482: The Current State of Social Media Marketing For Product Brands

Listen to this episode. If you want a status report on what's really going on on social media for marketing a product-based business in 2026 and to be more specific or about more than halfway through 2026 so we're talking Q3 Q4 what's going on? What do you need to do? What do you need to prioritize? I think product-based businesses are vastly still approaching social media politely wrong and really like we did in 2016 to like 2022 Everyone's asking, you know, what is the algorithm doing? What's gonna work? When I think they really are asking the wrong question the better Question should be what are consumers consuming on social media? Not what do we want to pose? Not what is making the most amount of sales or what the algorithm is picking up the most Social media has evolved alongside of the new customer behavior so incredibly much and today We're really going to break down. What does this mean? How do we adapt our brand to fit the current market in social media marketing for 2026 and what do you have to do moving forward? I just want to take 10 quick seconds to introduce myself in case you don't know me my name is Madison Page I am a business growth specialist. I work with product-based business owners every day to make them the next category leaders In their industry odds are I've probably worked with some of your favorite brands as kind of the strategy brain to really help them take off With their branding their marketing their community building their sales and their overall growth objectives And so today I'm coming to you with a lot of real-world experience here I am in social media accounts all day long some of your favorite brands many of the up-and-coming brands and Just many people that are either growing scaling stable whatever it might be. I'm looking in their social media I live I breathe and I'm really in there all the time even though I don't just teach social media marketing Social media is a non-negotiable as a business owner now And so we are talking lots about social media because it really is the home of your brand and so today I have a list of 10 things that I really want to bring towards you today of what is with the current market Let's talk kind of a good old status update and then we're gonna kind of go from there And I'm sure there will be lots of insights along the way by the end of this episode You will leave with tangible things that you need to know when it comes to social media Hopefully some mindset shifts and some strategies for you to execute First things versus that followers truly matter less than ever most platforms Instagram included TikTok included YouTube shorts included Facebook included many of the major brands now are no longer doing follower distribution They're more so on yes community building so your most engaged followers are going to be there But they are also more so pushing out to new cold audiences and so discovery Now comes from your content quality and the relevance there But we do still have to balance that by when they come to your feed They are quickly warmed up as to who this brand is which tells us we need more variety in our content We need some content going out for discovery some content going out for top of funnel And then we need some content for brand building nurturing and community building So when they click on your profile to stock more to learn more about your brands, they also are getting some of that more Content to nurture and content to sell in there as well And so yes, we do still want followers, but really at the end of the day your followers don't actually help How your content performs per se or how many sales you're making per se? What it helps you do is it helps gauge a little bit of the authority behind your brand the community size of your brand But it's not an end all be all metric. It really hasn't been since like 2015 Yes, in 2015, we had a chronological feed the more people that you follow the more people that saw your content And there was a little bit of discovery, but it was really hard this actually helps Smaller creators and smaller businesses get out there a little bit quicker This brings me to the biggest misconception I still see is that organic social media isn't actually designed to sell your products Will it sell your products by proxy? Yes, but we really have to touch on the fact that Organics job is attention and community building attention can create that familiarity and awareness behind it and That creates some of the trust trust can create demand and sales happen within a different ecosystem It happens when they see you on social media. They might see an influencer post about you they might see you in a store and then they throw it in their cart Or they see you on social media in multiple places Maybe they get an ad because they were on your website Retargeting and then they go and buy it's almost another touch point for them to say oh, I've seen somebody talk about that Or oh, I've saw that online before and so organic social doesn't necessarily mean it has to be designed to sell It is still one of the largest sales driving strategies and marketing channels in and of itself However, people aren't on social media to be sold to if you've talked to anybody influencer marketing is barely working anymore A lot of affiliate marketing is going downhill We've kind of been in this age the last three to five years that was really easy to sell stuff online Why that is was because it's where people were but now customers are getting smart customers are getting sick of it And frankly, there's a big push of people to move away from social media And so if they're following you and all you're ever doing is