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Genna Franconi has been in digital marketing so long, she fondly remembers the day she pushed out the first Instagram post for Barbie. But social media marketing has changed significantly since those days. These days, lone marketers aren’t the ones worried about hitting send on a post at the right time. Instead, brands now have teams of social content creators who monitor trends and leverage a brand’s voice to get personal with consumers and entice and engage them at each point of the buying journey. 

“For years we have been saying that brands do not need to be investing in organic content...That makes a ton of sense. But if you're trying to participate in a cultural conversation by throwing out content that is old school, those days are over. Now marketing is really sophisticated and marketers are using the channels to reach these audiences. We're not screaming through a megaphone. Now we’re laser-targeting people to give them something that's either helpful or educational within their buying path.”

Genna is the founder and managing director of Trade School, an integrated content shop that works with big brands such as Home Depot and FedEx. On this episode of Marketing Trends, she reveals just how the social media landscape has evolved from the wild wild west of marketing to an integral piece of every marketer's toolkit. Plus, Genna touches on the evolution of influencer marketing and why it’s important that every brand and creative agency understand why and how to effectively deploy a successful influencer strategy.

Main Takeaways

• Organic Content Sets Brands up for Success: Creative agencies need to understand that the best way to partner with brands is to not only understand the creative voice of the brand, but also the business goals the brand wants to achieve through its creative efforts. If you don’t align your creative vision with the business goals of your brand, the content you create for them won’t resonate with its consumers.
• Content is Less About Format and More about Engagement: As the social landscape has shifted, marketers’ strategies need to pivot from thinking about what content works best for each social platform to understanding what content will get the most engagement from their consumers. This means marketers should spend less of their budget on large-scale commercials that will reach a broad audience and focus on more organic content that can be targeted to hyper-specific audiences.
• Influencers are Now Competitors to Agencies: Many brands view influencers simply as talent that they can direct, but the reality now is that influencers must be seen as competitors to creative agencies because of the hyper-targeted audiences that each influencer possesses. The best influencer strategies allow influencers to leverage those audiences and give creative license to influencers so that the material they post is organic and  aligns with the influencer's audience.

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