How to nail your social media strategy with ProQuo AI

What’s the basis of every successful social media strategy?  

An engaged community.  

Once brands can get the engaged community part down pat, nailing the entire social strategy is just that much easier.  

But to gain this kind of loyalty, you need to first use social media to understand and connect with your audience.  

More 16-24 year olds use social media than Google when researching a brand. So, taking ownership of your brand’s organic social and community management strategies is imperative. This is how brands build connection and loyalty with consumers.  

Rather than just being a space for accumulating a big following and selling products, social media is where people expect to see brands being authentically themselves. It’s how brands connect with consumers and demonstrate the credibility and trustworthiness that builds long-term loyalty.  

That’s why every brand needs to make their social strategy uniquely their own. What works  for one brand could be a total PR nightmare for another.  

The one thing every successful social strategy will have in common, however, is a deep understanding of what it takes to build relationships with people.  

And since ProQuo’s AI-Powered Brand Management platform helps brands build these relationships, the two really do go hand in hand for creating and executing a social media strategy.  

Here’s 5 ways to use ProQuo to nail your brand’s social media strategy.  

Pro-Tip #1:  Understand how your target audience feels about your brand 

Any good strategy starts with fully understanding and exploring who the strategy is actually for.  

Flexing your messaging and creative on socials can help you to resonate with different audience segments. For example, Gen Z typically go for the brand with the most buzz, whereas older age groups prefer slower-burners - brands they’ve grown to trust over a longer period of time.  

Taking the time to understand these individual differences will lay the groundwork for your social strategy, helping you to identify what your brand should keep doing, stop doing, and do better.  

Here’s how you can use the ProQuo AI platform to gain a deeper understanding of the motivations of your target audience

• Set goals that are directly linked to your target audience. To see how current users feel about your brand, pick the goal ‘increasing frequency of users’.  If you’re looking to introduce new people to your brand, pick ‘recruiting non-users' as your goal. 

• Compare these audience segments to help you to uncover differences in brand perceptions and show you which areas need more focus.  
• Look at your category’s 16 Driver profile. The 4 most expected Drivers are what you need to include in your social messaging. The 4 most unexpected Drivers are what you can include to shake things up.  

• Nail your brand’s IT factor by looking at your top 4 Drivers. These are what your target audience appreciates most about your brand, and what you should keep doing.  
  
  
  
  
  
• Then, hone in on what to improve by looking at your 4 focal Drivers. This is what to incorporate into your social strategy to build stronger relationships with your target audiences.  

• Finally, you can find opportunities to stand out by comparing your brand’s Driver profile to your top competitors. Look at the Drivers where your brand is outperforming and vice versa. 

And because ProQuo monitors how your target audience is feeling every day – this data will help to inform your social strategy, ensuring you’re  effortlessly keeping up with the times.  

Pro-tip #2: Choose which social channels to focus on. 

No brand can be everything to everyone.  

Similarly, no brand can do everything on a single social channel – or do everything on every channel.  

Your brand will have a different audience on each channel, so you’ll need different messaging, tone of voice and content for each – but more on that later.  

Depending on the demographic of your target audience, some social platforms could be counterproductive to your strategy. If your target audience is Gen Z, for example, Facebook wouldn’t be the right choice, since use has been steadily declining for years.  

Think of each channel as a community of potential brand advocates, not another channel to sell through. Each of these communities will expect different things from these channels, and an outstanding social strategy takes this into account.  

Here’s how to use ProQuo to choose the right social platforms

• Identify the purpose of each channel your brand is on by matching each one to at least two of the 16 Drivers. TikTok, for example, aligns with the Performance and Relevance Drivers, since it’s comprised of user-generated content. Instagram, on the other hand, would match up with Aspiration and Attraction. Facebook is all about Popularity and Familiarity, since people rely heavily on peer reviews to choose brands.  
• Match your top 4 Drivers to social channels. If two of your top performing Drivers are Empathy and Aspiration, YouTube would be a good channel to prioritize. 
• Match your 4 focal Drivers to social channels. If Performance needs work, Facebook would be a good choice. Keep in mind that with the drive for in-platform shopping, Performance, Familiarity and Popularity are all well-matched Drivers for Instagram and Facebook. 

Pro-tip #3: Cut through the noise: decide what you’ll say and how you’ll say it.  

50 million people consider themselves content creators on social media. That's a deafening amount of noise for brands to cut through.   

What your brand says on social media needs to be perfectly honed so it reaches the receptive ears of your target audience. 

Tone and messaging need to be tailored to the channel, so they directly speak to each segment of your target audience. Something that’s far too promotional for a younger audience could work wonders for older ones.  

Something too brand-centric could be a disaster for platforms heavy on user-generated content like TikTok, but perfect for Instagram or even your website. 

Although a brand’s voice needs to be consistent everywhere, you can change up your tone to cut through the noise. The right way to do this is to combine what people expect from a brand in your category with what they don’t expect.  

How to use ProQuo to say the right things in the right ways

Use ProQuo’s  Action-Plans to help you figure out exactly what to communicate on social. There are 14 Marketing Levers ProQuo’s AI chooses from when analyzing what actions your brand can take to reach its goals. Use  them to inspire your next social campaign or post.

