Social Media Creative Guidance

Yes – but the definition of “where they are” goes much deeper, and links much more directly to real world decision-making and behavior-driving via social media.

Most social media strategy begins-and-ends with one consideration: where are the eyeballs? And, obviously, a person actually BEING on a social platform is important to reach them there. However, from the neuroscience perspective, simply “being there” leaves off the other two crucial components of behavior driving:

1. The behavioral influence of the social media platform.
2. The psychological role of the platform relative to the consumer mindset of YOUR category.

Once we understand consumer psychology and decision-making criteria via our Behavioral Profiling, we can clearly link to their behavior in the marketplace, in a much more involved, actionable manner. We assess not only WHERE a consumer audience spends time, but also which media align to behavior, and in the ways that correlate to YOUR category and brands.

Open your feed on your social medium of choice… you’ll see that a given user is there for one of four reasons:

1. To connect with their social tribe (the alleged purpose of social media in the first place).
2. To learn or collect information (think of that great chili recipe you discovered!)
3. To take a little vacation (fail videos et al).
4. To brag (great, Jill’s on another helicopter skiing vacation).

These four reasons correlate with the durable, predictable drivers of behavior which we measure within our Behavioral Profiling. If we find that your brand aligns with the social driver of behavior, and the audience is on Instagram to connect with their social tribe, then that’s an alignment that’s proven to translate to real-life behavior.

However, if your brand aligns with the social driver of behavior, and the audience is on Instagram to brag, that’s a mis-alignment and your content will simply be dismissed by your target audience as noise.

Most journey mapping efforts end up outlining every imaginable brand interaction and trigger point a person could possibly encounter in the path to actually purchasing a given category or brand. This is kind of like having a road map, but with no guidance on which route will be the fastest, most direct way to reach your destination.

Our approach uses quantitative data (via our proprietary measures of behavioral influence and psychology) to line up where to reach the audience, with what type of content, and at which point in the path-to-purchase that will most effectively drive real-life purchase behavior. It’s not about finding some undiscovered social media platform, but rather aligning where your message will be most effective.

Simple, efficient, and uber-actionable. We’ve seen this approach consistently separate the signal from the noise in activation planning – not to mention driving +10% sales growth, all on the same big digital platforms everyone already knows about.