January 6, 2020
Why Media Buyers and networked Creatives agencies are doing Social Media wrong
If you were to jump into a DeLorean equipped with Flux Capacitor and punch in a date of just five years ago, you would be whisked to a time when the larger agencies in industry didn’t give a hoot about Social Media. Resolute to their beliefs that TV was still king, they would discount the credibility of a vertical that was already making waves.
At this exact time, immediate future is collecting award win after award win, and publishing numerous client win announcements.
By 2017 a new trend had emerged; creative and media buying agencies were now referring to themselves as content agencies. Their former disdain of Social Media replaced by a desire to publish some campaign content. And this is my key problem.
Social Media isn’t the new billboard display, or latest device upon which to view a TV advert. It’s not a catapult to propel you down the funnel. It’s a means to foster and cultivate connections with your audience. Done correctly, and you’ll foster widespread brand awareness and brand consideration – leading to purchase consideration. Done incorrectly, and you’re just adding to the growing number of brands accused of intruding on people’s feeds.
So, what’s the difference? Well, the incorrect way being a single advert published to all and sundry, that severely lacks any resonance or connection with an audience. Social Media is well documented to track what we view and who we engage with. Simply put, all of this data, together with your personal data and other cookie collected information, builds a potent picture of your behaviours and interests. Your likes and dislikes. Yet, too many agencies DON’T utilise this information when building creative assets. Rather than a one size fits all, with a billboard-cum-social media advert shoehorned into your feed, agencies should be creating content that delivers contextual storytelling to your audience.
So, if that’s the key to Social Media and unlocking ‘nudge nurture’ of your audience, why aren’t more agencies delivering this? Simply put, they’re not resourced to deliver this way. They don’t want to spend time live monitoring social media channels to see if bid rates on Paid Media have rocketed due to popular use. They want their teams focused on building and deploying the next costly single advert to boot out the door. Once it’s signed off, their billable hours are largely spent. Further, when agencies are fighting to beat the rivals single-digit ad management fee, they simply can’t justify using hours in this fashion.
The end result: you see a single advert flush with an array of vanity metrics, but doing nothing meaningful funnel wise, let alone conversion wise.
Nudge nurture is key to Social Media. If your agencies don’t understand this. Then ask yourself, should you be spending with them?