selling to them never providing value never providing entertainment What you're doing is you're just telling them why do I really care to follow you? There's a lot of people that are Unfollowing people that don't align with their values or what they want to consume because people are getting smarter about their Consumption and they're getting smarter about the way that they shop and so organic social media isn't just designed to sell You're on social media in order to entertain to educate and to basically build this connection based community and then the Sales happen on top of that the sales happen when you are actively selling I call this active versus passive sales Often times when you have an active sale, which is like a promotion a launch something like that Yeah, you are going to be selling but the rest of the time you really shouldn't be doing too much selling You're talking about attention and awareness or you're talking about how can we communicate through connection Education and entertainment some of those other pieces again think about the content that you consume you don't want to consume a video of Somebody saying this is my product to go and buy it right or like here's just like a random video of me Filling up a jar of my product or here's you know behind the scenes in my warehouse without any contacts without any connection And people don't care as much as we really think that they do the brands that are trying to sell in every Post are usually the ones that are going to grow the slowest right now So you really have to branch out and think about marketing in a way that social media marketing is not equal to selling all of the time People open social media to be inspired to be entertained to be connected to be educated Not necessarily to be sold to we're seeing this across the board even an influencer marketing is going down a little bit because people are sick of Influence or selling to them from all angles number three is that we live in an attention economy I actually think we need to really dive into this deeper than just kind of what I've said Every brand is competing against we could be watching Netflix you could be on TikTok You could be texting people you could be at home with your babies you could be working you could be making dinner You could be doing a hobby of some sort your competition Isn't just like another candle company. It's literally everybody competing for attention online And so what we have to think about is how can you create content that is going to hold somebody's attention We live in a noisy stinkin world at this point We live in a world where if there's noises and there's politics and there's friends and there's family and there's work And there's all of these things coming back at us all the time and we have to come up with why should they pay attention To us there is something that I did throughout my marketing that made you sit here and want to spend 30 minutes with me And one thing about a podcast is it's often passively listened to which is different than social media social media Is quick at any time you can just swipe and it's gone right now many of you are probably doing the dishes Driving to school in the morning doing different things that way and it's a little bit more of a passive listen But on social media you are Fighting for attention that is literally one minor finger scoot away Just like a little swipe and they can go away and they'll never have to see you again And so what you have to do when you're creating content at least that visibility content that top of funnel content is What is going to make somebody actually give you their attention attention is honestly power right now This is why you see all of these videos of people lighting candles and changing outfits and doing crazy things That you're like what is this person doing or they're holding like a wine glass upside down that's full of wine Just to get people to try to figure out what's going on It's why a lot of videos have TVs on in the background because they know no matter how sad it sounds that you are going to be checking out the entire video You're going to be checking out the TV in the background and that that is holding your attention longer If you can get somebody and you can ask yourself when you're creating this top of funnel content content, what is going to capture and hold somebody's attention, that's going to win. It can't be these long drawn out videos. One of the biggest feedbacks that I give my clients when they send me their content is we got to shorten this up and quick it up. I want you to turn up your personality a little bit, turn up the energy as well as I want you to speed up everything that we're doing, cut the little breaks out. People don't want to sit there and listen, have there be a one second gap in the beginning of a video. We are literal goldfish that have these brains that are wired to have less than two seconds of an attention span. You have to keep somebody's attention. You have to be like a baby with a rattle. We got to be holding their attention in some way. The next one is that again, we're still kind of talking top of funnel here. Shatter is becoming more valuable than the viral content and you having one viral massive video. It's not this go viral and how can I get a million views on one video? It's how can I give other people something to talk about? So yes, you will most likely get natural organic touch points. But you'll also get all of these people online to chit chat about your brands. How can we get the influencers talking about you? How can we get the pop culture people talking about you? How can we get more chatter online about you? Again, it doesn't necessarily need to be negative. But there's a