Same-ification

TikTok is where young people are! YouTube is for longer, educational videos! LinkedIn is how to find a new job!

Except, people of all ages are on TikTok, YouTube has every type of video imaginable and LinkedIn is many people’s primary source of news, along with a host of other functions.

Some have called this the ‘TikTokification’ of the industry because all channels have copied the endless feed of short-form vertical video, algorithm’d to what we are interested in, instead of who we are connected to. Hell, even Spotify - not typically seen as a ‘social media’ platform - has followed suit…

But what are the implications for anyone planning and executing marketing campaigns?

Crossing the Channel

It used to make sense to map out the channels with different objectives in mind, ideally all starting with the same letter (joking, but not actually joking). For example, use TikTok to ‘engage’ people into being aware of the product, Instagram to ‘entice’ them into considering it and YouTube for ‘educating’ them about the functional benefits before purchase. That’s less relevant in a world where the platforms look and feel increasingly similar and all prioritise short-form video.

We are not our Demographic

Another common trope of old-school media planning was to use different media channels to reach different audiences. For example, ‘LinkedIn is for business-to-business communications’ and ‘Instagram is for millennials’. Selling to homogeneous audiences made little sense before and it makes even less sense now, especially when we are able to target based on people’s interests in a more precise way.

Hey DJ, Just Change the Creative

The above doesn’t mean that brands should share exactly the same post to all channels at exactly the same time. If there are platform nuances relevant to the audience cohort you are targeting, it still makes sense to ‘DJ’ a specific version of the creative. But, more often than not, we should create for the format (e.g. short-form video) and the nuances of the potential customers, not the channels themselves.

In Summary

Spend more time creating entirely different creative for cohorts of the target audience and less time worrying about the differences between the channels.

How much creative? There is no limit on how much creative to produce. It’s like saying, ‘how many shots does it take to score a goal?’ The answer is that it depends on the quality of the shot. But, if you keep shooting, you’re more likely to score.