How to Create a Killer Social Media Strategy [8 Simple Steps]

Working in social media without a strategy is like throwing together random ingredients, hoping to create a Gordon Ramsay-approved meal. News flash: It just doesn’t work like that. There are so many parts involved in social media marketing, you need a good strategy to succeed.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting to dip your toes into the world of social media, this blog will show you how to build a robust social media marketing strategy that will help you navigate the complex terrain and drive your business forward. Let’s dive in.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms to promote your business, products, or services. 

Social media marketing includes any and all activities carried out on social media with the intention of promoting your business. These may include sharing content, engaging with potential customers, and promoting a new product.

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media strategy defines how a brand intends to use social media to achieve its goals. It’s like a map that guides social media activities to ensure that they align with the business goals and deliver the desired results. 

A social media strategy outlines details like target audience, social networks, content plan, key performance indicators (KPIs), and engagement techniques – more on that later in the sections that follow.

8 Steps to Build a Social Media Marketing Plan

1. Set goals

Every great social media plan starts with clear objectives and goals. Goals will help you define what you want to achieve and dictate how you invest your time and energy. They will also help you track the right metrics while measuring ROI.

This goes without saying, but all your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Once you have your goals, break them down into smaller objectives. Objectives are easier to scale, alter, and keep track of in order to attain the larger goals in your plan.

Examples of social media goals:

1. Increase brand awareness by x% in 2024: Brand awareness is about making your brand known or familiar. A few things to consider here include: What are your business values? What is your brand personality? What causes do you care about? In the context of social media, this means posting less promotional content and posting more authentic content that amplifies your brand story and voice. 
2. Generate leads and sales to xx in Q4: The primary goal of every marketing activity is to generate revenue. In the same vein, social media should be viewed as a revenue-generating channel. It is now increasingly easier to sell through social media with the introduction of native shopping features.
3. Grow social audience to xx followers by 2024: The best channel to build an engaged community is social media. It is where most people “live.” Therefore, your brand should be actively finding new ways to reach new audiences that might be interested in your content but haven’t discovered your page yet. 
4. Provide holistic and prompt customer care: We’re past the age where a business having an active social media presence was considered revolutionary. Now, almost every business has a social media presence. The primary differentiator now is social media response time. Customers value prompt responses on social media, whether in the comments or DMs.

2. Research your target audience

In order to create a foolproof plan, you need to understand who you are communicating with, down to their biggest pain point and most pressing need. The effectiveness of your communication is based on how well you know your audience. If you don’t know who you’re speaking to, your content will always miss the mark. 

When researching your audience, use social media tools to gain insight. Don’t rely on your gut or make assumptions where data is available. Defining your audience based on demographic, psychographic, and geographic information will help you determine the kind of content that will perform well.

However, it should be noted that audiences behave differently across various platforms. So, it is important to go further and define audiences based on social networks. Different social media platforms cater to different audiences. So, your Facebook audience might be different from your Twitter audience, which will impact the type of content you create for different platforms.

3. Select your social media channels wisely

Now that you have a clearer idea of who your audience is and where to find them, it’s time to narrow down which social media channels you want to invest in based on your industry and target audience. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

Consider this: It takes a lot of resources to create a social media presence across multiple platforms. Large corporations can afford to have a presence on all platforms. But what happens when you are a small or medium enterprise with a limited budget? Take account of the resources you have and then use them on the platform with the highest ROI potential.

Here is a breakdown of the major social media channels and examples of brands that use them successfully.

Facebook: Community building and broad reach

Best for: Building a broad community, fostering deeper relationships, and reaching a general audience.

Facebook is ideal for businesses that want to build a community around their brand and reach a wide demographic. With over 2.9 billion active users, Facebook remains the platform with the broadest reach, especially among adults aged 25–44. It offers extensive ad-targeting capabilities and is great for sharing long-form content, announcements, and engaging directly with customers.

Instagram: Visual storytelling and brand aesthetics

Best for: Visual content, brand aesthetics, product promotion, and influencer partnerships.

