🔧 How to Build a High-Performance Marketing Engine...

4 Steps to Build a Strong Social Brand for Effective Marketing

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Speaking to experienced founders and ecosystem players (not to mention some of our Open Letter polls), a major stumbling block for many SA startups and scale-ups is marketing, going to market and positioning.

And where many fall flat, is in failing to establish a brand. Basically — how many people get to know and trust you, and how fast can you make that happen?

And, just like you build a product to honestly solve problems, you gotta ask yourself whether both the content and marketing you put out on social media, for example, also honestly helps anyone – or is it just part of the background noise?

Well, one obvious key is to build a brand that solves problems even on social media, for example, just as your product would elsewhere. And I was quite inspired by this 3-minute social branding segment from Gary Vaynerchuk as a brand-building guide to lead into a full-on marketing strategy, so here’s how I’d tackle it…

A Social Brand as Foundation for Great Marketing

1. Go super granular on segments

Most brands (or people for that matter) only focus on 2 or 3 very broad customer types and then just kinda hope for the best. But if you’re really going to connect and add value, it pays to go super-specific.

Vaynerchuk advises to create 40–50 customer segments – as granular as you can:

• Female Xhosa-speaking university students, 18–24 in Gauteng
• English-speaking male lawyers, 28–34 in Cape Town, etc.

And then find the right channel(s) for each segment, know the current trends on each platform (what content’s over-indexing, where) and then start generating and measuring content performance.

2. Let the machine self-inform

Yes, you’re obviously going to be looking at quantitative data – how many likes, followers, clicks and conversions posts generate – but the key to getting smarter and better as you grow is to have specific team members review content for the qualitative feedback.

This means you have people analysing any posts that do super well – over-indexes, get a lot of comments and engagement and just seem to resonate with the audience – and make that formula and format the brief for the next post in that segment.

You keep doing this, rinse and repeat so that your marketing actually builds deeper and deeper affinity with time. Now suddenly, you don’t need millions of rands in ads anymore, because your team has learnt how to reach specific people on their level, in their mindset, where they gather.

3. Keep refining segments for affinity

As you repeat and grow, you can start eliminating those segments you’re just not hacking. And start looking closer at the ones you are finding affinity with for even deeper cohorts and segmentation.

This should all help feedback to your product, too, in terms of who your customer really is – or at least which customer you can reliably reach.

4. Get the support to do this properly

Now, I know this sounds big – many established brands don’t even approach their brand-building this holistically. But the truth is you can build this with even a small, competent in-house team – especially if you approach it as you would building a product:

• Segmentation: Your product person is ideal for this (it’s just your user personas, after all)
• Qualitative data: Your insights team can help set it up
• Qualitative analysis & briefs: A smart marketing person will shine here
• Posting & scheduling: You can automate it all with tools like Buffer
• Design & video creative: Internal designers can help, else a visual agency/freelancers
• Copy: Often the hardest to nail, but it just got super-easy and flexible with unlimited, pause-and-grow specialist tech copy by Stream.

Got a startup hack or insights to share? Hit reply and we might feature you here, too.

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