With great TV comes great reactive opportunity: how to work small screen moments into your comms
Brands, start your engines. With The Great British Bake Off and Strictly landing last week, The Traitors to hit screens this week and more highly-anticipated TV to come (The Apprentice, I’m A Celebrity), the autumn TV schedule is undoubtedly the season for all things reactive.
And react we should, because when an audience is invested in a cultural moment, brands too should be invested. Be part of the story, allow it to enhance your brand personality, and, where it feels right, use it to underpin your key messaging. All we ask is that you don’t do it in a way that feels forced, because this will stand out a mile off.
Here are four golden rules to make sure your social media moments land with impact.
1. Make it simple
Sometimes the simplest execution can be the strongest. No need for too much curation, just be ready for the right opportunity and grab it with both hands.
One example of this approach at WPR would be our Great British Bake Off reactive for building materials manufacturer Holcim last year. When we heard the bakers were tasked with creating a cake to resemble a landscape, and because spotting someone in the tent using rocks and rubble as their inspiration, we knew it was our moment to celebrate our client’s beautiful Glensanda quarry.
By all accounts, the Holcim audience agreed because the post performed well. With the image created swiftly the morning after the episode went out, it was a perfect example of spotting an opportunity and delivering a simple reactive.
2. Make it relatable for your brand
While we’re definitely not suggesting you should be shoehorning brand messages in at all costs, when the moment for making that link does arise, you should take it.
When Scarlett Moffatt’s shocked expression from the I’m A Celeb camp was doing the rounds earlier this year, brands took the opportunity to align it with their own business and audience.
The trick is avoiding forcing in a jarring line about a product or deal where it doesn’t fit. We did just this with pub brand Hungry Horse, who were able to connect it to a key USP of the brand without it sounding unnatural.
3. Make it relatable for your audience
Many a meme worthy moment arises from The Traitors, and last year was no exception. However, memes do not live by the image alone, and a witty caption that is relevant to your target audience makes all the difference to post success.
For electronics brand Belkin, that looked like finding a typical (but relatable) pain point and aligning it with the visual, as in the example below.
4. Make it part of the plan
While we’ve largely been talking about reactive moments, there is of course such a thing as ‘planned reactive’ – knowing and plotting in those calendar moments that will get people talking ahead of time.
Both of these examples from pub brand Chef & Brewer were filmed ahead of time to enjoy the benefits of the hype to come, and to be part of the conversation at the right moment in time.
So there you have it – and the advice I’d leave you with is that if it feels like you’re trying too hard to get a post right, it probably isn’t right for your brand or audience. Reverse engineering a concept rarely works and, if it doesn’t feel natural, you’d be better waiting for the next viral moment to drop to make sure your business can join it authentically.
If you’d like to learn more about social media strategy, feel free to reach out to Alex Dixon, senior social media director.
The author: Alex Dixon is a senior social media director at WPR who specialises in using LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X to keep clients ahead of the curve when it comes to social media marketing.
WPR is an award-winning PR agency, based in Birmingham, delivering world-class PR and social media which makes ambitious brands impossible to ignore.
We specialise in consumer PR, across sectors including food and drink, retail and leisure; B2B PR, where we work with companies spanning manufacturing, construction and HVAC industries; and social media.
To start a conversation about how we can get the world talking about your business, please get in touch – we’d love to chat.