Instagram is all about visual appeal, which makes it perfect for industries like fashion, food, beauty, and travel. With its focus on images, videos, and short stories, Instagram works particularly well for businesses that thrive on product displays and creativity. The platform’s built-in shopping features, such as shoppable posts and Stories, allow businesses to turn followers into customers easily.

Boohoo excels on Instagram, primarily using influencer marketing to engage its over 12 million followers. With a mix of pop-culture content and trend-driven campaigns like #BoohooInTheHouse, they successfully connect with a young audience and maintain strong brand engagement.

X: Real-time conversations and industry insights

Best for: Real-time updates, customer service, brand voice, and industry thought leadership.

X is a go-to platform for brands that want to engage in real-time conversations, provide quick updates, and keep their audience informed. It’s particularly effective for industries that benefit from timely content, such as news, tech, and entertainment. X is also a great place for customer service, as it allows companies to quickly respond to customer concerns and build a voice of authority in their industry.

JetBlue effectively uses Twitter to boost customer engagement and brand visibility. By sharing promotions, partnerships, and crew appreciation posts, alongside quick responses to customer inquiries, they maintain strong audience interaction and enhance their customer service reputation. At the same time, keeping their followers informed and connected.

LinkedIn: B2B networking and professional authority

Best for: B2B marketing, industry thought leadership, recruiting, and networking.

LinkedIn is designed for professionals and is an excellent B2B marketing, recruiting, and thought leadership platform. It is highly effective for sharing industry insights, publishing long-form content, and connecting with decision-makers. LinkedIn should be a key part of your strategy if your business targets other businesses or you want to establish your brand as a thought leader in your field.

IBM excels on LinkedIn with over 17 million followers, sharing a mix of industry insights and company updates. Their concise, engaging posts resonate with professionals, reinforcing IBM’s position as a tech industry leader.

TikTok: Viral content and younger audiences

Best for: Short, viral videos, user-generated content, and reaching Gen Z.

TikTok is the platform of choice for businesses looking to create engaging, bite-sized content that resonates with younger audiences, particularly Gen Z. The platform’s algorithm prioritizes entertaining, trending, and creative content, making it easier for brands to go viral if their content hits the mark. 

Chipotle has thrived on TikTok, with 2.4M followers and 56.3M likes. Their viral #ChipotleLidFlip challenge drew over 100K imitators. The #GuacDance challenge generated 250K submissions and 430M video views in just six days, leading to 800K guac sales on National Guacamole Day. Chipotle continues to use TikTok to engage users and promote events like their Boorito Halloween campaign, which received over 4.2B views.

YouTube: Long-form content and educational material

Best for: Long-form video content, tutorials, product demonstrations, and educational series.

YouTube is a video-centric platform and the second-largest search engine after Google. It’s perfect for brands that want to share in-depth content like product reviews, how-tos, educational videos, and demonstrations. If your business benefits from visual explanations or storytelling, YouTube can be a highly effective channel to drive traffic and build trust.

GoPro excels at creating user-generated content on YouTube, showing people how its products work in action. The brand regularly posts exciting, high-quality videos made by both professionals and everyday users of its products. This strategy showcases the potential of GoPro’s cameras and encourages others to create and share their adventures.

Pinterest: Visual discovery and inspiration

Best for: Inspiration-driven purchases, DIY, fashion, home decor, and recipes.

Pinterest is a visual discovery platform ideal for businesses in industries like home decor, DIY projects, fashion, beauty, and food. Users come to Pinterest to find inspiration and often end up making purchasing decisions based on what they discover. Brands that rely on aesthetic appeal and creativity often find great success in driving traffic from Pinterest back to their websites.

Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, uses Pinterest to showcase its sellers’ unique products. By creating visually appealing pins that link back to product listings, Etsy drives traffic directly to its marketplace, capitalizing on Pinterest users’ intent to discover and buy unique items.

4. Determine the metrics and KPIs you want to measure

Effective social media marketing is built on performance metrics. In order to get the most out of your data, don’t focus on generic metrics. Instead, double down on metrics that align with your goals. If the goal is brand awareness, track the reach, engagement, and hashtag performance. If sales is the goal, track the clicks and conversions.

