Today we’re joined by Milena Traikovich, a demand generation expert who helps businesses build powerful campaigns that nurture high-quality leads. With her deep experience in analytics and performance optimization, we’ll explore the significant gap between social media’s potential and its practical use in marketing. The conversation will delve into the structural barriers preventing full-funnel integration, the risk of losing emotional connection with customers, and the strategic shifts required to merge brand presence with performance marketing. We’ll also touch on the power of frequent, short-burst content and the underutilized potential of creator partnerships to drive long-term ROI.
With fewer than one-third of marketers deploying social media across the full marketing funnel, what structural barriers prevent this integration? Can you walk us through the first practical steps a brand should take to build a more connected, end-to-end social strategy?
The barriers are almost always organizational, not strategic. Everyone knows they should be doing it, but their teams, budgets, and metrics are built for an older media world. You often have a brand team handling top-of-funnel awareness and a separate performance team focused solely on bottom-of-funnel conversion. They have different goals and report on different KPIs, so their efforts never connect. The first practical step is an honest audit. Map every single social media activity you’re currently doing to a funnel stage. You’ll immediately see the gaps. From there, create a pilot project that intentionally connects two stages—for instance, a campaign that retargets people who engaged with an awareness video with a consideration-focused piece of content, like a product demo or customer testimonial.
Social media excels at building emotional connections with audiences. How do brands risk losing this advantage when they fail to engage across the full customer journey? Share some specific tactics for reinforcing that emotional connection at the consideration and retention stages.
That emotional connection is incredibly powerful, but it’s also fragile. When you only use social for top-of-funnel “brand love” campaigns, you create a powerful first impression but then abandon the customer emotionally when they move toward a purchase. It feels transactional. You’ve made a friend and then immediately tried to sell them something without continuing the conversation. To reinforce that bond, brands can use social for high-touch customer service in the consideration phase, answering DMs quickly and personally. For retention, creating exclusive customer communities on social platforms is a brilliant tactic. It makes them feel like insiders and continues that feeling of shared values and cultural relevance that you established at the beginning.
Research shows a 21% sales increase when brands use frequent, short bursts of attention. How does this “lots of littles” approach challenge traditional campaign thinking? Can you provide an example of how a brand might implement this strategy effectively?
It completely upends the traditional “big bang” campaign model. For decades, marketing was built around large, intermittent flights—a huge TV spot, a massive print campaign. The “lots of littles” approach recognizes that on social media, you’re competing for attention every minute, not just during a campaign launch. It’s about building a constant, ambient presence. For example, instead of a brand spending its entire quarterly budget on one polished three-minute video, it could produce dozens of 15-second clips, behind-the-scenes Stories, and interactive polls. This creates a steady drumbeat of engagement that keeps the brand top-of-mind, and as the data shows with a 21% sales lift, it’s far more effective at driving actual business results.
Many brands use social either for performance or brand presence, yet a combined strategy can boost revenue ROI by 90%. What organizational silos or outdated metrics keep these functions separate? How can leaders begin to merge these two approaches for greater impact?
The primary culprits are budget allocation and success metrics. The brand team is given a budget and judged on vanity metrics like impressions and reach, while the performance team gets a budget and is judged on cost-per-acquisition. There’s no incentive for them to collaborate, and in fact, their goals are often at odds. To merge them, leadership needs to establish shared, full-funnel KPIs. Instead of just looking at conversion rate, look at the customer journey from first touch to final sale and beyond. Leaders can start by creating a “squad” with members from both brand and performance teams and giving them a unified budget and a single, revenue-focused goal. When they succeed or fail together, the silos start to crumble. That 90% potential ROI increase should be all the motivation they need.
Creator-led marketing can outperform average media channels by 51% in long-term ROI. Beyond a single campaign, how can a brand strategically integrate a creator partnership across the entire funnel to influence perception, trust, and even reach non-active buyers?
This is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Most brands use creators for a one-off awareness play—a single sponsored post. But the real power comes from long-term, integrated partnerships. Imagine a creator introducing a product to their audience at the awareness stage. Then, in the consideration phase, they do a “day in the life” video showing how they actually use it, answering follower questions in the comments. At the conversion stage, they can offer an exclusive discount code. And for retention, they can feature user-generated content from people who bought the product. This builds authentic, sustained trust that a single ad could never achieve, and it effectively influences even those who aren’t actively looking to buy, building brand memory for future purchases.
What is your forecast for social media marketing?
My forecast is that the line between “social media marketing” and “marketing” will disappear entirely. Social is becoming the main stage, not a supporting act. The platforms have become a dominant entertainment ecosystem, and consumer behavior has already shifted. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that stop treating social as a channel and start treating it as the central nervous system of their entire brand strategy. The brands that continue to operate with outdated structures and siloed teams will see their cultural relevance and market share steadily decline. Success will be defined by full-funnel integration, where brand building and performance marketing are two sides of the same coin, not competing departments.
