On Social, Less is More
Your client has a social media campaign. Your agency has its production budget to create the assets. Now what?
In About Face, my co-author and I advocated for creating fewer, better social media assets to be amplified with paid media. So what does “fewer” really mean, and why is it ever better to have fewer paid assets? To answer that, Communications Planners need to connect creative, media, and production disciplines back into their strategy.
To determine how many assets you actually need to make, Comms Planners need to understand the reach and frequency goals of the campaign, especially given the paid media budget.
Let’s hone in on Facebook and Instagram in particular. Many brands now cross-promote assets, treating the two platforms as one audience for efficiencies (depending on the consumers social media habits, and with the assumption that these consumers are on both platforms).
Your media agency should lead the charge in determining the reach and frequency goals for your brand, but the Comms Planner needs to fully understand their recommendation. Generally, the higher the frequency, the lower your reach. This means that the media agency and the Comms Planner need to be aligned on how much frequency you need to build brand salience, without wasting impressions on additional, unneeded frequency and thereby creating a smaller audience for your brand.
According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and CNBC, there is evidence that a frequency of one can be more valuable than multiple exposures to the same person. Specifically:
“Evidence to date shows that advertising’s greatest sales effect occurs when an individual moves from zero to one Exposure (Wind and Sharp, 2009). Subsequent close-by exposures can have a positive effect, but the impact is much lower.
An effective multi-platform media mix needs to reach more people without wasting advertising dollars by hitting the same consumers multiple times with the same stimuli within a short window. The lower the overlap in audiences, the greater the synergy”.
Ultimately, your client and media agency will set the reach and frequency goals, but as a Comms Planner, it’s important to understand the delicate balance of reach and frequency. Too much frequency results in media wastage and cripples reach.
Once you determine your production budget, one of your first steps is to connect with your media partner on the number of assets needed to drive optimal reach and frequency. Again, too many assets to promote will drive frequency up and lower your reach, ultimately limiting your audience size and impacting brand growth. You and your media partner should also align on campaign goals, key messages, and KPIs.
Once you know how many assets you have, you can take a step back and analyze your production budget versus the assets you actually need to make. And if you can show why you need to make fewer assets to better manage for frequency, you can save precious production dollars and invest more in the assets you need to make. This means that those fewer social assets are actually better, hopefully through more engaging formats (e.g. video), better and bigger creative ideas, talent or influencers, etc.
As Facebook and Instagram evolve, brands no longer needs a constant stream of lightly boosted posts. Comms Planners can work with media partners to ensure that our production dollars are wisely spent and in service of a bigger, better, breakthrough creative idea.
Source:
“PLANNING FOR SYNERGY: Harnessing the Power of Multi-Platform Media”. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and CNBC, 2012.
