10 Things I Learnt At LEAD 2024

With 5.17 billion social users worldwide ‘social’ isn’t just the leading channel for brand visibility, it’s fast becoming the leading channel for performance, conversation and cultural relevance.

But posting without a strong social strategy is like writing with a broken pencil. You won’t leave a mark.

Your strategy is your guide, taking you from random social posts duplicated across all channels to a social feed that targets your audience where they are.

What exactly is a social strategy?

A social strategy is so much more than what you post:  it’s the why, where, when, and for who. Your strategy connects the dots between business goals and attention-grabbing content. It tells you:

- Who you're talking to

- What you should be saying

- Where you should be saying it

- And how to measure if it’s working

No more random posts. No more “let’s just try this.” It’s structure + storytelling + strategy = results.

To get it right, takes time, patience, and a team of social natives who have years of experience in creating game-changing strategies.

But what about trending topics? What if we go viral? How about negative press? It’s important to know that social strategy isn’t fixed, it’s not about prescribing what is posted when just for efficiency reasons. A true social-first strategy flexes and moves. It provides the tools to quickly respond to new trends, builds in tactics to take advantage of viral content, and provides guidelines on dealing with both positive and negative attention.

Spin 360 degrees with our social-first strategy.

Why you need a social strategy yesterday

Social strategies go beyond getting you closer to your marketing goals. They make getting there so much easier and so much more intentional.

Everyone will know what’s going live, when and where. They’ll know who’s in charge of social photography and when to expect posts from your influencers.

●       Joined-up thinking: No more silos, or “who’s doing what?!” bedlam. It will be teams working towards the same goal.

●       Better Targeting: Zero in to nail the voice, value and relevancy.

●       Long-term planning: Socials should grow with your business, not just light up a moment.

●       Creative flexibility: Built in agility allows you to take advantage of successful campaigns or fine tunes ones that aren’t hitting home.

What a creative-first social strategy gives you

Socials are a visual medium, so you’ve got to catch the eye before you make an emotional connection. A creative-first social strategy knows that traffic isn’t the only party in town. It looks at:

●       Brand visibility: Get seen, remembered, and talked about.

●       New audiences: Tap into new communities, trends, and new corners of the internet. Hello, fresh eyeballs.

●       Authenticity: Lean into storytelling, UGC, and behind-the-scenes moments that build trust.

●       Revenue: From Instagram to TikTok, social content converts. Scroll, tap, buy.

●       Engaged audience: Posting with purpose gives your followers a reason to double-tap, comment, and share, whether paid or organic.

●       Data: Every click, share, and save is a data point. Learn what resonates and who’s watching, so you can keep adjusting and keep winning.

Get creative with Spin strategies.

The fun bit: let’s build a successful social strategy

What you include in a social marketing strategy depends on your business and your goals. Each strategy is unique. That’s what makes it a strategy instead of a generic, cookie cutter social plan.

At Spin, we tackle a strategy by looking at the following:

Benchmarking

●       R-Score: At Spin, we can develop an R-Score for our clients. This shows where you are and how we can improve your relevancy and reach. A unique formula that combines follower growth and engagement rates, with a proprietary content scoring system using AI models and survey data to evaluate alignment with your ideal customer.

●       Goals and KPIs: Do you want users to buy your products, or just know you exist? What do you class as a success? Are you chasing clicks, really want referrals or looking to fill up on followers?

Data deep dives

●       Audience: Who are you trying to reach, and what content makes them tick? Is it one audience or a variety of personas you’re looking to target?

●       Competitors: Who’s doing what you’re doing, what strategy is getting them there? What can you learn from that?

●       Platform: Where does your audience live? Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok? How can you best target these places in platform-native ways?

Taskmasters

●       Workload: Who is doing what? How are you dividing responsibilities among your team?

●       Budget: How much can you afford to spend on a strategy? If you don’t have time, invest ina social marketing team.

●       Reporting: What are the key metrics to report on? How often do you need a report?

Step By Step Guide to Social

Here’s how we would do it.

1. Start With an Audit (Even If     It Hurts)

Before you get flashy with Reels and carousels, take a moment to look at your current social presence. What’s been working and what’s been flopping? An honest analysis will reveal focal points, especially if you also look at engagement stats, and demographics, getting a clear picture of your audience in the process.

2. Set Meaningful Goals

Terms like “Raise awareness” sound great, but aren’t measurable. A solid social strategy sets SMART goals: milestones that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Why? Because social-first brands see up to a 10.2% jump in annual revenue just by implementing a SMART strategy. That means knowing what success looks like and what numbers prove it.