Here is a quick snapshot of the social media metrics that really matter depending on your goals:

a. Brand Awareness

• Reach: This refers to the number of unique users who saw your content in their feeds. 
• Engagement: The total number of interactions a post receives, i.e., likes, comments, and shares.
• Hashtag performance: Reflects your best-performing hashtags and the hashtags that are most associated with your brand. 
• Organic and paid likes: While this is a vanity metric, it can help you gauge how much people enjoy your content. Organic likes are from organic posts, while paid likes are from promoted posts. 
• Impressions: This is commonly mistaken for reach, but they are not the same. Impressions refer to the number of times a post is displayed to users. This means even if they scroll through your post, it is counted as an impression.
• Brand mentions: Refers to the number of times your brand is mentioned in posts or comments.

b. Sales/Leads

• Clicks: This metric tracks the amount of clicks your content receives. It is mostly used for ads and sponsored posts with an action you can follow.
• Conversation rate: Refers to the number of people who convert after seeing your post and either buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, download a lead magnet, etc.

c. Follower count

• Follower growth: As you might infer from the name, this metric measures the number of new followers you gain within a specific time.
• Follower growth rate: This refers to how fast you gain or lose followers over a period of time.

d. Customer care

• Reply time: It reflects how long you take to respond to a mention or a message. 
• Total response volume: This refers to the number of responses to customer inquiries over a specific period. 
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): This score measures customer satisfaction after every brand interaction.

5. Create engaging content

Content is the driving force of social media; without it, social media would be non-existent. That’s why you need to get it right. From the onset, create a content strategy that defines the types of content you will publish based on your goals, audience, and brand. 

Great content is based on the following pillars:

1. Goals: What are you trying to achieve with your content? If you want to increase sales, then product-first content is the way to go. If you are focused on brand awareness and follower growth, then creating educational and entertaining content is the way.
2. Brand voice: Every great brand has a voice. Having a unique voice will help you stand out on social media and create connections with your audience. The key is to be human and not robotic in your communication while using industry-appropriate language.
3. Originality and trendiness: There’s no consensus on whether brands should follow the trends or create original, unique content. However, both styles work, and the best approach would be to focus on what your audience wants. 
4. Consistency: In order to be recognizable, you need to have consistent themes across your social media platforms. This means your graphics and content should have the same feel and look on all platforms.

6. Create a content calendar

Once you define your content pillars, it’s time to plan your content. A content calendar will help you know what to post in advance, prepare for the same, and also keep you from repeating content. 

When creating your content calendar, consider the optimal times per platform for maximum engagement. Then, schedule your posts in advance to save time. When scheduling your posts, ensure that you are available to engage and interact with customers at those times. If possible, ensure someone is available to reply to comments and interact with your audience when you post. 

In case you have limited resources, consider investing in AI tools and automation so that you are able to interact with your customers even when you’re offline.

7. Conduct a competitive analysis

It is important to check out what competitors are doing in order to get a good sense of your industry. This can also help you see what they are doing well and what they are not doing well, which can lead to unexplored opportunities.

For example, if your competitors rely on one social media platform, you might want to take a different approach and focus on the platforms they neglect. This way, you will operate in an underserved environment with less competition. 

Note: The goal of competitive analysis is not to copy your competitor’s ideas. It’s to identify what’s working and adapt your campaigns to the conclusions you draw.

8. Evaluate and improve your strategy

The quickest way to grow your social media is to evolve your strategy constantly. Every time a campaign comes to an end, analyze how it performed and draw insights that will help inform your next campaign. 

Analyze all your content and create performance benchmarks to identify top-performing content. 

After every analysis, make small adjustments to your strategy instead of waiting for huge quarterly or yearly improvements. Constant evolution will help you stay on top of trends and improve strategically.

What’s Next?

Just start. 

Creating a social media strategy can seem complicated, but it isn’t. Take it step by step. If you have a team, make it a team task in order to complete it faster and get diverse inputs. Bottom line, don’t worry about step 2 if you haven’t completed step 1.

If you still don’t know where to start or want to take it a step further, check out our Social Media Strategy and Proving ROI course today, which explores this topic in depth.