What is Social Media Marketing? The Complete Guide

Social media marketing is the process of creating and publishing content on social media platforms to build connections with your target audience, promote your products or services, and turn consumers into loyal customers. 

The average person spends 143 minutes per day on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn. That’s an enormous window of opportunity for your business to capture and convert customers. But huge opportunities mean huge competition. Standing out and growing your presence requires a carefully executed plan of action.

I’ll provide a step-by-step framework that you can use to build a social media marketing campaign that drives results for your brand. I’ll cover everything from building a community and creating first-class content to analysing metrics to refine your strategy’s performance.

But first, let’s recap why social media marketing is so important by taking a look at the benefits.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

The pros of social media marketing are obvious to any business owner who has invested time in developing their own digital media strategy. 

Still, if you want to align your team and get key stakeholders on board with your campaign, you must be able to articulate the benefits clearly. Here are five reasons a social media marketing strategy is big news for your small business marketing strategy.

• Building brand awareness: Today, there are over 5 billion social media users worldwide. By creating engaging content, you can spread the word about your brand to this enormous global audience. 

• Enhanced lead generation: Social media marketing is the ideal way to drive traffic to your website. This directs potential customers to your bottom-of-the-funnel content, helping you generate leads.

• More trust with customers: 81% of people believe social media increases brand accountability. This translates into greater trust for brands that show their values and authenticity through social media. 

• Provides helpful data: The more structured your social media strategy, the easier it is to gain valuable insights into your customers. This allows you to measure success and refine your approach over time. 

• Boosted sales: More brand awareness, more qualified leads, a stronger reputation, and better customer service are all equal. One thing is that there are more opportunities to make new and repeat sales that will grow your bottom line over the long term. 

10 steps to develop a social media marketing strategy

Let’s get into the real reason you’re here. Here’s how to develop a social media digital marketing strategy from square one.

1. Identify your target audience and their preferences

Posting on social media without knowing what your target audience needs, wants, and values is like playing darts wearing a blindfold. You need a strong understanding of your ideal customers to hit the mark consistently. 

Consider the people you want to connect with. To whom are you trying to sell your products? Who truly needs the service you offer?

Once you know this information, use it to develop a comprehensive buyer persona. This will help you understand what, when, where, and how you will market your business. It should contain all relevant information about your ideal customer, such as:

• Age, gender, and geographic location.
• Job title and income
• Skills and hobbies. 
• How they like to communicate online.
• The social media channels they frequently use. 
• Their needs and wants.
• Pain points and potential objections. 

This step is essential because it underscores every other decision you make when creating your strategy. If you understand your audience, you’ll know how to build a social media strategy that connects with them. During this process, you should also consider which social media sites your audience frequents and what times they visit them. 
Expert tip: Don’t know who your target customers are? The best place to start is by looking at historical sales data to see which demographics are buying from your business. You can also hold interviews and focus groups to learn more about consumers’ needs and wants.

2. Set clear and measurable goals

The second pillar of your social media marketing strategy is your business objectives. Define some specific goals for your organic social media campaign. 

Define some specific goals for your organic social media campaign. What specific things do you want to achieve by posting on social media? Perhaps you want to increase brand awareness, generate more sales-qualified leads, or improve customer retention by building a positive, friendly community. 

Once you have a basic idea of your objective, refine it using the SMART Framework:

• Specific: Make the social media goal clear and precise.
• Measurable: Ensure your goal can be measured.
• Attainable: Keep things realistic. 
• Relevant: Make sure the goal is relevant to your broad objectives.
• Time-bound: Set a time limit to achieve this goal. 

For instance, if your social media goal is to foster customer loyalty, your goal might be:

“Improve customer retention rates by 10% over the next six months through community events, cross-selling, competitions, and excellent customer service.” 

This SMART field goal will help you align your team with your strategy and create actionable tactics to reach your broader business objectives.

3. Research your competitor’s social media strategies 

One of the easiest ways to develop your social media strategy is to assess what the competition is doing. 

A competitive analysis can help you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. If they’re finding success with a certain channel or content style, you can use it as a building block to develop and refine your own strategy. Likewise, if they’re gaining little traction on a particular site, perhaps this isn’t the ideal channel for your own business. 

