We help companies who want to punch up their brand reach over gift-giving season — using social media to level the playing field between themselves and entrenched eyeball hoarders who are killing it on social.
But as you think your way through how to do that in Q4 and beyond, here is one minor DON’T and one major DO so your team can use the holidays to gain on your better-funded, better-staffed competition.
DON’T: Throw a 2021 Hail Mary Play
The last thing you should do is redouble whatever you’ve done all year in hopes of standing out in the holiday chatter. Especially when supply chain issues and seasonal competition for social media ad inventory mean traffic and ad budgets are going to be swamped by deep-pocketed eCommerce/delivery retailers already well in their lane.
2021’s a wrap.
Breathe and let it go.
DO: Get Urgent About Your Focus for 2022
The Thanksgiving-to-New-Year trough is when you take a quiet moment to ask yourself one simple question: “Who do we want to reach and what do we want them to do in 2022?”
Read back through your brand’s posts on the platforms where you’ve tried to make a dent this year. See any message drift or loss of focus?
When you’re in charge of most or all of your brand’s marketing activities, it’s easy to — like the poor souls in the hold of the Valdez from Waterworld — just keep rowing every day sans a North Star.
Get Refocused
To start, you need a steady, consistent organic presence to be credible in your arena. And an idea of what you’re playing for: Followers? Views? Thought leadership? Qualified leads? eCommerce revenue? Downloads of an asset?
This might sound remedial, but you’d be amazed at how many smart, smart professionals who are really good at what they do can drift off their foundations, degree by degree, from the target they set when they started a brand play on social media channels.
Thinking about this — taking the time to gird up with a solid content plan for the new year — should be your #1 job for the holidays.
Grab the Right Yardstick
After you’ve refocused on your social media target audiences, you might naturally turn to how you’ve been measuring effective engagement.
Are your target metrics the right ones? Do they actually match the outcomes you’re going for?
Having more followers than your competitor can assist in brand credibility, but will that drive more business your way?
The number of engagements (likes, comments, shares) on a post can tell you if that content resonates with your audience, but is it driving revenue?
Website traffic referred from social channels is a key metric, but would it be even better to measure conversions or bounce rate or the average session duration of that traffic?
Digging into performance metrics for 2022 — the ones that define progress in your marketing and sales goals — should be the next thing you do before the end of the year.
So, in review, here’s your Holiday Playbook:
1. Stop rowing so hard.
2. Re-envision the customer you want to reach and the actions that help you both. Place that at the center of your social media universe.
3. Maybe don’t go shopping today. Read a book.
4. Decide what you’re going to measure, and why.
We’re not talking about a big leap here. It’s more of a step up — take stock, look back, think ahead. And if you take this time to breathe, ponder, and plan, your 2022 social media presence will be more intentional, focused, and successful.
“But WideFoc.us,” you say. “I’ve already done all this and I’m not getting anywhere.”
Then that, my friend, means you’re at Step 5. Let’s chat.