Here are a few examples:  
 

• If the platform suggests Customer Service as a lever for your brand to focus on within its action-plan, revamp your community management guidelines. to make sure all reviews – whether positive or negative – are responded to, along with customer questions and issues on any channel 
  

• For Partnerships, run an influencer campaign on TikTok 
• For Product Delivery, plan some posts to broadcast a new relationship your brand has with a third-party supplier that broadens your delivery network.  
• Use your brand’s IT factor and work out the best content formats to communicate it. Is Attraction a top Driver? Photos are perfect for getting that across. Performance? User-generated videos of your brand’s top fans using or reviewing your products are a solid choice.  
• Do the same for your focal Drivers. If your Transparency needs some work, videos shining a spotlight on employees would be a good choice. If Differentiation scores are on the decline, ask your followers for feedback directly. They’ll most likely be brutally honest and you’ll know that using their feedback to inform the content you create will help your brand stand out.  
• Don’t forget, whatever changes you make, your brand still needs to sound like your brand – just your brand 2.0.
   

Pro-tip #4:  Test the effectiveness of creative concepts before launch.  

A/B testing your campaign creative on social is a great way to find out which visuals and copy drive your target audience to take the action(s) you want them to. But it won’t show you whether the concept behind the campaign is actually landing.  

There’s nothing worse than getting halfway through a campaign and realizing people are apathetic about the content – or worse, they hate it because it has a negative connotation your team didn’t think through.  

Sure, you can quickly delete the offending creative, but chances are people have taken screenshots and the damage to your brand’s reputation has already been done.  

That’s why only testing creative on social isn’t enough to determine whether the campaign itself resonates. It’s the concept behind this campaign that is essential to get right.  

If none of the Instagram ads you launch make people want to hit that “Shop now” button, at best you’re wasting budget and at worst you’re alienating or even offending your customer base.  

What will resonate with your social following tomorrow could be something completely different to the creative you’ve used in the past. Testing and optimizing your creative beforehand is the only way to ensure that every dollar you spend is effectively pulling your brand in the right direction.  

 How to make sure your creative concepts land before launch with ProQuo

• Test campaign concepts, images, messaging and more on ProQuo. ProQuo’s CreativeLab solution shows different versions of your creative to 300 consumers in your category, so you can make sure your content is triggering people to take the action you want them to. Once you’ve optimized your concept, you can feel confident testing these variations (with slight tweaks) on your social. This will make your A/B testing on social even more impactful.
  
  Pro-tip – use your focal Drivers to make sure your visuals, design and copy are in line with your brand strategy. 

• Interact directly with your consumers on ProQuo via the Custom Question feature - where you can ask your audience anything. After posing a Custom Question on ProQuo, you might learn that people don’t think your packaging stands out. You could then get more information by asking your social followers what they think would stand out. Giving them the chance to actively contribute to your brand’s activities deepens connection and ensures what you do resonates with them. 
• Use CreativeLab to make sure creative concepts have a measurable impact on the areas of your strategy that need improvement. CreativeLab shows you how each asset you test impacts scores for your focal Drivers, so you can be certain every post or ad you launch is helping you nail your social media goals.  
   
   

Pro-tip #5: Monitor how well your social strategy is working.  

Social media is an arena for building stronger relationships with consumers.  

So, nailing a social strategy also means constantly monitoring to what extent that strategy is strengthening relationships. You should see your reach and positive social media engagements increase, as you monitor, as well as people’s perception of your brand change for the better.  

Monitoring social KPIs is a community manager’s bread and butter – but how can you measure improvements in something as abstract as people’s perception of your brand?  

Nailing social strategy means continuously improving on this social strategy. What works now won’t necessarily work tomorrow, and with something as fast-paced as social media, you’ll need real-time data to keep up.  

How to monitor the success of your social strategy with ProQuo

• Monitor increases or decreases in your Driver scores, paying particular attention to your focal Drivers. If you’ve been embedding Transparency into your social posts, for example, a meaningful increase in your Transparency score shows you that the improved messaging is working. But if that score has stayed exactly the same for the last 6 months, it’s probably time to re-evaluate your tone or launch a campaign solely focused on showing audiences how your business operates.  

• Monitor changes in your social KPIs and see if this correlates to your Driver score changes.  
• Use ProQuo’s BrandPlanner (automated marketing calendar) to monitor how individual social campaigns perform.  This will give you an easy overview of how each campaign impacts your Driver scores. The same goes for your more significant posts, like a product launch video, a post you’ve pinned or a crisis. Recording these as events in BrandPlanner will help you see what content and messaging works best for improving Driver scores, so you can keep replicating and improving.  
   

• Use Custom Questions to monitor the reach and impact of your social campaigns. Ask people if they’ve seen your latest social media campaign and what their main takeaway from it is. This ensures your campaign is actually reaching your target audience, is memorable enough for people to recall it, and the messaging is resonating in the way you expect it to.  

• Search conversations before, during and after your social media campaigns to see if any campaign content is coming up – the more this happens, the more the campaign is resonating. And if your latest campaign missed the mark and is having the opposite effect you want it to, conversations will flag what people are actually thinking - but might not comment on your social channels.  

The right social strategy for your brand does more than grow followers and engagements.  It gives you a space to hear what your customer base is thinking, straight from the horse’s mouth, helps you manage crises, and creates a steadily expanding community of lifelong fans eager to talk about how great your brand is.