Hey Square Readers,
We’re kicking off the core of Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, and so far we’ve started with an opening discussion of your business’ use of social media, and covered the basics of why attention matters and the importance of capturing it.
Now, let’s dive into Chapters 2 & 3, which the author describes as the deepest section of the book with all of the details of his Modern Advertising Framework and how they work together.
It’s a long one, so feel free to split it up and come back to both the chapter and the post as references. We’ll also be back next week with a bit of a more digestible recap of Chapters 4 & 5!
The Modern Advertising Framework
He breaks down this chapter into the 6 Core Principles that guide what he calls The Modern Advertising Framework:
- Cohort Development: Defining who you want to reach
- Platforms and Culture (PAC): The new requirement for your advertising knowledge
- Strategic Organic Content (SOC): What good modern advertising looks like
- Amplification: Spending against what works, aka not wasting a penny
- Videos People Want to Watch: Modern commercials
- Post-Creative Strategy (PCS): Listening to actual consumers and gathering insights
First he gives a quick overview of each step and explains how it all comes together, and then afterwards proceeds to break down each step.
This process boils down to:
- Figure out your core audience,
- Research and analyze what these groups watch and engage with,
- Decide on a creative format and platform features and create content with some variations based on your research,
- Pay to run an ad using one of your most successful pieces of content,
- Modify some content according to your proven strategy for broader appeal and build in a Call To Action,
- Read the comments and analyze consumer behavior to tweak your strategy and continue creating content.
First, the author acknowledges that the amount of work and time this can take can be intimidating, but necessary. To help with this, he gives some tips to maximize your efforts and get a lot of content out of your time.
“I have empathy for how it can seem like a lot. The problem is that this is the reality of what it takes to be successful in the modern advertising environment… understand that you shouldn’t have all of this figured out at once … think about what comes most naturally to you and which skills you’re most interested in developing… Just start… The biggest thing to do is set up a system where you record long-form content that can then be chopped up into clips that you can post across platforms. For a lot of people, starting a weekly podcast is the most practical way to do that… Remember, you don’t need a high-budget super camera from Hollywood—there are plenty of cameras that can get the job done, including the one on your phone.”
Let’s break out into some of the biggest insights we pulled from each section of this chapter:
1. Cohort Development:
“Cohorts are labels that describe any current customers or clients, potential customers or clients, and give you a framework for what content to create. This way, instead of serving a single message to a mass audience, you can make content that’s relevant to each individual cohort.”
- Define cohorts with “teeth”
- Drill down to be as specific demographics as possible for your audience, including gender, age, location, interests, profession, ”subcultures, stages of life people are at, affinities and passions, psychographics, cultural trends, and more…” For how you’ll use these groups, “It’s not that you’re only going to reach that audience and no one else. By defining narrow cohorts, your content is going to be more unique, sharper, more specific, and more relatable to different people.”
- Think of your cohorts like an “accordion”
- You may discover new audiences based on the analytics of the content you create, and “your cohorts will always be shrinking, expanding, and changing based on your post-creative strategy insights from the comments.”
- Consider the business objectives of your company
- Choose your cohorts according to what your business goals are, doubling down or expanding into the most impactful audience segments accordingly.
- Define a high volume of cohorts
- Aim to reach a lot of different specific sets of audiences. “The more cohorts you define, the more opportunities you have to create relevance for your business or brand. Based on results from your content, you can always add or remove cohorts.”
- The creative you produce could hit multiple cohorts
- The content you make may be great for different audiences, roll with it! “Cohort labels are just hypotheses that you can come back to and refine later.”
- Consider (but don’t overthink) media addressability
- Experiment with narrow and broad ad targeting to leave room for algorithm serendipity. “Media addressability [is] the total number of people you can reach in your ad targeting through paid advertising… As platform algorithms continue to evolve, they continue to get better at automatically serving your ads to the best possible cohorts based on who they think will engage with it… [You may get] higher watch time and conversion from a different segment that you may not have expected.”