Beyond examining how your competitors target their customers, it’s also worth exploring how they respond. Are people genuinely engaging? Are they happy or frustrated? Look for strengths and weaknesses and use this to optimise your own social media approach.

4. Choose the right social media marketing channels

You can use over a dozen channels to market your brand. But it’s not wise to spread your marketing resources too thinly. Instead, use what you know about your audience to select 3-5 channels that will drive the best results. Here are some of the options available:

• Facebook
• X (Twitter)
• TikTok
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Take your buyer persona and use that to decide on the best options for your business. Gen Z loves TikTok, for instance. Millennials are all about Instagram. YouTube is great for videos. Facebook is better for text posts, pictures, and ads. 

You don’t have to settle for just one approach. It’s helpful to build your presence on multiple platforms simultaneously. But if you’re trying to connect with teenagers on LinkedIn or the over-65 demographic with influencer marketing, you might be barking up the wrong tree.

5. Define your brand voice

If you haven’t already, you need to decide on your brand voice. How do you want your audience to perceive your business? 

Are you keeping things light-hearted? Are you looking to demonstrate the luxuriousness of your products? Or do you simply want to share a laugh with your community?

When you post on social media consistently, your audience will pick up on your brand personality. It helps to be consistent. Define your values, tone of voice, and core messaging. Doing so ensures your audience knows what to expect when you upload content, which will ultimately help build trust.

6. Optimise your social media profiles

Next, it’s time to create your social media profiles and optimise them using your brand voice. Here are some top tips:

• Profile pictures count: Make sure your business profile picture is easily recognisable as your brand’s. A logo is an obvious choice. Scale it to ensure it’s easy to see as thumbnail size.
• Choose strong visual imagery: In addition to your profile picture, you should liven up your profile with a strong cover photo. You can incorporate your brand colours to build a stronger identity that is memorable for your customers. 
• Include a strong CTA: Create a single sentence CTA that sums up why customers should choose your brand. Make it impactful, and remember to keep your brand voice in mind.

Add links: Remember to add links to your main website. If your customers like your content on social media, they need to be able to find out more.

7. Create a content calendar

It’s essential to be consistent with your social media marketing strategy. You need to know when you intend to post and stick with a schedule. This shows professionalism and reliability. 

To get started, you need to create a content calendar. This calendar details the dates and times you’ll publish to each channel and the types of content you’ll post, such as images, polls, or product promos. 

Use your ideal buyer persona as a starting point. When does your audience use their preferred social media channels? For instance, if you’re aiming your posts at busy professionals, you’ll need to upload them outside of working hours. 

Top Tip: If your content team’s scheduling doesn’t line up with the optimal posting hours of your audience, consider using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the process when your team is offline. 

How often should I post? Generally, you should aim to post high-quality content a few times a week. Nothing turns customers away faster than low-quality spam cluttering their feeds. Create clear and engaging content that offers value to your audience. 
Most marketers aim to post 3-5 times a week per social account. That said, you should always adapt this based on your own goals and audience. And remember: quality beats quantity.

8. Develop original, high-quality content

You know your audience and your goals. You’ve defined your chosen marketing channels and have clear brand messaging you want to convey. Now, it’s time to put all the pieces together with first-rate content creation.

Your social media content needs to make you stand out. With dozens of ads and posts on their feed, why should a consumer stop scrolling when they see yours? 

As always, the best place to start is with your audience. What are they looking for? If you create posts that directly connect with them and offer solutions to their problems, they’ll likely want to find out more. 

What types of content should I post? You can also use this approach to decide on the types of content you want to publish. Here are some of the options available to you. 

• Brand story: Offer information about your brand’s history and values.
• Product Spotlight: Give one of your products sometime in the sun. 
• Customer shoutout: Showcase a happy customer’s experience with your product.
• Behind-the-scenes: Show what a normal day looks like at your brand. 
• Videos: Create short-form videos that showcase your brand’s personality.
• New arrivals: Show upcoming products or services to build anticipation.
• Influencers: Partner with an influencer to promote your products.
• Community: Highlight events in the local community.
• Exclusive offers: Provide exclusive offers to guide people down your sales funnel.
• Competitions: Run periodic competitions to encourage likes and shares. 
• Polls: Create polls to engage with your audience and start conversations directly.
• Live video: Live streaming can show customers you’re authentic and personable.

