In this op-ed, Swan Studio co-founder Dean Gruskin delves into the strategic gap emerging within social media marketing. Gruskin considers why the industry needs to move beyond formats, trends and execution to place greater emphasis on consumer psychology, brand purpose and business outcomes.
Social media marketing is missing a strategic layer. The people who built the discipline were never required to learn it, and the platforms encourage you to skip it.
Read the job titles and the social media industry looks full of strategists. Analyse the work and you may struggle to find the strategy behind it. That’s because most social professionals spend their time thinking about how content should look and feel, and very little on the psychology of what makes someone take action. There are two reasons for this.
Number 1: Users became marketers without training
Social is fifteen years old as a marketing discipline, against a century of accumulated practice in the channels that came before it. It is still a young craft, and the roles inside it have been shaped by a new generation of marketers. That generation, of which I’m proudly one, were users of the platforms before they became marketers, and they quickly became pioneers of an industry younger than any generation before them.
This is worth celebrating. Young marketers are defining a discipline and reshaping what seniority and experience mean inside organisations. And for good reason: they have the instincts and the native understanding of social channels that you cannot teach, and cannot do the work well without.
But this has meant that many social professionals have grown into their careers without conventional training. Lessons on consumer psychology, brand positioning and advertising strategy. Traditional advertising, by contrast, followed a structured pathway. You typically arrived via a grad scheme, sat next to seniors, and absorbed the foundational questions that had to be answered before anyone touched the execution work. Who is the customer? What do they believe? What could shift that belief?
Where traditional advertising made training a condition of entry, social advertising made it optional. Someone in their early twenties can be running creative for six figures of spend a month without anyone having asked them what the customer currently believes about the category. As a result, the strategic fundamentals of advertising are often absent from the craft.
Number 2: Everyone’s trying to blend in
Training is only part of the story. The other part is what people come to the platforms for.
Nobody opens their social apps to be advertised to; they open them to be entertained, inspired or taught something new. Your work has to earn its place against everything a person chooses to follow: their friends, family, favourite sports team, celebrities and influencers. You don’t have the luxury of the dedicated ad breaks the customer was once accustomed to.
To add to that, the audience makes the same content you do. Chances are, the person scrolling past your ad has filmed and edited content of their own, and knows within half a second when someone is selling to them.
This dynamic has led to an over-indexation on execution. Social media specialists are trying to fight their brands’ way into relevance on the feed by replicating what looks like organic content. That usually means trending formats and aesthetics, without tying it back to the brand and its goals.
Done well, this drives engagement while very little value comes back to the brand. Done poorly, you have tacked yourself onto something that was never about you, and it falls flat.
As a brand you are there to sell something, or to shift what someone believes about you, and doing that while remaining relevant to the feed is not easy. But starting with real strategy will always get you closer to the business outcome.
Message should always come before format
Strip it back and the job has not changed. As David Droga puts it simply, the advertiser’s job is to make things people want to watch and care about.
So let’s define strategy on those terms, because in social the word usually points to a content calendar or a channel plan. It should point to the decision about who the work is for, what it has to say to them, and what that has to achieve for the business.
Get the message right first, and the format carries it from there. None of this is an argument for plainer work. Once the strategy is in place, go as hard as you like on the craft: make it beautiful, make it funny, make it the thing someone sends to a friend. The only difference is that you worked out what to say before you worked out how to say it.
Social strategy also starts from the feed
Granted, strategy does not work in social exactly as it did on the channels before it. Despite everything I’ve said about execution, there is a part of the strategy that runs up from the feed. Playing into what people already want to see is non-negotiable, so what is happening on the platform has to feed the thinking rather than only follow it.
What is performing on a platform tells you something true about the people you are trying to reach. A trend that is popping off or a sentiment that keeps surfacing teaches you something about your customer you would not get anywhere else. Knowing what to make from what people are already watching is a valuable skill, and working from the feed is part of the strategy. But it cannot come at the expense of thinking from first principles, and too often it does.
That is why finding the right people is so hard. They have to read the platforms and stay on top of culture, then tie all of it back to the brand and the customer in a way that is not shallow. The work also asks for several roles in one person: the strategist, the creator, the writer, the producer.
None of that arrives with seniority. It is why some of the most experienced advertising minds struggle in social, however much strategic thinking they bring to it.
Deliver results or die
Social also has something no channel before it had: data, right away. Traditional advertising placed its bets and waited months to learn whether it had read the customer correctly. We get to form a hypothesis about an audience, put it in front of them, and know within days, even hours, whether we were right.
That gives you real validation of the strategy and a clear view of where to take it next. It also leaves nowhere to hide from the results. Add that to the list of what a good operator needs: a willingness to be held to the numbers, and the pace to adapt when they tell you something. So being good at this craft is not easy. But if you’re up for the challenge, it’s a lot of fun.
Strategy also matters more now than it did a year ago. AI is making execution cheaper, and it hands everyone the same average thinking. What it cannot do is trump an elite operator with the taste and judgement to know what is worth saying, who it is for, and why they would care. The strategic teams, the ones that start from the customer rather than the format, will win social over the next decade. We have bet our whole agency on it, and are excited to be shaping what this discipline becomes.
