How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy [With Examples]

We live in a time where people are more active on social media than ever before. In 2022, 173 billion dollars worth of social media marketing spending fiercely competed for users’ attention and engagement on various platforms, and ad spending is projected to increase even more this year. 

Why Social Media Marketing Strategy Matters? 

No matter what industry you are in, making sure that you have a well-defined social media marketing strategy can make a massive difference in the competitiveness of your product by boosting awareness, improving your SEO, as well as increasing returns on your investment.

How To Create Your Marketing Strategy

1. Understanding Your Audience: Foundations of Success

The first important step is to understand the specific demographics of people you would like to reach.

What are their wants and needs? What are their interests?

It can be helpful to create a profile for your ‘ideal customer’, specifying information such as age, gender, location, average income, typical job title, and interests. 

This is a process called “audience segmentation”, which can empower you to engage them more effectively on social media, by making content that interests them more as well as sharing that content on the platform that they prefer to use.

2. Define Metrics for Success: Setting Your Impact

Regardless of your target audience or your chosen platforms, it is crucial that your social media strategy is data-driven. 

Consider your goals and decide on the metrics that align with them best. In other words, define your goals and set the corresponding KPIs. These may be post impressions, engagement, follower growth, or even the speed of your support team when replying to follower messages.

This is where social media monitoring tools can come in handy, as they can provide data as well as important insights that can help you invest in the right opportunities and maximize the effectiveness of your social marketing strategy. 

3. Content Calendar: Mapping Your Social Media Journey

If you follow any social media creator who has a regular upload schedule, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the timing of your posts is as important as the content of the posts themselves.

Not only do you want to make sure you have a steady flow of content for users to engage with, but you also want to reach your audience when they are most active.

Having a social media content calendar that keeps track of the dates, times, and platforms where you will post is a great way to ensure your content is equally spaced out to avoid too much or too little content on your users’ feeds, as well as plan ideal times to post on a given social media platform for the most impressions and engagement.

4. Content Creation: Getting Started on Making Engaging Posts

Now that you have decided on your core audience and goals, it’s time to start creating the content to make your marketing plan happen!

Consider all the points we’ve discussed and the data you have gathered, and you focus on making engaging, targeted content that is consistent with your brand identity.

Determining a content strategy for each social media channel can be extremely helpful for this step. A clear content strategy ensures you have specific goals fit for each platform which can serve as a guideline for your content creation. 

For example, you may designate LinkedIn for publishing blogs and sharing industry news while using Instagram to boost brand awareness and post product photos.

Remember to use each platform’s features to your advantage. Instagram’s strong image-based feed is good for eye-catching visual content, but if the content you want to publish is long-form text, other platforms would be more suitable. 

5. Evaluation and Adjustments: Content Creation is the Process of Trial and Error

With your content published and your social media plan underway, there is still work left to do. Keep an eye on your metrics to monitor the performance of your plan. Inevitably, there would be components of your plan that work and others that do not.

Take a closer look at the data. Which posts are performing well? Who among your audience is most likely to engage with your content? Is your target audience on the platform you’ve chosen? What kind of tactics are your competitors using, and how does your social media presence compare to theirs?

Be realistic! Asking yourself these hard questions can help you determine areas for improvement, and understand which social media profiles you should invest more time in than others. 

Social Media Marketing Strategy Examples

With these steps in mind, let’s take a quick look at some real-world cases where a strategic social media marketing plan has led to successful campaigns!

Jugnoo

Wondering if you could boost user numbers without spending a fortune? In 2016, Jungnoo, a ride-hailing service for auto-rickshaws in India, was looking to scale up and reach new customers.

They leveraged data from Facebook Analytics and discovered that 90% of their users who referred new customers were 18-34 years old, and 65% of that majority used Android devices.

Using this crucial data, Jungnoo began a new social media marketing campaign that targeted a narrower group of customers and managed to reduce their cost per referral down by 40%.

