The First Thing I Fix in Every Client’s Social Media Strategy

I can usually spot this within two minutes of scrolling a brand’s feed.

Because nearly every client I’ve ever worked with starts out with the same imbalance. (And it has nothing to do with content pillars.)

When you don’t see how your content is lopsided, your team can pour all their heart and ingenuity into a full calendar of posts, and still end each month struggling to prove it had any business value. (Cue the CEO Slack: “why don’t we make more posts like this?”)

Innovative organizations and overextended MarComm leaders are especially vulnerable to this blind spot. 

So it’s the first thing we fix in every Strategy-First Social Playbook. 

And today, I’m showing you the framework. 

Marketing is not unlike dating. 

You’d never end a first date with a marriage proposal. And you’d probably never put up with an endless situationship either. (The “so… what are we?” convo is inevitable.)

But most brands are unknowingly doing one or the other to their audience. In under 10 minutes I can tell their feed is either: 

1. Bottom-heavy with conversion & consideration content

This usually happens when a team is under pressure to find more customers, patients, or donors (usually with unrealistic expectations from leadership). So they make every post about the organization’s services, programs, products, or case studies. They try boosting posts and using “proven” conversion templates, but revenue won’t budge… and engagement is in the tank. 

The easily-forgotten reality is that at any given moment, very few in your audience are actively shopping for your solution. Speaking only to that select few turns off everyone else — and misses the opportunity to build trust with people who will need you later.

2. Top-heavy with awareness content

On the other hand, maybe the CEO is dogged about growing the account. Or the team gets that you need to warm people up before you ask them to take action, so they’ve doubled down on education and entertainment. 

But they’re so busy winning people over, they forget to shoot their shot. They’re not making moves to take the relationship further. So people may not even realize the org is interested and available to help.

Either mistake points to a deeper strategic gap:

You haven’t mapped your messaging for every type of audience, at every stage in their customer journey. The result: your content is trying to speak to everyone at once, which means it’s reaching no one. 

And until you fix this, your brand’s social media won’t stand a chance at moving people from strangers, to engaged followers, to customers/clients/donors. 

Every post you publish should speak to a specific person at a specific stage of their journey. (This is way more important than hitting a variety of content pillars and themes.) 

When I build strategies for clients, I map this as a funnel. An actual customer journey is rarely quite so linear (it’s more like a winding trail, full of forks and off-ramps). But the funnel image helps us visualize two truths: 

1) You have to reach a far wider audience than you’ll ever convert, and 2) what people need to hear changes at every stage.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. 

Here’s how a fertility clinic might map their customer journey and design content for a single audience across a simplified 3-stage funnel:

Journey Stage: “I want to optimize my health / understand my cycle as I think about having a baby.”

Content Example: B-Roll Reel — “3 overlooked signs you’re actually ovulating right now (that an Oura ring might not catch).”

Call to Action (CTA): “Save this post for your next cycle.”
 

Journey Stage: “We’ve been trying for 6 months without luck, and I’m over 35. What are our options?”

Content Example: Carousel: — “IUI vs. IVF: Which is right for you? A simple explainer →.”

Call to Action (CTA): “Download our free Fertility Treatment Planning Guide.”

Journey Stage: “We need medical intervention and are choosing a clinic.”

Content Example: Video Reel — Meet the specialists behind our success rates, and the unique approach that gets results for our patients.

Call to Action (CTA): “Book your initial consultation today.”

I’m sorry to say there is no universal ratio to bake into your content calendar.

But it starts with asking this one question: what does this person need to know, understand, or believe before they’ll take the next step? 

I ask this again and again for each type of audience you serve, at each stage of your funnel, until you have an accurate, comprehensive messaging matrix. (Because as you might remember from this newsletter, even “awareness” is not just one thing.)

When you have your audience’s mindset so precisely mapped, blank-page syndrome becomes a thing of the past. Your team gets better and better at putting themselves in the right person’s shoes, which leads to endless ideas — and more resonant ones. 

Of course, if you’re pioneering a new category or tackling a widely misunderstood issue, you probably have the most work to do at the top of your funnel. My past client, the Center for BrainHealth, is a prime example. For most people, the idea of “brain health” as a category of health that, like cardio for heart health, is something you can proactively improve is a full paradigm shift. 

And that’s both the hard part and the fun part. 

(Admittedly, it’s my favorite kind of problem to solve.)

Because when you have a truly novel approach, the right strategy playbook is all the more important — and all the more impactful. 

Whatever kind of brand you’re building, the payoff of having a real multi-stage messaging playbook is the same. 

You stop being the order-taker everyone pings to “just whip something up,” and become the one leadership defers to. Social stops being the thing you’re forever defending, and becomes the thing your CEO points to as the gold standard for your brand. 

There’s nothing quite like watching your team’s work finally get the respect it deserves. 

Here’s to leading bigger conversations,

P.S. Want to know exactly what types of content your team is missing? I have two spots this month for a complimentary content audit — no strings attached. Reply STRATEGY if you’d like to snag one and I’ll send over the details.