Welcome to another edition of PROse, where we explore the science behind building a brand. Sorry for missing our letter last week. Things got hectic, but we’re back!

In today’s email, we discuss:

• What makes a good social strategy

• How detailed the strategy needs to be

• Who should be responsible for creating the strategy

Yo! I’m Darien from Antidote 👋🏾. Every week I share what I learn about the science of building a brand. If someone forwarded this email to you or you’re reading this online, welcome to the fold! What you're about to read is an unconventional view on B2B marketing.

If you enjoy it, join 100s of other B2B marketers on the journey to build a standout brand.

What’s the most overused, but least understood word in marketing (and business as a whole)?

Community? Nope.

AI? Nope (getting there).

MQLs? Nope (close second though).

Strategy.

Every marketing team uses the word. But few understand what it means; even fewer are good at it.

Strategy is this somewhat ambiguous, nebulous term. If you ask five random people at any company what their strategy is, you’ll get one of two answers: 1) “I’m not sure” or 2) a list of tactics.

So before we go further, let’s define it:

That’s Michael Porter’s (creator of the Porter’s Five Forces Framework) definition. That’s the definition we’ll be going off of for this newsletter.

What makes a good social strategy?

There’s two layers of strategy in social: your global strategy (set for the entire organic social program) and your platform strategy. For now, we’re going to focus on your global strategy.

It should take 3 primary things into account:

1. The business objective it’s responsible for driving

2. The context of the platform it’s built for

3. The resources available for content production & management

The business objective

Social media should drive a business objective.

More followers is not a business objective. Engagement is not a business objective. Going viral is not a business objective.

Awareness, demand, and conversion are business objectives.

Your social media program should be responsible for one of the objectives. Typically it’s awareness, since people don’t scroll social media with the intent of becoming your customer.

Once you have an objective, you need a way of measuring whether you’re successful or not.

The metrics will differ depending on the objective, but the most common ones are:

• Follower count

• Site traffic

• Leads

Platform context

If you’re going to build a winning social strategy, you have to first accept that each platform is different.

The way users prefer to consume information is different.

How the algorithm ranks content is different.

What’s seen as “best practice” is different.

Even though there is overlap between a few platforms, there are also important nuances that you need to account for.

These nuances form your creative strategy, or your use of platform-specific designs, features, behaviors, etc. to create standout content.

Available resources

Finally, you need to know what resources you have available to create content and manage the platforms.

If you’re on Instagram, you need a lot of design & video production resources.

That’s also true for YouTube, but in a different way (long-form video + thumbnails are a different game than short form video and graphics). You’d also need on-camera talent.

If you’re on Twitter or LinkedIn, you need copywriting resources.

And so on.

If your plan is to get active on YouTube, but you don’t have anyone who’s good on camera. Or a good thumbnail designer, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.

Last point, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention your team’s bandwidth.

This is a really important piece.

The days of asking a single person to manage, create content, and report on 7 different platforms is over.

Limiting platforms to 2 per strategist/manager is a good rule-of-thumb.

How detailed does your strategy need to be?

The philosophical answer: as detailed as necessary to convey what tradeoffs you’re making, and how they’ll help you win.

The practical answer: somewhere between 1-2 pages or 10-slides in a deck is probably appropriate.

You want to walk away knowing exactly what you’re focusing on so you don’t get distracted by the shiny objects that will inevitably pop up.

Trust me, it’s a mistake I’ve made more than once.

“We will deliver content that educates & entertains our audience” is too vague. Chances are you won’t know where to start. Or once you start, you’ll pivot constantly as you see other companies “pass you by”.

A better framework for thinking about the detail is through a set of questions:

• Who is our audience (e.g. primary, promoter, partner)?

• What is the key narrative will we be communicating?

• What medium(s) will we use to communicate this narrative?

• What content pillars will we test?

Let’s go deeper on the first and last points.

Every company has multiple segments in their broader audience:

1. Primary - the group of people you sell to

2. Promoter - people who are supporters but don’t fit ICP

3. Partner - other companies and people your company partners with

Knowing how your strategy, and your content plan specifically, targets each of these groups is key.

You don’t want to have a content plan centered around partner marketing and blog posts when the goal is creating hype.

Then there are the content pillars.

Every brand should have 2-4 content pillars.

It may help to think about these like branching storylines in a TV series. All the hit shows of the last decade (GoT, Succession, Grey’s Anatomy, etc.) employ this technique.

They incorporate multiple storylines that keep you hooked and engaged.

For example, let’s say we created a TV show about two college seniors matriculating through their last year.

Character A may start off as bright, but shy and insecure about their prospects of landing a good job. Over the season, you’d watch them develop more confidence and discover an opportunity they love.

Meanwhile, Character B may have a clear idea of what’s next but they’re struggling to navigate interpersonal relationships. Over the season, you watch them navigate through that challenge and develop values for what matters most to them.

(Obviously, I’m not a scriptwriter so don’t judge that example too hard 😂)

The same idea works with social content, except the “characters” are your company (and maybe even people in the company) and your product.

Your audience should see parts of your company, product, and narrative evolve.

Who should be responsible for strategy?

Often social media strategy is left to a junior employee who doesn’t understand the impact of specific tradeoffs.

Or it’s left to a senior leader who isn’t very active on social at all.

Both are a mistake that’ll end up costing you a lot of time and money.

The person responsible for your social strategy should both have direct knowledge & expertise in organic social media marketing; and they should be senior enough to understand what tradeoffs need to be made and how they affect your goal.

Ideally, that person is also involved in executing the strategy in some way.

That doesn’t mean they should be doing everything, but they’ll need to stay close to the ground because platforms change fast and often.

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Your feedback goes a long way (seriously, I read & respond to every email—good or bad!)

See you next week,