3. Know Your Pillars (And No, Not Just ‘Funny Memes’)

Define content pillars. These are the go-to topics for your posts, campaigns, and brand storytelling. Think “behind the scenes,” “UGC,”, “how-to drops,” “hot takes,” “product moments.” It’s your playbook for consistent, engaging content. And don’t underestimate UGC. 86% of brands are using it to connect with real people and tell real stories.

4. Use Multiple Platforms

With users browsing across 6.7 platforms a month, tailoring to each space is vital. What works on TikTok might not yield results on LinkedIn. So, take a deep dive into where your audience hangs out and then craft tone, format and visuals to match. Square? Vertical? Lo-fi? Studio? Log it and then modify it. Brands using multi-platform strategies have seen up to a 5% lift in webs ales.

5. Competitor Research

Competitor research is paramount. Dig into what your competitors are posting, what’s working, and what’s falling flat. From post frequency to engagement levels, this will help you to surface patterns to help you do things differently. Because being just “as good as them” isn’t the goal. Standing out is.

6. Plot It Out with a Proper Plan

Random posting won’t get you far. You will need a proper social strategy to bring structure to your posts. Map out what goes live, where, and when, so your team isn’t scrambling, and your followers are consistently engaged.

7. Listen To Your Followers

With 54% of users turning to social to research products, listening is just as important as speaking. And your audience is talking. About your brand. About your competitors. About that thing you missed because no one was listening.

Use this to your advantage by plugging into the conversation with social listening tools that track mentions, mood, and trending conversations so your content doesn’t just speak at people; it speaks with them.

8. Organic or Paid?

Organic posts build on brand and long-term relationships and engagement, while paid uses ads to reach a wider audience quickly, targeting specific demographics. But make sure you’re using a strategy. Don’t just boost posts and hope for the best. Build creative that earns organic reach and drives paid results. Whether you’re growing followers or pushing conversions, aim to blend both sides into one high-performing content mix.

9. Your Tech Stack, Sorted

You don’t need a dozen tabs open to run good socials. Pick and plug in the tools that matter, from schedulers and reporting dashboards to design platforms that make your feed compelling.

10. Decide Who Does What

Cut out the “who’s posting today?” chaos and ring the whole team together. Map out your entire workflow from creative to copy to scheduling to sign-off, ensuring everyone knows their bit and nothing gets left in the drafts.

Spin a Strategy with Spin

If that sounds like a lot of work you don’t have time for, Spin can help you out. We use creative-first strategies to connect your brand with culture and make you a truly relevant brand amidst the chaos that is social media.

If you'd like to know how Spin can help you, hit the button below to arrange a chat.

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For years, TV has been the go-to for brand building at scale. And we won’t deny that TV still has its place… sometimes. But if you're still sinking the majority of your budget into linear, unmeasurable reach… you're not just missing a trick, you’re missing your audience.

Because while TV CPMs have exploded by 87% since 2020, Meta CPMs have quietly dropped by 18%​.

So why are brands still defaulting to TV?

Comfort. 
Familiarity. 
A (false) sense of scale?

But what if just 10% of your TV budget went to Meta?

Say you’re investing £5M in TV. Reallocating just 10% of that to Meta could reach 4.4M unique users at best-practice frequency, across a six-week campaign​. And that reach wouldn’t be theoretical. It would be:

• Trackable
• Optimisable
• Tailored to real human behaviour in real time
  

That’s the difference. Social media doesn’t just reach people. It tells you who’s engaging, what’s resonating, and where to go next.

Still think social’s just a support act?

The University of Oxford’s ‘No Silver Bullet’ study, the largest academic investigation into brand-building effectiveness, found the most effective media mix is TV, Meta and YouTube​. Not just one. Not two. All three. But used strategically. We’ve long seen where the attention’s heading. It’s why we brought Be a Bear into the Spin fold, the YouTube and audience strategy specialists who help us go bigger, broader, and sharper across channels. Because in 2025, full-funnel doesn’t mean “a bit of everything.” It means knowing how to make each channel work harder. 

And when Meta owns the four most-used daily apps in the UK (👋 Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp), the opportunity to amplify ATL impact and extend reach is unmatched.

And here’s the kicker…

Social doesn’t just scale your ATL. It adds lift:

• Greater unaided awareness
• Higher consideration
• Lower cost per acquisition

We’re talking social-first adaptation, where we translate ATL creative into a high-performance suite of assets designed to scale, test, and convert. It’s how we helped Brothers Cider exceed their reach targets with 12 modular assets from one TVC. It’s how we helped People’s Postcode Lottery turn a brand shoot into a DR sign-up engine on Meta.