lot of ideas around this. It's just like I did a whole podcast episode a couple months ago that was, don't remember the name of it, but it said like alloyots and skims or in full bush panties on the picture. You should go and watch that if this is something that's really interesting to you. It was probably like just like a month or two ago that we put it out. But that's what we're talking about here is that chatter is more valuable than the absolute perfect content because everybody was talking about that aloe yoga yacht that all these influencers were on and how out of touch it is that aloe has this yacht and how all these billion dollar corporations just have all this money to rent this yacht. But they did that because they knew it would get chatter. They literally drove it around all of these major cities for like a week with the aloe on the side because they wanted the chatter. And it wasn't just one viral video. They ended up having 50 viral videos from all of these other creators and they probably had 5,000 people talking about it, which also equated to the earned media value of that aloe yoga yacht to be so much more because they had the internet chatting. Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is it out of touch? Is it not? They're basically using, however everybody loves to have an opinion in 2026 against them. So what can we do to get people to chatter about your brand? Whether it is just how beautiful it is, fish, wife, tinned fish is a great example of this. The chatter that they built is they basically were the perfect addition to a sharkootary board. And so they wanted to put this colorful, beautiful packaging on a sharkootary board and everybody wanted to post about it. How can you make it where people are chattering about you? Yes, this can be controversial launches like a full bush panty like Skims did. Or it can be an unexpected collaboration like the Sydney Sweeney and the American Eagle Jeans. It's controversial in and of itself. It became controversial, but it also was just kind of unexpected. It can be an incredible customer experience. We've seen this happen where somebody buys something or there was some mistake or a car lit on fire and their Stanley Cup was still there and then Stanley sent them a new car. That got so much chatter, which is called earned media. You earned media online, media dollars basically. It can be unique packaging. It can be surprising campaigns. It can be founder opinions. It can be just what you're doing differently within an industry to get people talking, attention spreads through conversation. And because we have such an opinionated online world, you might as well use it to your advantage. Hey, I've been getting some DMs that you may not know what I do outside of hosting this podcast. I actually work with product-based business owners every single day to help them grow and scale their brand. If you really want my eyes one-on-one inside of your business to look at your strategy, to look at your funnel, to look at your data, and to develop your next campaign or bring your business or your idea to life, that is exactly what I do every single day. I've worked with 500-plus businesses across 70 different industries to help them become the next household name in their industry. If you are craving a business-brain strategic advisor, a data-centered, obsessed person to come into your business and help you bring your idea to life, I'm your gal. Come on over to my Instagram @this is Madison Page DM me support, otherwise you can click the link in the show notes to apply today. Okay, back to the episode. Kind of moving into more of the nurture world here. We've talked a lot about top of funnel, a lot about attention, but we also need to talk about the fact that social media is the home of your community. Again, this means we need different pillars of content. So you have some content that is to go out to new people. Again, it doesn't matter about how many followers you have, it's how much attention, how much chatter, how much visibility we're getting. And then you have other content that is going for more community value. It is truly the biggest competitive advantage. I've been saying this for like a decade, but this truly has been my philosophy forever, even when I was doing social media marketing, truly a decade ago for all of these other brands and I had my own blog. It was all about community building, but it used to be a nice to have and it was a little bonus. Now it's a must-have and it's not going away anytime soon. Your products can be copied and odds are, it's probably not that different than a lot of other products. Your ads will go out of style in two to six weeks. Your copy, you know, anybody, AI can go out there and create more content, but your community and the connection that they feel to the brand is huge. You need a face behind your brand that's either consistent in your videos. It can be you. It can be somebody you hire, but you need a face for people to connect to. You need somewhere where they can communicate with you and that they really do feel like they are a part of your brand. This is absolutely necessary. Brand is winning. It always has been, but now identity-based branding is winning the most. Basically what this means is don't just build recognition. You want these people to be able to see themselves in your brand. People can say, oh, you know, I really love that brand, but you know, this looks great, but can they see themselves in it? Can they see that this was created for exactly the type of person that they are? This is why knowing your ideal customer is so important. But before you can really tell if you're looking at any brand, who are they trying to attract? If I look at your