Born Social whitepaper reveals four key elements to being a ‘social-first brand’

With Covid-19 moving every aspect of the world online, digitalisation is soaring, and with it so are social media platforms. For brands, this means that engaging in a social-first approach is not just key to thriving, but also to surviving. Through social media, brands can engage with new audiences like never before.

London-based social media agency Born Social has launched the ‘Social-First Brand’, a series of whitepaper events exploring the four key elements brands must use to thrive on social: unlocking the full funnel to bring brand and performance together; building channel clusters; building with the community not just for them; and committing to subcultures.

“Digital has made it harder than ever before to build strong, cohesive and memorable brands,” says Callum McCahon, executive strategy director and partner at Born Social. “But the upside in doing so- succeeding where so many fail- is greater than it ever has been.”

For social-first brands to unlock the ‘full funnel,’ they must focus on mastering the balance of brand building and performance marketing, acknowledging that the two must be complementary to one another. To unlock the full funnel, Born Social suggests combining performance marketing’s testing to brand marketing’s scaling, using feedback loops to gain early indicators on effectiveness in performance, creating balanced scorecards to build balanced and unified methods of measurement and taking advantage of social commerce functions.

A success story that has brought brand and performance marketing together is Rapha, the cycling clothing and accessories brand which has weaved products into its storylines, bridging the gap between brand and performance.

“Rapha focuses on bringing together its brand beliefs with its products. They seamlessly integrate that with social elements reducing the friction and producing a clear discovery of the brand,” says Paddy Smith, creative director and partner at Born Social. 

The second pillar is all about combining different channels and formats that give brands the necessary reach to achieve scale. To do so brands must pay particular attention to the context, in addition to the content, as mindsets and behaviours of users in TikTok, for example, are different from those on Instagram. Burberry, for example, adopted the channel cluster approach with their launch of the ‘Singing in the rain’ campaign in November 2020, by creating each asset with nuance in mind, from vertical cuts to subtitles for silent viewing and cues to rotate the screen.

The last two elements of a social-first brand, ensuring consistent distinctiveness by building with the community and identifying and committing to subcultures, both creating distinctive products assets that will appeal to different subcultures and making the audience an integral part of the brand as co-creators. 

“It’s about identifying the right subcultures for your brand and commiting to them in the long term. This isn’t about dipping in and out of different subcultures but it’s about incorporating them in the overall strategy. It should have a clear overlap with your target audience so that they can become one and the same,” says McCahon.

Netflix heroes the commitment to scaling subcultures, as it recognises that its viewership is not a homogenous group but rather made up of individuals with differing shared interests, like fandoms. The digital streaming giant has started separate social accounts with specific teams to lead them, both at a micro level by plugging into fandoms of shows or films, from the Crown to the Irishman, and on a macro level creating NetflixFood and NetflixFamily.