It’s best to prioritise a broad range of content. Be creative, and remember to let your brand voice shine through. Social media is the best place to communicate your personality. 

If you’re struggling for inspiration, head back to your competitors and see how they approach their content production. You can also try capitalising on recent trends. Beware, though, the internet moves fast. Last week’s hot topic is this week’s “Hello, fellow kids.” You need to catch it early so it doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard.

9. Start posting and measure the results

Lastly, all that’s left to do is start posting your content. You should then measure your results to see how well you’re hitting your objectives.

There’s no shortage of social media metrics that you can use to measure the success of your posts, but here are some of our favourites to assess social media engagement. 

• Likes: A like is a good indicator that someone appreciates your content. More likes means a greater number of people felt that your post was valuable. 

• Followers: How many new followers are you gaining? This is the number of people who have decided they want to see more of your content on their feeds.

• Reach: The number of people who see your content. If your content is being viewed by a larger number of people than you have followers, this is a good sign your social media posts are reaching a wider audience.

• Shares: This is a big one. Are you creating content that makes people want to share it with others? 

The good news? You don’t need any fancy tools to measure these metrics. For instance, X Analytics, Instagram Insights, Linkedin Analytics, and Facebook Analytics will let you track all of these things in-app. 

Once you’ve gotten this information for specific posts, you can use it to refine your strategy with data-driven insights. Notice that short-form videos are performing better than any other content type. Now you know what posts to target going into the next quarter.

Which social media marketing platform should I use?

Let’s deep dive into the different social media platforms to help you decide which is the right fit for your business.

Facebook

• Active Users: 3.065 billion
• Business model: B2C with some B2B aspects
• Ideal audience: Millennials
• Useful for: Advertising and community building

Facebook is still the most popular social media platform worldwide. This enormous user base means you have the potential to reach a broad and varied B2C audience, especially men and women in the 25-34 age bracket. Here are some enlightening statistics to consider, as per Hootsuite. 

• Millennials make up almost half of Facebook’s audience.
• Only 19% of teens use Facebook daily. 
• Image posts have the highest engagement on the platform. 
• More than half of users take action after seeing a brand’s story.
• 50% of time spent on Facebook is spent on video. 
• Brands post an average of 5 times a week on Facebook.
• Facebook’s ad reach is 1.98 billion.

The best way to capture your audience on Facebook is a combination of images and videos — Facebook Live is an excellent place to start. You should also consider Facebook Ads, which can drive website traffic starting at just a few dollars a day.

Instagram

• Active Users: 2.4 billion
• Business model:  B2C with some B2B elements
• Ideal audience: Gen Z and Millennials
• Useful for: Images and videos that build brand awareness. 

Instagram is the place to be for brands to share relatable images and video content. It’s best suited to younger audiences, with the 18-34 bracket making up over 60% of users worldwide. Sprout Social offers some interesting statistics:

• Instagram is the biggest platform for influencer marketing. 
• Instagram Reels have the highest reach rate on the platform. 
• 70% of shoppers use Instagram to find buying opportunities. 
• Short narrative-type Stories are the most popular format. 
• Brands see an average conversion rate of 1%
• In-feed ads make up the majority of the platform’s revenue. 

Short-form videos are the king of Instagram marketing. Post relatable content and quick-fire videos to engage the younger demographic, and don’t forget to consider influencer marketing. 39% of consumers are more likely to buy a product that is recommended by an influencer.

X (Twitter)

• Active Users: 600 million
• Business model: B2C and B2B
• Ideal audience: Millennials
• Useful for: Customer service and community management. 

Twitter doesn’t have a global audience like Facebook, nor does it excel at short-form videos like Instagram. But it does do one thing better than almost every social media site: Direct customer communication. 

Nearly 80% of customer service requests on social media occur via Twitter. The platform is the ideal way to connect with your audience and build loyal fanbases. Here are some illuminating stats via Hootsuite.