social media and I can't tell who you're trying to attract, that means we're not building enough identity. This is one of the pillars that I add into most of my clients' marketing systems is because we need to say this is the type of person that we want to attract. This is the type of person that is involved in this community. What do they like? What are they just like? What are they doing on a Friday night? What are the things that they love? What are they hating? All of that. How can we put that out there? What are the other brands that they're using? And how can we really create some of that connection there? People don't just buy products. They're reinforcing their own identity based on the products that they are buying. So that's kind of talking a lot about nurturing. You know, we talked a little bit about the chatter, a little bit about the attention, which is top of funnel, but the nurturing piece is here is you have to build community. It also goes back to not selling all the freaking time. You can't be selling all the time. You have to be educating and inspiring and all of that. That's going to help you build and nurture this home of your community on social media. And then, you know, the identity there as well. Something that we really need to talk about is that AI did not just replace marketing and photo shoots and copywriters. It replaced average execution of everything if you want to be middle of the road. You're about 50% tile and everything that you do truly AI marketing. I use AI every day in my business. Let me tell you I don't use it for my marketing because AI marketing is a super easy to notice. If I see one more person say the word freaking quietly, that it's quietly doing this. I know that that is written by AI. Or it's not this. It's actually that. I watch a video and I know when a script is written by AI because everybody is using AI now. We know what AI sounds like and you're just sounding like everybody else because it's the easy way out in your marketing. What are people wanting on social media is they want more human right now. What's going on is we're battling this world that people want more human but brands want to execute with AI everywhere. And so what's going on is we're taking less human and doing more AI which is basically saying we don't care what the consumer wants. This is what we want to do because it's a little bit more efficient for us. Your marketing has to feel authentic connection driven and human in order for people to really connect to it. Human insight and human connection and human adjustments and personality here matter more than some of these other things and please for the love of all please take photoshoots still. You can use AI for some specialty photos and videos every once in a while. But if you're just going in a chat chvt and saying make me this graphic that is not going to do it. There are specialty AI softwares that are really great that will make you certain graphics or photos but for the vast majority of people. And I know when I look at your website, when I look at your social media, again you're just blending into everybody else. Consumers are not yet ready for AI. And so if you have now all of a sudden just replaced your social media photos videos, content with AI, you are going to shoot yourself in the foot because the consumers are saying in their hearts. screaming it from the mountain tops. We don't want this. So you can use AI in your business. Again, I use it every day. I literally did one task this week that probably saved one of my clients a hundred hours of work using cloud co-work. I do it all the time. However, we can't do it on an outward sense yet. People just aren't ready for AI marketing totally. So you have to really keep some of that authenticity there because that's how you're going to continue to stay separate. Again, AI is just regurgitating what everybody else is doing. So if you want to be middle of the road, if you want to be mediocre, keep using AI, but you're not going to become a category leader with AI on social media. So when we really look at social media, I actually think how social media works has changed probably the most in the last five, ten years, right? Before social media was your entire sales channel. You know, if someone found you, they were nurtured by you and they were sold to you, you could see one ad and we'd still see this. People see one ad and they purchase all the time. But the world takes a little bit more touch points now because we are in a trust recession when it comes to businesses, which basically means it's taking a lot longer for a consumer to actually trust a brand that they do want to buy from you. And so what you have to think about is that every touch point is actually an ecosystem. You don't really have to be everywhere, but everywhere you are has to be cohesive. So whether you have a podcast and Instagram and email, a Facebook, a TikTok, retail website, PR, events, community, whatever, none of these channels exist alone. Everything should be working together. If you do a pop up, a PR pop up, you should be making a bunch of content around it. If you have an influencer posting about you, you should also be creating connections with them off the screen as well as reposting that on your social media. If you have emails going out, they should feel the same as your website. If you are on Instagram, you know, all of these channels intermingle again going back to the fact of like I walk through Target and a lot of times I'm like, Oh, I've seen this online and I haven't seen it anywhere else. I'm going to try it, right? I'm going to try that brand. That's awesome. That's because they aren't just singularly marketing. They're marketing. I get their