’re not going to be playful and humorous when discussing things like equality or political elements that are going on, I don’t really want to get into any of the politics. But the point being, there are times when your brand can have fun, there are times when you have to be a bit more serious, because the moment denotes it. Workshops need to happen across a whole myriad of topics.

Let’s start with audience because this is one that perhaps brands miss. Lots of marketers still make intuitive decisions around who their real customer is, we would always urge a brand to go and look at the data to show you who your customer is. So, look at those who’ve transacted with you, identify the demographic behind them. And where possible, supplement that with psychographic data to the reason psychographic data is really important to immediate future. And it’s one of the reasons we really harp on about this within social is. The psychographic data gives you all the keywords around the behaviours, the interests, the intent of the individual. And those keywords are critical within your paid media targeting. If you just throw in basic demographic detail, you’re going to get a very broad, broad audience, you set your creative off to run, it will resonate with some but it won’t resonate with a lot. And when people are clicking on those buttons, saying I don’t want to see this advert, it doesn’t speak to me. Every time people are doing that your reach is being penalised, and your costs are going up. It’s far better to layer in behaviours and interests get a smaller audience that you can try greater resonance with getting those really positive metrics and conversions.

So, the first job you have to do to exploit moment-based marketing is understand the audience that’s going to transact from you. And then consider the moments that are important to them. You hear us say a lot. content creation is about creating content that matters to your audience, not the content that matters to Mr. or Miss salesperson, they’re just going to put together a credentials deck or put together content that’s going to be talking about feature advantage and benefit, you’re going to put people to sleep, your content needs to matter, your moments need to matter to the audience. So, to understand the moments that are right for your brand, you have to start doing that work around who your audience is, and the moments that matter to them.

Let’s talk about content pillars. We have frameworks within IF that allow brands to understand how to build content based on keywords, topics, visual type values message, it’s a complex chart, and I’m not I shouldn’t really be showing you this. But to give you an idea, it’s a complex chart like that, I mean, guess who we get the work for. And the editorial output would be something like this, you zigzag your way through it. The point being, if you create filters based on the topic, the keywords, the values, the requirement, the output, everything that matters to your brand, and your audience, and you’re using that as a checklist on building your content, you’re going to know that the outputs are going to resonate and live up to what you need. Moment-based marketing will pull you in a few different directions, because the moment might not be owned by you. Let’s talk Tour de France for a second give you a tangible example. If you want it to play into the Tour de France moment, you’re going to have to use certain Tour de France vernacular, you’re going to have to resonate with cyclists, you’re going to have to resonate with people who have a passion about the Tour de France, but you don’t want to drift so far away into that topic that you’ve completely detached from your brand offering.

That brings me back to another point that if you are trying to play into a moment that doesn’t resonate with your brand, what people are going to be thinking do you have a right to be there, that the content pillars, understanding the thematics for your brand aligned with the values aligned with your audience triggers. If you’re building content to those blocks and those steps, your outputs are going to stack up. Rather than just doing willy nilly in the moment content personality we get talked a lot.

People talk to us a lot about personality and tone. I’m going to group these two together. To define your brand personality and your brand tone, you need to go through quite a complex workshop where you start looking at the type of brand that you are or want to be known for. You’ll have to look at charts calling out keywords, you’ll be asked questions about whether you want to be funny or serious formal or casual respect for a relevant enthusiastic Matter of fact, then we would go through keywords default tonality of what you like and what you don’t like. We pull all that information together and we can come up with almost a persona for your brand. This is important if you’re an organisation that has a complexity of personalities and I’m going to talk Fujitsu defence for a moment. Whenever I talk tone, I defer to Fujitsu defence because they’ve got quite a complex job they’ve worked on with the defence and security services for decades. So there were times moments throughout the year where traditionally historic events are taking place trooping of the colour was a recent one. If we were all playful and joyous and colloquial and full of emojis playing into trooping of the colour, it would be a bit jokester, and people would be think that’s a bit disrespectful, what are you doing? Equally, there are times within the sporting agenda within military when are the Army-Navy hockey match, if you’re too formal in dialogue around that moment, people are going to be thinking, come on, let’s be, let’s be a bit more everyday language. We’re not all stiff upper lip, people within the military. The point being something like the military has complexity of moments and a complexity of scenarios. So as a brand, you have to know when you can be fun, when you can be serious when you can be tongue in cheek, or when you have to be respectful. So going through a workshop that defines the scope of how far you can go in each direction is going to be key if you’re able to make a decision about whether Bix and beans as a brand collaboration is right for your brand.

So you’ve started to look at the audience and the moment you’ve looked at your personality and your tone, you now need to be recognising that moments is just a moment. What I mean by that is, if you’re banking your entire customer journey, on a moment, you’re going to come up short. Because a moment isn’t going to give you the full customer journey from awareness through consideration phase and onto conversion. A moment is going to create triggers, awareness peaks of interest, it may develop the start of a nudge nurture campaign where you start to take people through the consideration phase. But even in a brand owned event. On the day only content will not go from awareness consideration conversion, particularly if you’re a high value professional services brand where your cost of services is significant. You still need to consider how that branded content from your on the day event, then packages into a full nurture campaign coming out of event so that you can walk people through the consideration phase retargeting them around the topics and interest the pain points they have and showing how you can alleviate and solve those pain points as a brand and retargeting those warm audiences for the value exchange conversion.

Too many businesses race to get that value exchange out, using a cute moment to achieve a bit of resonance. But a moment is only a moment, it’s a moment of resonance, you still need the marketing plan wrapped around it to exploit that momentary trigger that momentary head turn that you’ve achieved. The nudge nurture campaign in context of the moment you’re trying to trigger is key thinking you need to put in ahead of time, moment based marketing should be flagged in the ground, they should be moments that you can trigger awareness in your brand. But the question you’re then should be asking yourself is how can we extend that moment through weeks, months, ideally, quarters?

Hopefully, that’s given you a flavour about some of the questions and challenges you face as a brand, the audience and the tone bits are huge, and they take hours to get through. But hopefully, you can start to understand how understanding the tone that you want as a brand in context of the tone is going to resonate with the audience you want. Or perhaps challenge your thinking and take away some of the intuition and start getting you to look at ways in which you may be have to move a little left or right to play into a specific audience. Don’t get consumed by a cute moment, if it’s irrelevant to your brand. If bix and beans is going to allow your designers to have a bit of fun, and that’s going to stimulate a bit of morale that’s going to benefit the brand for six weeks, I would say crack on. But equally if bix and beans participation is going to be detrimental to your brand. Don’t do it. Equally. If you’re trying to force a brand or a message into a moment, I’d go back to that audience point.

Focus on the moments that matter to the audience you want and figure out how you can exploit those and if you do that, you moments will be more meaningful in context. Whether that’s your consumer brand, and you’re looking at incremental wallet values or whether you’re a professional services brand, and you’re looking at how you build your true beauty pipeline, the same stack shop. As always, if you’ve got any questions or queries, do you give me a call back on our time over 15 minutes. I did say it was a complex topic. If you’ve got any questions, pick them up with me at Colin Jacobs on Twitter or CJ@immediatefuture.co.uk if you want to email me as always, we’ll be back next week with another serious social live where we’ll be live across Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and into the pod shortly after broadcast. Until then, have a good weekend. Take care.