So what makes social more measurable?

Unlike TV, social doesn’t rely on panels or extrapolation. You get live, platform-native performance data across every asset, audience, and placement.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Creative-level breakdowns: See which specific edits, hooks, or formats are performing across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube.
  
  
• Funnel-stage metrics: Track not just awareness, but how assets influence consideration, intent, and conversion, mapped to real user journeys.
  
  
• Custom conversions & pixel data: Set up granular, first-party tracking to understand true ROI beyond surface metrics.
  
  
• Holdout testing: Run incrementality studies to isolate impact - what would have happened without paid social?
  
  
• Creative scoring & fatigue tracking: Know when an asset’s burning out before your performance drops.
  

Through SpaRk, our ad creative solution, we use this data to iterate in real time. We test modular creative, scale what works, and retire what doesn’t. It’s performance and brand-building, working together.

And here’s the stat that says it all: 56% of action outcomes on Meta are driven by creative alone​. 

TL;DR: If you're still debating “TV or social”... you’re asking the wrong question.

The right one?
‍How much of your TV budget could work harder on social?
We’re here to help you find out.

In October 2025, the UK government will implement a landmark ban on junk food advertising across social media and TV, aiming to curb childhood obesity and promote healthier eating habits. This move presents a significant challenge for brands in the food and beverage industry, particularly those reliant on digital marketing to engage consumers. However, as history has shown, where restrictions arise, innovation follows. In this piece, we’ll explore creative, compliant, and effective ways for brands to navigate these new regulations—maintaining brand visibility, consumer engagement, and continued growth in a rapidly evolving advertising landscape.

Advertising restrictions are nothing new—industries from tobacco to alcohol, gambling, sex, and pharmaceuticals have all faced regulatory hurdles, yet the most successful brands have thrived by bending these rules creatively. Many tactics involve focusing budgets into less overt paid mediums, such as event sponsorships both offline (sports, festivals) and online (live-streamed events, YouTube influencer partnerships). This is something we’ve seen in the alcohol and gambling industries and isn’t currently withheld under any advertising regulations. But unlike traditional paid advertising methods, these do come with a catch in attribution complexities. Which isn’t always so great for the marketer. In the DTC pharmaceutical and sex industries, advertisers have explored creative ways to alter the focus of messaging away from the product and onto the emotion-led outcome that having the product provides to appeal to the consumer. Within some regulatory clauses, this allows advertisers to remain active on paid media channels, particularly on social, which is more lax than TV. Spin successfully navigates this with our client, Lovehoney, by creatively concealing their products in normal everyday environments (i.e. hiding the Rose within a bouquet of real roses) or using the products as background props to a scene otherwise focused on emotion-led lifestyle messaging, i.e. connecting with your partner & lifting your mood. These techniques not only allow us to continue using social and digital channels as paid media channels, but access data that allows us to optimise and grow these channels as revenue-driving heavy lifters.

Having advertising restrictions can actually be a blessing when it comes to using paid social as a communication channel. Paid social is a rare hotbed in the available marketing mix that brands can harvest zero-party data from to draw insights into their consumer behaviour, engagement, and motivations. When intentionally used in this way, it can be a great marketing tool to optimise other channels. Taking the above Lovehoney example, knowing advertising efforts must be focused on emotion-led messaging, we can focus in on a handful of problem/solution combinations when crafting our creative. The data passed back from the algorithm after launch highlights the winners amongst each subdivision of our audience, informing subsequent creative thinking to optimise activity but also providing valuable insights that can be applied to CRM segments, website copy and UX, organic social, and influencer partnerships.

Instead of seeing the 2025 junk food ad ban as a roadblock, brands should view it as an opportunity to innovate. When regulations tighten, the most successful brands adapt—often emerging stronger, more strategic, and more connected to their audience. By shifting focus to influencer partnerships, sponsorships, and emotion-driven messaging on paid social, as well as increasing their exposure on unaffected marketing mediums such as organic social, brands can maintain visibility and continue to connect with their communities while also gaining deeper consumer insights. Those who embrace this shift early will not only stay compliant but will also future-proof their marketing strategies in an increasingly regulated digital landscape. The key is to think beyond traditional paid ads and start investing in creativity, storytelling, and authentic engagement—because the brands that evolve are the ones that win.