ads and then I see them on social and I've seen some influencers talk about it. Great. I'm going to go and buy their products, but it's going to be at Target, which is not something that is attributed to social media marketing. At least, you know, by KPIs that we can track, but that's why I'm buying is because I've seen them so much on their online presence. So social media is basically the connective tissue behind everything else. Your website, yes, is still where people buy. I'm big on e-com. e-com is great, but your social media is basically where people decide if they want to over time. Your organic social is where they connect with you and they make sure that they really like that and love your brand. Your ads might just be more of a reminder that's there. Your emails that are going out are again, kind of another touch point until something is compelling enough for them to go to your website. So your website is yes, why people buy, but your social media is what is continuing that connection point and it truly is the home of your brand because it's taking people longer from following you and from finding you to actually purchase from you. So it's the best way to actually get people to stay in touch. It's really no longer email. It really is your social media. Your social media is almost like your website 1.0 now. 64% of people, even when they go to your website, will often click on your Instagram first. 64% of people are going and checking out your Instagram before they are actually buying from you. Which tells me that people like to scroll through content in order to actually make their decision if it's something that they want to buy. Because this generation all the way from gen alpha to millennial, we got our information from social media ever since we've been basically adults. And so it's easier for us who are now becoming some of the largest forces in the consumer spending. It's easier for us to kind of piece through all of this content of like, okay, what is this brand all about? Do I like them? Do I like their vibe? Do I see myself in them? Because it's what we're used to. We like this more casual front. Social media has gotten a lot more casual these days. And so what they're doing is they're actually using your social as almost a mini website. This is where your pinned posts come in handy. This is where your highlights come in handy. This is where your variety on your feed needs to have some that's going to be awareness, nurturing and selling. You know, we need to have this proper variety there because it's a non-negotiable. You don't necessarily need to be on every single channel, but you do always need to be on social media somewhere. Most likely either Instagram or TikTok are going to be the home of your brand, depending on your industry, depending on the brand that you really want to have. But you will need to be in those areas because people are looking for your social media. When I go and I search when I was getting married, I went on social media and I typed in, you know, Seattle wedding photographer. I went in and I said Seattle florist. I do this all the time. I had somebody the other day like, you know, they wanted custom cookies for a party and I said, if he looks it up and I didn't go on Google, I went on social media and I said, okay, let me see if there's any cookie places in the area. It is becoming a search engine and it's becoming your website 1.0. So yes, you can spend $30,000 on a website easily and have like all of this built and that's wonderful. But also do we have social media that backs it up and really puts our business in the best foot forward. That's really what matters here. The brands that are doing social media best are balancing the art and the science. Now the science is saying that people want more casual nature in their content. But the data does still say that people are attracted to the visuals of what is going on on your social media. And so you've heard me use this art versus science for so long, which is the art is the identity, it's the aesthetics, it's the storytelling, it's the emotion, it's your creativity behind, you know, the fun and the personality and all of that. And the strategy and the science is the positioning, the psychology, the analytics, the strategy, the pillars, you know, your consumer behavior. The brands winning today aren't just either all beauty or all science. They're actually exceptional at both and this doesn't mean that you need to be perfectly curated and beautiful and have all of this put together because that's actually not what the consumers want. Now in 2026, social media is a little bit more casual than it's ever been. The videos that perform go and scroll through your real speed and go and look at the videos that are there. They are not very curated. They might be quality. They have good lighting. They're not pixelated. They have hooks. They might have a mini microphone. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it had to be this beautiful professional camera. There is a lower barrier to entry on social media now than there's ever really been from a posting content perspective. Yes, there absolutely is a lot more noise on social media than ever before, but that brings us back to the attention and to the chatter part. Also, there's so many ways that you can get visibility. You don't need to go viral. And again, your followers don't always matter. What matters is are new people finding you? Are they nurtured into a community and are they actually engaging with you and how do you sell? So when I look at the status of social media, it's changed a lot in the last decade since I've been running other people's socials or helping them from this capacity. And now I'm an advisor. I'm a CEO of people's companies and things like that. So I've worked at a variety of different capacities over the last 10, 15 years ago. I was running social media of my family's company. And it's changed a lot. It used to just be you can post and get by. That's not the case anymore. You can post and you can get 300 views. You can get 2000 views. It can go out there and be consistent, but that doesn't necessarily means it's going to make you a category leader. What's going to make you a category leader is what we talked about today. Connection, identity, having an actual funnel, understanding that social media is an ecosystem, having sales strategies on your social media that are going to help you actually use it as your website 1.0. So we talked about top of funnel nurturing and a little bit of sales, the top of funnel, visibility chatter, all of that. Middle of funnel is community building connection, putting your face out there. You know, it can be a little bit more casual, educating, entertaining, all of that. The sales side is looking at your social media as a website. What are the key facts that we need? I call them trip wires. Where can we put trip wires to make sure that when people are stalking you, they're going to end up on your website somewhere. All of that is going to be really important, but we have to think of social media as all of those because some people are coming for their first time, some people are coming for their 10th time, some people are coming to your profile for the 100th time and they're ready to buy. So we have to build this system as a little bit of everything and that is truly what really really matters when we're diving in to all of these things. This is a status update of social media. It doesn't necessarily mean that social media is harder than it's ever been. From a content creation perspective, I actually think it's much easier. You don't need to be super curious. Some of the best videos you just set your phone down and pretend that you're just talking right to a camera and this wasn't even something you thought about. It was just something that popped in your head. Those videos were almost work better. Yes, there is more noise, but it just means you have to be a little bit more creative. It just means you have to be sometimes a little bit more outlandish. I think there's a bunch of brands out there that are doing really well. I think face, the luggage company does a really great job. They just redid their weekend their bag and they did a great job of bringing that casual nature. They had the founder reading hate comments. of their past bag and why they were redoing it. I think Floss, which is a Flosser company, does a really great job of a lot of things we're talking about today. Their marketing is very casual, but it has a lot of identity and it has a lot of problem solving and a lot of entertainment for something that people might not really care too much about. There's so many brands out there that are really absolutely crushing it. And you should be taking a note out of what's working for these category leaders and for these emerging brands that are coming through in their business today. That is going to help get you there. What you can see here is that social media is very methodical, it didn't used to be. It didn't have to be. Yes, I have always had a strategy just because that's how my brain works, but people could get very far without a strategy and just beautiful aesthetics for a long time. We need these pillars, we need these structures and pillars aren't just asking chat GPT what should my content pillars be. It has to be based on your industry, based on your stage of business, based on what your content is, based on what your product is, based on what platform you're on. And let me tell you, I've been getting a lot of lists of chat GPT content pillars and they are not the full spectrum. Again, marketing was not replaced by AI from a visual sense and from a strategy sense. It's outdated and it's not going to work as well. It's only going to make things worse. When I post AI-driven content, I've tested it. It works much worse than everything else. It doesn't perform because people are smart and they know exactly what you're doing is you're just making lazy content. This is a status update on social media in mid to late 2026. I can't believe we're in August. If you are wanting to have a rock solid Q4 holiday season with your brand, this is something that you really should be trying to tackle in August and September. And so by the time October, November and December comes, you have everything optimized. If you have any questions on that, as always feel free to let me know. You can come on over to my Instagram @thisismadisonpage. I would love to hear your questions and your status update on social media and your thoughts on this. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always here for you. I love you. I'm rooting for you. I'm in your corner always. I will see you in the next episode. (upbeat music) Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Business Growth Podcast. We put up new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. So if you love this one, make sure that you're subscribed so you never miss a conversation. If you want more conversations with me and other business owners, make sure that you join our completely free podcast community, The Founders Cafe. The link is in the show notes. You can get bonus resources, access to free coaching calls, as well as connect with like-minded business owners like yourself. Make sure that you rate and review the podcast by stars, share it with a friend to keep those conversations moving and come back every Tuesday and Friday. I'll see you there.