How marketers are adapting to reach siloed audiences in a fragmented social media landscape

By Julian Cannon

The ever-changing social media landscape has become fragmented in recent years, making it more difficult for marketers as they not only need to create additional content to target specific niches, but do so as platforms’ algorithms continue to evolve.

[Agencies] have to be balancing reach with engagement.

Hannah Hickman, Sparks & Honey’s vp of client strategy and head of youth culture

It’s a far cry from when millennials were arranging (and rearranging) their top five friends on Myspace. Marketers can no longer take a one-size-fits all approach to targeting users of a certain age, according to marketers and agency executives who say that there’s simply too much content and too many ways to consume it for that approach. So marketers have had to diversify their spend — and content — to reach different audiences with different needs. At the same time, those audiences have only become more siloed across social media channels.

“For agencies’ media spend, it used to be ‘let’s put the dollars where we can get the biggest audience’ and that was on places like Instagram or like Facebook,” said Hannah Hickman, Sparks & Honey’s vp of client strategy and head of youth culture. “But now they have to be balancing reach with engagement.”

It’s more important for brands today to have different strategies depending on the platform, particularly when targeting Gen Z, Hickman said. That means agencies spend more time with clients to rethink what it takes to understand and engage with the audience they want to reach on a particular social channel. This includes investing in different kinds of data and platforms as well as restructuring processes around partnerships and content creation.

The platform differences may not be clear to all marketers, but the differences are clear for their users.

Liz Cole, executive director, U.S. head of social at VMLY&R

This need to focus on the particular kind of content that may work with a specific audience on a specific platform has led to silos for marketers. As social channels continue to prioritize these silos — people who like role-playing games or Y2K fashion or whatever niche interest they have all talking to each other — marketers have to speak to said silos to breakthrough to those audiences, according to marketers and agency execs who say doing so is even more important when talking to younger generations.

“The platform differences may not be clear to all marketers, but the differences are clear for their users,” said Liz Cole, executive director, U.S. head of social at VMLY&R. “It’s up to marketers to use marketing research to stay aware of what motivates their target audiences to consume media via each platform. For example, anecdotally, Instagram is seen as more curated and more aspirational than TikTok, where TikTok is seen as more authentic.”

The move away from mass cultures toward niche cultures isn’t necessarily a problem. There is a unique opportunity in being able to reach a small subset of people who care a lot …read more

Source:: Digiday