Your Social Media Post is a Pilot
Small scale strategies help brands understand their users better and build engagement.
The Balenciaga scandal late last year brought with it many lessons, most critically about the key role—and key lack—of strategy when it comes to luxury brand content.
As a brand, regardless of size, you simply cannot put content out there without a plan for why you’re doing it, who it’s for, and what you’re getting out of it. This plan is a content strategy.
Every campaign, activation, and post your brand creates—from earned media advertising, web, and social media content to immersive experiences—needs to have purpose and its impact should be measurable.
The art of content strategy and why it matters
A content strategy relates to the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content across channels. Content strategy connects your corporate strategy to your brand story. For us, content is any touchpoint where a consumer encounters your brand messaging and product information, both IRL and digitally.
Every project or post your brand creates should connect to your holistic brand content strategy but it also should have a strategy of its own. This is the art of content marketing strategy, or content strategy for marketing.
The changing brand-consumer relationship
As we have explored, we are in an age of a new brand-consumer paradigm. The brand-consumer relationship is changing. The acceleration of creator content across channels means that consumer preferences and trends change on a whim; and brands are no longer exclusively in the driver’s seat when it comes to influencing consumer behavior through product marketing, advertising, and content creation. Consumer stories matter as much, if not more, than brand stories.
Small-scale projects need strategy
Small-scale content projects, like Valentino’s recent announcement that it is creating avatars for Meta or all the Threads, TikTok, and other social posts with which brands are currently experimenting, are in a very real sense a pilot. They are an opportunity to build community, interact with your customers, learn from them, and, in turn, sell products.
But you can’t do any of that without a plan of action or a content marketing strategy for an individual campaign.
How to create a small-scale content marketing strategy
A strategy for a small-scale project (or even a large-scale one) does not need to be complex. As Don Draper noted once in the TV show “Mad Men”:
“Make it simple, but significant.”
Even if you are not linking a smaller individual social post to a wider marketing campaign, it needs to be consistent with your brand vision and feel authentic and real to your target consumers.
Content strategy equals vision plus tactics.
Some elements your small-scale strategy should include:
Clear vision statement that makes sense for the project and reflects your brand vision
Concrete set of short goals to define what you’re out to learn or accomplish
Qualitative and quantitative (where possible) success measures to track and measure ROI and study consumer behavior
Optional lists of challenges and opportunities the project may encounter
Regardless of scale, any content or messaging your brand creates needs to make sense with your overall brand vision but stand on its own. If your brand content is inconsistent and you do not have checks and balances in place to study and measure your content projects on specific channels and across channels, then your brand is missing out on key data and key opportunities to interact with and build loyalty with your target consumers.