In today’s complex landscape, the discussion around “the right channel mix” is a hot topic. With different channels offering diverse benefits across the funnel, it’s fundamental to understand where to allocate your budget to drive your business outcome. Putting all eggs in one basket can be costly, and spreading thinly across many might not be penetrative enough.

By: Johan Elmqvist on February 9, 2024 | Reading time: 7 minutes

Where are your customers?

This ubiquitous question often gets thrown around on a strategic organizational level. The answer is everywhere – the overlap between the different channels is substantial. Unless your product or service is really niched, there is a high likelihood that you will reach the exact audience on multiple platforms. And if your business or audience is of a niche nature, you need to consider how accurate the different platforms are to avoid overspending.

It might even be that social media isn’t the right channel for that purpose; instead, it is email, affiliate, or more traditional channels. If we know that an audience is overlapping across multiple platforms – the more interesting discussion is what your prospective customers are doing on these platforms.

Knowing the platform = understanding the audience

Each platform within the social media landscape offers businesses unique USPs and best practices that can guide how to push a message that resonates with the respective audience at the right stage of their consumer journey. This always comes with some trade-offs. One common is the clash of a brand department that wants consistency according to brand guidelines and a creative team that wants to be platform native with the content.

To get this right, it’s not about finding efficiencies in your production – creating one piece of content to utilize across multiple platforms. To get this right, you need to have a fundamental understanding of adapting your brand guidelines and KPI framework to convey the message you want to share on the platform you are present on. And why is this so important?

Creative targeting

The algorithms on these platforms are sophisticated, and we are now finding ourselves in a situation where targeting isn’t the competitive advantage it used to be – especially if you have growth ambitions. The industry has had its fair share of data regulations, pushing social media platforms to pivot to ensure that the businesses advertising on their platforms can still drive outcomes for their budget.

That pivot has, among other things, gone towards creative targeting. With most platforms pushing that broad and open targeting is best practice, the algorithms steering needs to come from somewhere. By designing creatives tailored for your core audience and your growth audience, the platforms will find prospects in those big audience pools through the creative elements. It doesn’t stop there either, as ad placements on the platforms also open your campaigns for more incremental reach and unique users.

Each platform serves a purpose

Pinterest users, or “Pinners” as they’re called, turn to the platform with an active purchase behavior in mind because they are in a particular moment (or life stage) that they need to cater to. TikTok is all about entertainment, as their users spend a considerable amount of time being just that, but at the same time finding new brands and products from the vast amounts of content created by their user base.

LinkedIn is the Social media channel for business professionals and an ideal place for B2B, as their audience is on the platform for career-oriented reasons as well as to get business and industry updates. Snapchat is a fun and engaging platform to connect with friends and express yourself through its unique lenses and AR functionality.

Last but not least, Metas family of apps, the biggest platform out there with a suite of benefits, from personal spaces within messaging through WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as entertainment, events, news, and updates from friends and trusted voices through the flagships Facebook and Instagram.

When you have defined the relevant platforms, diving deep into their functionalities and how they align with your KPI framework and business goals is the next layer to consider. Outlining tracking capabilities, brand safety, and data security is the baseline before looking more into optimization points and actual formats (shopping, lead generation, and so on). The formats offer best practices that differ per platform, whereas the TikTok shopping format isn’t a 1:1 comparison to Metas.

Designing your channel mix

Knowing your product/service and audience, how people behave on the different platforms, and each platform’s capabilities in terms of governance, tracking, and formats should give you a good start for testing out your channel mix. This isn’t just a one-off but rather an evolving constant, as you always need to be able to enable your prospective customers to find you.

If you want to discuss this in more detail or have questions about the impact of your current social media mix, please reach out. With our vast capabilities in digital growth, we are a steady partner in navigating these complexities, putting our clients in motion and propelling them toward being the benchmarks of their industries.

About the author

Johan Elmqvist is a Paid Social expert in the Paid media team at Curamando, with a background in ecommerce verticals fashion, automotive, personal care, betting and apps.