• 48% of users rely on Twitter to get the latest news
• 79% of Twitter users follow brands
• Twitter users are more likely to like brands that are transparent and inclusive
• Tweets with hashtags get 100% more engagement
• Tweets with video get 10x more engagement

LinkedIn

• Active Users: 770 million
• Business model: B2B and B2C
• Ideal audience: Gen X, Millennials, and the upper limit of Gen Z
• Useful for: Generating high-quality leads and forming B2B partnerships. 

LinkedIn is a powerhouse for B2B networking. If you want to spread the word about your business to CEOs, decision-makers, and working professionals, there’s no better network to do so. Here are some interesting statistics via The Social Shepherd.

• LinkedIn Ads reach over 14% of the global population. 
• Active LinkedIn pages receive five times the page views.
• Content with images sees double engagement. 
• Regular weekly content sees twice the engagement. 

LinkedIn is ideal for finding high-intent clients that are actively looking for your business’s service. As such, it’s estimated LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating high-quality leads than Facebook and Twitter.

TikTok

• Active Users: 1.04 billion
• Business model: B2C and B2B
• Ideal audience: Gen Z
• Useful for: Short-form video content to capture a younger demographic. 

TikTok has soared in popularity in recent years due to its intelligent algorithm, which matches users with content based on their watching habits. This means the right brands can quickly build brand awareness — all it takes is one viral video. Here are some telling statistics from Sprout Social. 

• Two-thirds of 18-19 year olds use TikTok.
• With a 2.65% engagement rate, TikTok is officially the most engaging of all platforms. 
• 49% of Gen Z users make purchases on TikTok.
• 61% of social media marketers use TikTok for influencer marketing. 

TikTok content revolves exclusively around short-form videos. Brands can also sell their products directly on the TikTok shop, reducing friction in the sales funnel. As with Instagram, influencer marketing is absolute gold dust on TikTok. It’s one of the easiest ways to build trust and loyalty for your brand.

YouTube

• Active Users: 2.5 billion
• Business model: B2C and B2B
• Ideal audience: Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X.
• Useful for: Long-form video content.

YouTube is still one of the most visited sites in the world. Despite the rise of short-form video content on platforms like TikTok, it’s still a powerful tool. Long-form videos, like explainers and behind-the-scenes footage, are the best options. The opportunity to dive deep into specific topics makes the platform a powerful way to build loyal communities.

Notice a common theme with Vegemite’s Instagram page? The brand repeatedly uses its core colours (yellow and red), creating a stronger visual image that helps customers remember the brand. It’s always worth optimising your profile page to reflect what makes your business unique.

Social media marketing example from India

Yogabar

Image source: Instagram

Indian healthy snack brand Yogabar has mastered the art of influencer marketing. The brand regularly partners with micro fitness influencers to promote its products and spread the word about health and wellbeing. 

There are two things to learn from Yogabar. First, aligning your brand with a particular mission or cause can open the door to a wider audience. In this case, it’s Yogabar’s commitment to promoting healthy eating. And second, you don’t have to break the bank to make an impact with influencer marketing. Micro-influencers can still drive traffic to your website and help establish loyal communities.

How Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help?

Building a social media marketing strategy from the ground up takes time. Every business would generate hundreds of leads if it were as easy as creating a few posts and watching as customers poured down your sales funnel. But it takes effort, and you need the right data to optimise and refine your advertising campaign over the long term.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you turn interested consumers into loyal customers. Our software centralises your siloed marketing and sales data in one place, allowing you to make better, data-driven decisions to optimise your strategies. 

Here’s how our solution can complement your social media marketing strategy:

• Tailored customer journeys: Build unique customer journeys for every social media channel. Design custom sales funnels that guide customers to the point of sale and beyond.

• Audience Builder: Segment your target demographics and create distinct sales pipelines for each across every social media platform. 

• Content calendars: Create and manage your social media content in one place with our advanced content features. 

• Analytics: Track the performance of every single post. Get AI-driven recommendations to improve. Discover new insights through our AI-driven predictive analytics. 

Want to learn how the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help your social media marketing campaign hit the mark? Explore our Marketing AI tools here or sign up to watch the free demo.