2. Platforms and Culture (PAC):
Culture:
“The “culture” side of “platforms and culture” can help you define your cohorts, make relevant creative for them, and help inform your platform strategy… We need to have a nuanced understanding of what they’re all paying attention to in culture… It’s more about understanding what’s culturally relevant to your target audience… You must pay attention to what I call “signals.” Signals are any data points or information that give an indication of what’s relevant to different consumer groups… including:
- A consumer behavior or statistic
- Something a celebrity did
- Something an influencer did within cohorts you’re looking at
- News articles
- Emerging trends on advertising platforms or sites like Google Trends
- Tweets, articles, or other content that sparks debate Research statistics about relevant topics
- Historic events
“Adding titles that speak directly to your cohort group and call them out literally is a good way to capture attention and make it relevant in the first few seconds… If you’re not funny by nature, don’t force it. If you aren’t chill and casual, don’t force it. This is a game of authenticity… You don’t need to compromise, nor do you need to make for trends and algorithms if you feel like that’s not ‘you.’”
Platforms:
“When you gain platform knowledge, you become aware of the variety of different features that exist… You also get to know how to use the different features to create more awareness, engagement, and, ultimately, sales… Another way to uncover popular creative formats is by paying attention to what the platform is prompting you to do.”
- Take account of all the features a platform has
- Understand the basic features and learn how to fully utilize each platform.
- Remember, the platform just wants you to stay on for longer
- “There’s no standard right answer to how long your content should be. It only matters whether people want to watch it.”
- Pay attention to what is unique
- “Pay attention to features on a platform that you don’t see anywhere else—this can help inform what your content ideation should look like.”
- Pay attention to what’s similar across platforms
- “Platform similarities can also give an indication to what their goals are, where they might be headed, and what behaviors they may or may not be trying to incentivize. You might be able to even implement similar tactics across platforms if you know where the similarities are.”
- Notice how similar user behaviors show up differently on different platforms
- Understanding how each platform may elevate or incentivize content or user actions in different ways can be a guide to your content strategy.
- Stay up-to-date on new tests that platforms are running
- Platforms often give higher reach to the first content creators that try out new tests and features – be one of them!
- Consider the psychology of the user when they’re on the platform
- Keep in mind what kind of content users are in the mindset of for each platform, and make sure your content fits.
- Be a practitioner, not a headline reader
- “The only way to get good at this stuff is to make content, post it, and learn from it.”
3. Strategic Organic Content (SOC):
“Strategic organic content is meant to build brand, grow community, and create relevance… It’s a framework for how to make creative that people want to consume… Being a good advertiser on social media is harder than being a good advertiser in the traditional marketing world… Your content must be strategic… you can’t just post content for the sake of posting it.”
The author says that when you properly utilized Strategic Organic Content, it enables you to:
- You build brand and relevance from day one
- It takes time and creating a lot of content to fully try out a strategy. Be strategic, experiment, keep getting better, but don’t just throw anything out there just to see what works. Be deliberate and keep working, and you’ll be relevant.
- You can turn your best performing content into performance ads to drive sales
- “If you have a piece of strategic organic content that overperforms compared to the average on your account, you have proof that people resonate with it. Then you can take the piece of content and tweak it a little,” by adding in clear call-to-actions to drive leads.
- You can make higher-production commercials with proven insights
- “The more SOC you put out, the better insights you’ll have—you’ll get a sense for what content resonates, how to effectively use platform features, and you’ll learn how to make your next piece of content better than the one before it.”
- Does your content feel like an ad?
- It shouldn’t! It should feel informative or entertaining.
- What does the hook of your video look like?
- “If you’re not catching people’s eyes in the first second or two, they’re going to scroll to the next piece of content in their feed. The hook is the part where the audience decides if the piece of content is relevant to them or not.”
- Do people spend time watching and interacting with your content?
- Does your content evoke emotion and tell a story?
- Is your content native to the platform?
- Are you putting out enough volume of content?
- Is your copy optimized for the platform?
- “If done right, your copy can be the primary driver of your content’s distribution. Your copy can be a place where you add additional context around your piece of content and build on it further.”
- What does your profile hygiene look like?
- “You should make sure that people can easily see who you are, what you do, and have the chance to take an action… It’s our job as operators to eliminate friction for users who want to do things with us.”
- Are you showing different sides of yourself, your brand, or your business?
- Do you occasionally mix in content to get answers to questions you have?
- “The best way to figure out what content to make is to literally ask the audience.”
