21 Oct How to Develop a Social Media Strategy for a Multi-Brand Portfolio

We get asked this a lot: how do you develop one social media strategy that actually works across a whole portfolio of brands, especially when some of those brands get plenty of attention and others barely get any?

Over the years, we’ve worked with a lot of multi-brand portfolios including Chrysler FCA (Jeep, FIAT, Dodge, Ram Trucks, Chrysler), Just Born (PEEPS, Mike & Ike, Hot Tamales, Peanut Chews), and Daimler Trucks North America (Freightliner, Detroit, SelecTrucks, DTNA Parts). In each case, we’ve developed models of working relationships that could meet the individual brand needs but also generate efficiencies.

Currently, we’re being approached by more portfolio brands asking the same question, “How do we effectively scale social budgets and resources across our portfolio?” This is a common situation. Most companies with a brand portfolio have a flagship product or two that soak up the majority of marketing resources, while smaller brands are left with minimal support, or in many cases, social channels that have gone completely dormant. Usually, the root cause is a mixture of budget and resources. We’ve learned these constraints help think of smarter ways to think about strategy across the whole portfolio.

So, if you are wondering how you might get started developing a social media strategy for a multi-brand portfolio, I’ll walk you through some key considerations below.

Start with Budget Ranges, Not Strategy

We have a saying here, “No brand has the budget to do everything they want to do in social media marketing.” This is exactly why budget ranges can be a helpful and strategic exercise to help clarify a social media strategy.

Nearly every time we’re asked to propose an approach for a multi-brand strategy, the conversation goes in a chicken/egg discussion on budget levels to work from:

Us: How are you prioritizing brands, and what is your investment level for overall support across all of them?

Brand: We don’t know what our budgets should be, we’d like you to propose that.

Us: Can you at least give us some budget tiers on investment levels we can back support into?

It might seem backwards, but you can’t build a strategy that scales across a large number of brands without first understanding what budget ranges you’re working with. This exercise doesn’t mean you’re locking yourself into current budget levels forever, nor does it mean the budget dictates all aspects of your tactical execution. It simply means that you need to start with at least providing historical budgets and have organizational discussions to understand investment ranges that may be possible for your brand to invest in above that.

If you skip this step and jump straight into strategy, one of two things tends to happen: the proposed plan ends up costing far more than the business can sustain, or the “efficiencies” you think you’re building in turn out to be unrealistic once you try to execute them. Grounding the strategy in real budget constraints from day one is what often clarifies where resources and output should be prioritized.

How Do You Decide How to Allocate Resources Across Different Brands?

Once budget is understood, we look at three things to help lay out how resources should be allocated across brands. This includes a view of current social performance, natural brand groupings, and business priority. Together, these inform a tiered support structure that can scale varying support levels to fit within the budget.

1. How is each brand currently performing on existing social channels and beyond?

If you ask us to help inform a multi-brand strategy, the first thing I’m going to ask is for you to gather all your social channel links of every handle you want management for. This is because often multi-brand strategies have some brands with 4-5 active handles, other brands with only 1-2 active channels, and some brands that are purely dormant or have never created a social handle. These baselines help inform what future support may look like. We look at two main layers:

On-Channel Performance: What’s the engagement rate, the total engagement volume, and the posting cadence for each brand’s existing channels? This tells you whether the channel is active, whether people are engaging, and the scale of overall content, community management, and paid amplification support that is needed. It’s also going to highlight dormant channels and help paint a picture of the current activity levels across the brands.

Off-Channel: Are people talking about this brand naturally, outside of what the brand itself is posting? Are people actively creating their own UGC, sharing their own experiences with the product, tagging the brand without being asked to?

This second layer matters more than people expect. Sometimes a brand’s channels look unimpressive by the numbers, low engagement, and inconsistent posting, but the brand has a cult following happening off channel that isn’t being taken advantage of. In the scenario where current channel performance doesn’t match what’s happening off the channel, this can begin to indicate there is a disconnect in content and channel strategy. On the flip side, some brands that get heavy investment still don’t perform well. Recognizing that mismatch can help inform how to use resources more efficiently.

2. Are there brands that naturally belong together?

Look for brands in your portfolio that could share resources, content, or production because they reach similar audiences or naturally overlap in the topics and moments they’d both be talking about.

A simple example: a portfolio with multiple food brands have certain brands that share a key holiday season. This natural crossover in audience and content topic opens up the opportunity for the brand to develop content featuring multiple brands at once. These brands can explore collaborative content, cross-posting between brands, or shared content and campaigns.

Looking for these natural groupings is a way to stretch a limited budget further without diluting any individual brand.

3. Which brands does the business need to grow right now?

This is the business priority layer. Is there a specific vertical or growth area the business is counting on? Is there a brand where leadership sees real potential, or where market demand is clearly pointing toward more investment?

This consideration sits alongside performance data and natural groupings, not above or below it. A brand might not show obvious organic traction yet, but if the business has real strategic reasons to grow it, that shapes how resources get allocated too.

How to develop a multi-brand strategy?

After initial budget ranges are developed, it’s much easier to outline varying levels of social media support that fit particular brand groupings. The budget is a loose strategic framework from which to plan high-level content frequencies, reactive engagement, content levels, publishing, paid amplification, reporting, and more. Running scenarios on support levels that fit various budgets helps contextualize what matters most for the brand and helps clarify swim lanes and shared resources between agency partners and internal teams.

Once internal and external alignment is met, the real strategy work is able to begin. While the initial scenarios defined high-level support levels, the multi-brand strategy helps map everything out in more detail. Ideally, this strategy work helps outline overarching business and marketing priorities that all social efforts ladder to, while individual brand frameworks allow for strategies that consider varying target audiences, channel strategies, and tactics that are specific to how each brand will come to life. The screenshot below is a representation of this approach.

Ready for Help?

For many brands, having an outside consultant with experience executing multi-brand strategies can help tremendously. Given no client is quite the same, we’ve seen many ways of supporting portfolio brands over the years and have experienced what works and what doesn’t.

If you are ready to discuss different approaches for your portfolio brand, please reach out to us to begin the conversation.