There wasn’t always truth in advertising, but there was the ability to grab the attention of your demographic with ease. Familiarity has been replaced with viral content; and in many ways, this transition from straightforward advertising to the multi-dimensional approaches that are the bullet points for thought leaders has changed the game to something more behavioral––something that requires scaffolding.

Video marketing has been around since the advent of television, and it boy has it changed. Once, all you needed was a clever premise, a well-shot commercial, and the appropriate placement during prime television hours. This was before the ability to pass over what you don’t want to watch, or simply turn off advertising through social media applications.

A captive audience is easy to sell to.

Complexity invites a variety of difficulties; however, expanding the overall playing fields has created niche markets on top of niche markets––complete with targeting and re-targeting applications to help navigate them. Perhaps your wondering what this means for you. Two things are clear:

• Single-channel marketing has gone the way of the dodo
• Your demographic is now online

Television hasn’t disappeared altogether; it has just become a less effective advertising tool when considering ROI, cost-benefit analysis, and the relative budget necessary to get a campaign up and running. Drilling down deeper, we need to think about why single-channel marketing was so effective––is so effective.

The answer is simple: a direct, unadulterated conversion with your audience.

So now the question centers on how to keep the conversation, but change the methodology. Developing content for a demographic is the basis of marketing; in order to do that you need to know where you audience consumes media and information, and what indeed they are interested in.

This isn’t new information. Just think of the most popular brands that come to mind and you can create a list of brands that have taken this change in stride and adjusted their marketing strategies as it relates to video. The problem is not the principle; it is the methodology.

A common guiding principle in marketing is same behaviors, same results.

This applies to video marketing strategies as well. IF you are still creating Coke ads with Cindy Crawford for a millennial (and younger) audience, then you are behind the curve. As such, these videos are skipped over because that brand did not take into account how their audience consumes media and to what kind of media they attenuate.

Fractionalization: The Future of Advertising Is Here Today

This leads us to the concept of fractionalization. A single-channel approach ignores the ability of a consumer to simply ignore an advertisement. Fractionalization is a solution to this problem. By creating smaller viral content with a budget, say many videos instead of one video, you can create content that appeals to the strengths of each social media outlet. Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat all have very different aesthetics; as such, the approach and content should differ and reflect what will create the greatest interaction––and conversion. It might seem like fractionalized creates more work, but really it is in an opportunity to flex creative muscles and approach your product in ways that you might not have considered before. While, it’s true that it does take more time, it is the way of the digital age.

If you’re scratching you head, don’t worry. Getting started is simple enough:

What’s the Big Idea? Understanding what you offer and who you want to offer is always the first step of a marketing endeavor. The Big Idea is something as simple as writing romance novels and identifying your audience of women between the ages of 35-55. Having this core principle guides how you fractionalize. This audience enjoys reading this genre, and you want to continue to encourage them to do that as well as purchase your product. There are a lot of writers and a lot of romance novels, so you need to use fractionalization to identify how to approach the different channels available to reach this demographic.

How does your audience break down? So you’ve identified a broad demographic and there are plenty of people subsumed by it. There are subsets within this audience that utilize social media channels differently, and identifying them allows you to better target them with content. For instance, our romance novel has a broad audience, some of whom might use Facebook or Twitter predominately. As such, you need to break down the channels in order to understand how to effectively hold your audience’s attention. Using multiple ads allows you to target more potential consumers than a single video ad on only one social media channel.

Build your content: Now you know where your audience is, what kind of content is successful on those platforms, it is time to create content reflects these different marketing channels. Understanding that people spend less time on a Snapchat post than a Facebook post should influence the length and delivery of the respective content. Older audiences will likely use older media, and younger audiences will use newer media; so not only do you need to base the content on the type of channel, it needs to be catered to the demographic.

The future of advertising is now, and video content must be fractionalized in order to reach more potential consumers who would likely be tuning out your content elsewhere. Knowing your audience is a great first step, but in order to stand out from among other similar products and companies, you need to force yourself to understand the entire social media ecosystem. Trend toward valuable content and specific targeting and you will find yourself turning the corner before you know it.

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