How to “day trade” attention: 5 key digital branding strategies

How does one define a brand’s success? In answering that question, most people would turn to the brands, products, and ads we’re all familiar with. They’ll consider McDonald’s famed “Golden Arches,” the meteoric rise of the iPhone, and water cooler chat about Budweiser’s latest Super Bowl ad. With these examples in mind, they’ll answer in terms of popularity. The more people who become aware of your organization and its offerings, the more branding success you’ve achieved.

There’s certainly some truth to that. Branding and advertising should translate into sales and good word of mouth. Billions served, millions sold, thousands of memes shared — that’s the dream.

However, this answer hides a common misconception: that chasing popularity means crafting a brand identity that will appeal to the largest segment of potential customers.

This approach may have worked back in the day when everyone listened to the same radio stations, watched the same three channels, and water cooler chats took place around actual water coolers. But the internet has since shattered mainstream culture into millions of social niches. 

As such, an organization’s addressable audience is no longer a culture, a demographic, or even a locality. That may seem disadvantageous, but it actually grants organizations many opportunities previously closed off. Brand managers simply need new strategies to take advantage of them.

“I believe every business needs to be thinking about consumer segmentations in a much bigger way.” That’s Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and chairman of VaynerX, and he has some advice for anyone trying to discover their audience in this new branding landscape. Rather than trying to move boulders, he recommends collecting pebbles.

Plenty of pebbles on the beach

In the heyday of broadcast TV, advertisers would target their commercials at large segments of the population known as “key demographics.” For sports, the key demographic was men ages 18 to 49. For broadcast news, it was still men but the ages skewed older. And the key demographics for soap operas, reality TV, and daytime television were women with disposable income ages 25 to 54.

While Vaynerchuk understands why TV did it that way — different era, less targetability — he also finds it “humorous” since people are “literally growing up” between those ages. An 18-year-old will, and should, have different needs, wants, and ambitions than those of a 49-year-old.

Thankfully, today’s brand managers have many more tools, options, and outlets. Online technologies allow them to target the population segments that may resonate with their organization’s products, offerings, and values. They can also help them hone their message to be more relevant to those audiences.

Imagine, Vaynerchuk asks, that you’re trying to sell a green sweater to a target segment of 18- to 35-year-old men. The best you can probably manage is a “general guy statement,” but crafting that message to appeal to a kid just starting college and a man with a growing family will be difficult.

According to Vaynerchuk, that task is analogous to lifting a boulder. It is technically possible, but it is also difficult and time-consuming, and everyone else has their eyes on the same boulder as you.

But what if your target segment was narrower? Say, 21- to 24-year-old men who are wealthy, live in the suburbs of London, and play sports on weekends with their mates? Now, Vaynerchuk says, you have a much easier lift. You now know this segment’s shared values, what slang they use, what experiences they have in common, what media they consume, and so on. With that information, you can appeal more easily to them. This is analogous to picking up a pebble. 

Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single pebble. You can pursue many niche cultures and groups and adjust accordingly.

“I believe that segments are imperative to advertising,” Vaynerchuk tells Big Think+ during his interview. “My argument is we now live in a world where we have to have 1,000 pebbles make a boulder — instead of one boulder.”

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5 ways to connect with your audience

Of course, it’s easy to say the world is your beach, now go collect some pebbles. But even after identifying a responsive cultural niche, you still have to win — and keep! — their attention through well-crafted, well-timed messages and advertisements.

“The biggest misstep that I see from everybody is they’re obsessed with yesterday, they’re curious and willing for tomorrow, but they’re missing the mark today,” Vaynerchuk says. To help you hit that mark, Vaynerchuk recommends these strategies.

Think like a day trader. Instead of collecting stocks and waiting years for them to vest, day traders buy and sell within hours, sometimes performing hundreds of trades a day. In the world of Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, Vaynerchuk says, brand managers need to trade attention the way day traders move stocks.

Brand managers must recognize that the way to make ads or craft messages for these platforms changes “day to day, week to week, month to month.” They should study, plan for, and capitalize on those changes quickly and at the right moment.

“You can’t just have a good strategy today and think it’s going to work next year,” Vaynerchuk says, “People need to recognize how big the stakes are because the ones who don’t know how to day-trade attention will continue to lose market share.”

Find underpriced attention. Underpriced attention is when your ad or message gets more attention than the effort or money put into it. Vaynerchuk points to social media as a great place to find underpriced attention. Social media allows you to reach your targeted segment cheaply compared to traditional outreach, sometimes organically and entirely free.

“Basically, every single action a business does to get customers — or a human does to get attention — is either properly priced, overpriced, or underpriced,” Vaynerchuk says. “As you can imagine, it is my great obsession, both personally and for [my] clients, to be great at underpriced.”

Focus on self-awareness. Even after working in branding for 20 years, Vaynerchuk still makes mistakes. Some of his ideas hit the mark and others miss. Some of his social media posts get traction, while others go underappreciated by all but the crickets. And while the analytics surrounding likes, views, and click-through rates are important, they don’t tell the whole story.

To judge the experience properly, Vaynerchuk fosters humility and self-awareness. These qualities help him better recognize mistakes, reassess his strategy, and put the quantitative feedback in its proper context.

Make creativity your centerpiece. If you’re married to one idea because it’s always worked, you’ll be left behind as a day trader of attention. You have to be willing to try creative new approaches and unusual ideas to see what works. “Those may be the exact things that unlock the opportunity,” Vaynerchuk notes.

Study your craft. The same goes for best practices. You need to study the ins and outs of your craft: When is the best time to post? How long should a video be? What thumbnail images drive the most attention? And so on. However, be willing to take small, low-risk experiments to see where novel opportunities and strategies may lie.

You may have noticed that “easier said than done” applies here. That’s because the new branding landscape can be scary to navigate. Things move fast. Tastes change and new trends are born all the time. You may find your way one day, get lost the next, and find your destination no longer exists the day after that.

“Here’s the good news for everyone who’s scared by how hard and fast it is: A great story will still find its way,” Vaynerchuk says. “Even if you don’t know the best practices for how to post on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, you’ll be stunned how much a story can find its audience if it’s just told from the heart in a pure form.”