When Social Strategy Overwhelms Messaging Strategy

Your pursuit of likes shouldn’t dilute your brand

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Anyone who has seen a Super Bowl commercial feels qualified to offer marketing critique. Or, in today’s culture, anyone with a TikTok account has advice for the Influencers and people whose job it is to post on social media.

I mean, how hard could it be?

Very hard, as it turns out. There’s a science and skill to marketing that gets forgotten in the mass consumption of its product. We all experience marketing and we all have opinions about what we experienced. A better way to do it, perhaps. What we would have preferred to see. But our shared experience of the end product is no substitute for the expertise that went into creating it. Great marketing is the product of great marketers.

And that’s not all.

Today, we experience so much marketing via social media, that we forget marketing is so much bigger than that. Social media is just one of the many platforms marketers use for promotion. Print collateral, email, billboards, sponsorships - that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to promotion, marketing experts collaborate with product and program managers on value creation, pricing, and even packaging.

Social media is a tool within marketing, not marketing itself. And “marketing” as we often think about it is much more complicated than creating the flyers, slapping the logo onto everything, and cooking up an email newsletter once a quarter.

Social media gets all the love because it’s easiest to consume. It also gets all the hate when a post isn’t to someone’s liking. Or perhaps the viewer was hoping to see something else: a different feature, a different experience, or a different picture. The frustration snowballs, because the viewer waits expectantly for the next post, or the post after that, to offer what they were waiting to see.

This is real, and part of the challenge of marketing. Social media has the advantage of volume, so if a single post doesn’t generate engagement or goodwill - or if key stakeholders would have preferred to see something different - it can be followed up with a new one quite easily.

This is also its Achilles Heel.

Because anyone consuming the social media feed, especially those inside the organization, can, should, and will have an opinion about yesterday’s post, you as a marketer can quickly find yourself in reactive mode. This is rampant in small organizations, where everyone has access to the marketing “department” (aka one or two people sitting nearby with the Instagram password and a camera.)

The “in-real-time” culture of social media pushes marketing into a very tight space, bounded by:

1. Promoting what’s coming
2. Reporting what’s going on now
3. Balancing diverse stakeholders
4. Adjusting to current trends
5. Reacting to yesterday’s engagement stats

Without a strategy, keeping up with your multiple social media platforms - and messages - becomes a daily circus. Distractions, noise, and death-defying stunts.

But a strategy isn’t just a calendar. It’s certainly worthwhile to create a social media posting schedule, highlighting themes, pillars, hashtags, platforms, and best-time-to-post. That’s important, and a critical tool for doing the work well. It needs a strategic foundation to be effective as well as efficient.

To understand that strategic foundation, it is helpful to think about the three elements that work to communicate an organization’s value proposition:

• Branding

• Messaging

• Marketing
  

Each one is critical to connecting your organization to internal and external stakeholders. But they perform very different functions. And you can’t do one of them effectively without the other two.

Branding is the art of capturing the heart and soul of your organization in ways you can communicate it to others. It establishes your identify, your personality, your unique approach to fulfilling your purpose. Branding sets guidelines for describing who you are and how you will present yourself consistent with the values of your brand.

Messaging is your high-level approach to how you will communicate that brand and all the information you have to share. Messaging will develop a list of key words, top themes, and clear strategy for connecting more deeply with stakeholder emotions.

Marketing is the on-the-ground work of spreading the messaging through all the channels at your disposal. Marketing has specific measurable business objectives, such as promotion or engagement. Promotion might be paired with a call to action. Engagement might be measured by reach or reaction.

Marketing is what you’ll see, but it is the manifestation of the messaging strategy. And that messaging strategy is rooted in the brand strategy. The brand strategy itself is the starting point for whatever ultimately gets shown through the various channels, be they digital or otherwise.

So what’s the best way to keep all of this sorted?

Start with the four “Big Questions” for your business outlined in The Nonprofit Planner’s 6 + 4 System.

1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Who are you trying to solve it for?
3. Do they want it solved?
4. Will they pay (or adjust behavior) to solve it?

If you cannot answer these questions, you aren’t ready to introduce your organization to the world, never mind engage with it authentically.

Once you know your distinct business purpose, describe your brand. You already have one, just as you have your own personal style. Whether or not you’ve put it down on paper, it encompasses how you present yourself.

Define your values clearly. Pair them with personality and tone - the kind that establishes you as the expert needed to address the problem at hand. Decide how you are going to speak to your stakeholders and how you want them to feel when they interact with you.

With your brand firmly established, build a messaging strategy. Decide where your stakeholders are congregating and determine the best way to communicate your message. Create those bits and pieces that consistently describe who you are and what you are all about - in your compelling brand voice. These are the snippets that fall at the bottom of a press release, sit within a grant narrative, or govern the direction of your LinkedIn pieces. Identify the key words you will use consistently to describe your work. Come up with a high level calendar organized around themes. Decide well in advance of anything actually posted on Instagram what types of images best tell your story.

The messaging may not give you the exact recipe for every piece of marketing collateral, but it sets the menu: what makes sense and what doesn’t in the context of your brand. What do we expect to see here?

Finally, once you know who you are (brand) and what you want to say to your target audience (messaging), delve into marketing: the what, when and how.

The marketing department will have some very clear deliverables associated with specific business objectives. The team will need to balance development priorities, program registration announcements, and maybe even some PR and journalism-like documenting of what the organization is doing.

The marketing team also needs to balance text, video, photos and graphics.

Finally, the team needs to balance general brand messaging - who we are and what we do - with specific call to action kind of marketing that leans into promotion.

This is not easy. But having a clear through line between brand, messaging, and marketing makes it easier. And more effective.

So, the next time you see something that catches your eye on social media, know that catching your eye is only the hook. That’s a sign of clever marketing - and it may even generate a bunch of likes or new followers.

But does it tell you something both new and familiar? Is it in line with what you would expect to hear from this organization? Does it feel of a piece with other messages and images emanating from this organization? Does it make you feel a certain kind of way? A feeling that you recognize every time you interact with this brand?

Does it call on you to DO something? Engage, give, volunteer, attend, sign up, refer someone, or tell someone else about this cool organization you saw on Facebook?

By the time you see the post on social, it should have traveled a long way through the organization’s branding, messaging, and marketing strategies.

If not, it’s a shot in the dark, chasing likes for likes’ sake.

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