McDonald’s

In 2022, McDonald’s Hong Kong unveiled a new plant-based menu item. They started a campaign to promote it on Instagram, understanding that their core younger audience is active users on the platform.

The company used automated Instagram Direct Messages to distribute discount QR codes to users who commented on the phrase “I’m a Green Lover” on the campaign post, which drove engagement on that post to 37%.

In just one week, the campaign had more than doubled McDonald’s Hong Kong’s follower count on Instagram, as well as distributing over 100,000 discount codes, of which 62% were redeemed in McDonald’s stores.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Tactics

Engagement Tactics: Building Meaningful Connections

The biggest question for anybody creating and curating content is “How do I get the most engagement out of this post?” And there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. However, there are some general rules you can always follow. 

For example, jumping on every bandwagon and every meme trend may seem convenient, but it’s important to always remember what your core audience cares about. Social media users crave authenticity and they seek interesting content in which they are not being advertised to.

This is another area in which AI social monitoring can be useful. Tools like Mandala AI can analyze large volumes of data across the internet in order to help you pick out content more likely to get good engagement and efficiently improve your click-through rate.

Influencer Collaboration: Amplifying Your Reach

Collaborating with social media influencers is another invaluable method to introduce your brand to new customers, but this needs to be done in a thoughtful way that fits your brand and goals to achieve the biggest impact.

Keep in mind that finding popular influencers with millions of followers does not automatically guarantee success. Depending on your goals, targeting micro-influencers with smaller followings can be just as viable, if not more effective. 

Compile a list of influencers whose audience aligns with your target group and your values as a business, and make sure to do your research before you decide to collaborate with them. The strong point of influencer marketing is a sense of authenticity, combined with interesting, unsponsored content that keeps audiences interested. So pay particular attention to whether their page is full of paid promos! 

Video Content Strategies: Captivating Your Audience

Anybody who has scrolled through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok recently will understand how influential video content has become for our social media experiences. And there are numerous statistics to back up how effective it is to use this type of content to market your business. In Wyzowl’s 2023 statistical report on video marketing, 89% of respondents claimed that they have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video. It’s no surprise that marketers are paying so much attention to video content.

Some simple principles for creating memorable, engaging video content include having a strong visual identity. Think about color palettes and fonts. Is your brand more suited to bold, bright colors, softer pastel tones, or gritty, desaturated shades? Additionally, pay attention to your video thumbnail, and consider incorporating text into your videos to grab attention without the need for audio.

Cross-Platform Promotion: Maximizing Visibility

Another powerful tactic when managing multiple social media accounts is cross-posting, which means posting the same content across different platforms in order to maximize your reach. When done well, you can leverage the audience on all the platforms you use while also taking advantage of each platform’s unique features and strengths.

Factoring cross-posting into your content calendar can be an efficient way to stay on top of your social marketing plan, and you can further streamline this process by using tools such as Hootsuite or Sprout to schedule your posts.

Data-Driven Decisions: Leveraging Analytics for Growth

As we’ve previously seen in this article, using data to inform your decisions can lead to more effective marketing and better value for your ad spending, among many other benefits. 

You would want to keep track of different metrics, depending on what you want to achieve for your business. Regardless, as trends shift and user behavior evolves, you can make better decisions by investing in different forms of content, and new platforms, while also being able to determine if it’s worth maintaining a presence on underperforming platforms.

Crafting Your Effective Social Media Strategy

In the end, there is no single “perfect” social media strategy. Your business needs are unique to its own identity, and trends and behaviors change over time. The good news is you can always edit, refine, and improve upon what you have.

Remember, the goal isn’t to go viral all the time but to achieve what’s important to your business specifically. And you’re not alone. There are many powerful tools available that can provide data analytics and assist you in all steps of the process.

Now you’re equipped with the information necessary to get started on your journey. And if you’re already using social media marketing, we hope the insights shared in this article can help empower you to elevate your marketing efforts to the next level.