- Are you finding the right balance between asking for business while providing value?
- “As you’re putting out free, valuable organic content across platforms, make sure you’re taking the overperformers and turning them into sales-focused ads… If you’re only asking people to buy, however, they’ll quickly tune you out, so make sure to balance out those asks with a high volume of valuable content.”
4. Amplification:
“The paid advertising ecosystem across platforms is moving in the same direction as their organic content algorithms… The platforms will take your creative, and they’ll distribute it to whoever is most likely to take the action you want them to take… In a sense, your paid ads strategy should be an extension of your organic content strategy—if you’re not putting out strategic organic content regularly, then your ads won’t be nearly as effective because you won’t have any indications of what is resonating with people.”
- Make sure you have enough creative variations for your ads
- “What you need to do is make more content. More videos. More pictures. More text posts. Use different angles, different sayings, different titles, and different hooks… If you’re only using one style or one message, you’re not going to resonate with as many people as you could have. The bottom line is, you need more content.”
- Don’t completely dismiss ad platforms because they “don’t convert”
- “When there’s an emerging platform like a TikTok and there’s mass attention on it, the platform is always incentivized to improve direct-response conversion numbers because they want your money… Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea, especially when consumer attention sits across different advertising platforms.”
- Experiment with different ad objectives, and rely on common sense
- “But there are also many cases where the ROI of building brand on social media isn’t as clear… In reality, that piece of content might be one that leads people to buy your product or service, but it’s not obvious because you can’t always directly attribute the sale to that specific piece of content… look at total sales and see if you’re headed in the right direction.”
- Optimize your content based on your ad learnings
- Use your ad analytics to change up elements of your content in order to optimize and maximize the attention you grab, and to fully refine your content strategy.
5. Videos People Want to Watch: Modern Commercials
“Depending on your resources, you can create longer-form, broadly relatable, potentially higher-production videos for broader impact. These are videos that might look more like TV commercials that people actually want to watch.”
“You can create an iconic, higher-production video around your company and distribute it across advertising platforms with the goal of increased distribution. These are videos that evoke emotion … and they appeal to a broader base of people … that millions and millions of people would want to watch them. It’s like SOC, but more thoughtful, produced, and expanded videos built off your initial marketing insights. The more people who watch it, the more awareness and relevance you’ll create around your brand or business, and the more you can drive down your customer acquisition cost as you run ads in the future.”
6. Post-Creative Strategy (PCS):
“Post-creative strategy is about reading the comments on every post you put out to get an insight or an observation on consumer behaviors and interest… Once you make a piece of content for a cohort and post it, post-creative strategy is about 1) understanding how well (or how poorly) it resonated, and 2) using those insights to inform how you make your next piece of content.”
“One of the best things you can do … is to spend some time scrolling through other people’s posts in your industry… Notice the formats they’re using. Notice the themes they’re talking about. Notice what types of content are doing well, and which ones aren’t. Read their comments too… Platforms like Reddit or Quora are also fruitful grounds to gather PCS insights—you can see what kinds of questions people are asking in different categories, within different topics and subreddits. You could answer those questions in video form on social media.”
“Replying to your comments has always been essential as it builds community and a relationship with your audience… When you reply to someone’s comment or leave a comment on another account’s post, make sure that it’s meaningful. Bring value. Be thoughtful, funny, smart, clever, informative; add to the conversation…
I know that was a lot and packed with information, so thanks for sticking with it all!
Next week, @DinaLRosenberg will be breaking down Chapter 4, which reflects Sections 2 & 3 of the Framework, giving more context and work in her own experience. We’ll also play social media consultant and give some advice and answer questions, so stay tuned!
We’d love to hear your answer in the comments:
- What would be your Framework for your business? Share your strategy ideas for each of the 6 sessions:
- Cohort:
- Platform & Culture:
- Strategic Organic Content:
- Amplification:
- Modern Commercials:
- Post-Creative Strategy:
- What elements or tactics included in this framework were new to you? What did you learn and what will you implement in your business?
Feel free to share any other thoughts you have about this book. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Don’t forget to:
- View and Subscribe to all threads about this book
- RSVP to our Live Discussion – Tactic Talk: Social Media
Happy reading,
Pesso
