There was a time when sharing entertaining content was an effective social strategy. That time is long gone.
Today, only businesses that treat social media platforms as an important part of their marketing strategy build stronger brands, deepen customer loyalty, and create better returns.
A report from Sprout Social shows that 68% of consumers follow brands on social channels to stay informed, and nearly 78% are more willing to buy from a brand after a positive online interaction.
These social platforms now shape customer experiences, influence buying decisions, drive revenue, and create partnerships that once took years to nurture.
However, getting real results starts with understanding how to do social media marketing right and how smart marketing strategies using social media drive long-term success.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and other social networks to connect with audiences, grow brand awareness, and drive revenue.
Customers aren’t just looking for company updates; they are searching for meaningful content and reasons to trust brands online.
Every social media post, every comment, and every shared article contributes to how people see and experience your brand on these channels.
With over 5.24 billion people using social platforms globally and spending an average of 2.5 hours per day on these networks, the opportunity is massive for brands willing to invest in a strong social media marketing strategy.
But understanding how to use these online networks is only the beginning. Building real connections means listening, not just talking.
You can use social listening dashboards like Brand24 to collect valuable insights into your audience preferences. You can also track business trends, run tag-based reports to spot emerging topics, and create more relatable content.
Overall, social media success comes from aligning marketing strategies using social media with real customer needs, not just chasing attention.
Why Have a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Social media marketing creates endless opportunities to connect with customers, but without a clear social strategy, even the best content fails to deliver results.
So, what is a social media strategy?
A social media marketing strategy shapes the content you post, the platforms you use, your target audience, and how you align with business priorities and team resources.
Here’s why building your strategy first changes everything.
1. To Build Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness is a top priority for most social media managers. In fact, research shows that 70% of marketers say it is one of their top business priorities.
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And while creating fresh content across social channels helps put your brand in front of new audiences every day, visibility alone isn’t enough.
True brand awareness means becoming the first name that comes to mind when someone thinks about your category, whether they’re browsing e-commerce products or looking for trusted recommendations within their niche community.
An effective social media marketing strategy does more than just build a presence.
It defines your distinct brand voice, outlines how you share company updates, and ensures your social media efforts support your overarching company goals.
A strong social strategy connects daily activity to a larger strategic objective, whether that is improving firm performance, achieving sustainable growth, or building a thriving brand community.
2. To Promote Brand Trust
With 81% of consumers saying they need to trust a brand before buying, brand trust plays a significant role in purchase decisions.
Building trust starts by maintaining a consistent brand voice across all your social networks. People connect with brands that feel familiar and genuine, not brands that change tone from platform to platform.
Focus on sharing more than just polished sales posts. Mix in curated content that educates or entertains, and inspirational content that taps into emotions your audience cares about.
People trust people. Sharing user-generated content, like customer stories, testimonials, and real experiences, shows authenticity and strengthens community loyalty.
Adding influencer content can also reinforce your brand’s credibility, especially if you are a regional business looking to build stronger local connections.
3. To Engage and Build Relationships
Social media audiences expect more than just polished announcements. They want real, personable content from brands they trust and feel connected to.
A strong social strategy lays the foundation for this by defining how you engage with your audience and how you invite them to share their experiences and user-generated content.
Successful brands, especially in food & drink PR campaigns, excel at this.
Companies like Guinness, Coca-Cola, and Cadbury have built loyal communities by offering various content. This ranges from playful social media challenges to customer shoutouts, relatable storytelling, and campaigns inspired directly by product requests.
Their social teams focus on polished marketing and creating original content that sparks real participation.
Surreal is an excellent example of a brand that uses humor to build community loyalty.
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When you balance your marketing campaigns and company updates with authentic input from your audience, your social media communications shift from promotion to authentic relationship-building.
4. To Offer Better Customer Service
Did you know that 64% of consumers prefer to message a business on social media channels rather than call or email?
Customers expect fast, helpful responses from brands, and many now turn to a company’s social media customer service for support before trying traditional customer service options.
Here’s such an example from X:
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If you are not set up to manage those conversations strategically, you risk damaging your brand’s reputation on a major network where others are watching.
A strong social media strategy helps your customer care teams handle service issues more effectively by setting clear processes for monitoring, responding, and resolving inquiries in real time.
It also ensures you have prepared resources like FAQs, direct links, and templates ready to solve common problems quickly.
Paying close attention to customer reports shows your audience that you are listening, and this strengthens loyalty over time.
5. To Reach a Wider Audience
Every social media channel attracts different audiences, each with their own behaviors and expectations.
Your ideal customers aren’t all gathered in one place, and even when they are, they expect compelling content that fits the platform.
A strong strategy maps where your audiences spend their time and helps you manage your social channel without stretching your team too thin.
Choosing the best social media management tool can make a big difference. You can judge the best fit by looking at ease of use, the strength of its advertising features, and the advanced targeting features it provides.
It’s not very practical to handle multiple platforms manually, especially as your social media campaigns scale. That’s where a tool like can help. It automates your posting schedule, keeps your messaging consistent, and frees up your team.
6. To Collect Data for Better Targeting
Every interaction online leaves a trail of actionable insights that can help teams better understand shifting customer interests.
You can easily track what people like and what drives them to take action, and adjust your communication objectives accordingly.
A strong strategy defines what social reports and platform analytics to monitor. Social media analytics helps you spot hidden patterns, track evolving audience behaviors, and measure how well your campaigns perform against your goals.
You can also get more specific with content decisions like whether to lean into multi-format content or to do a mix of videos and stories for better engagement.
Over time, this feedback builds a deeper understanding of your audience preferences and helps inform your future campaigns.
7. To Spawn Other Collaborations
Visibility on social media platforms attracts both customers and potential business partners. A strong social strategy positions your brand in a way that makes collaboration natural.
When your brand consistently delivers value and shares relatable content, it becomes much easier for other brands and content creators to see the benefit of working with you.
One standout example is Pepsi’s “Better With Pepsi” marketing campaign. Instead of competing directly with fast-food giants like McDonald’s and Burger King, Pepsi used influencer marketing and playful brand positioning on social channels to launch a collaboration.
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They commissioned a study showing Pepsi paired better with popular burgers. They then rolled out witty, multi-format content, mixing visuals, social videos, and challenges that encouraged engagement from customers and the brands themselves.
The result? Huge social buzz, millions of organic impressions, and earned media coverage that stretched far beyond their own channels.
It worked because the campaign tapped into existing audiences and strengthened customer loyalty by making customers feel part of something bigger than just a product ad.
8. To Drive Traffic and Conversions
Social media accounts for 16% of all web traffic, making it the third-largest source of website traffic after organic search and direct visits. With the right strategy, social commerce can become a steady source of qualified leads to your website, landing pages, and even direct sales channels.
A strong social media marketing strategy defines exactly how you guide people from casual engagement to meaningful action. It identifies which offers to promote, how to structure your calls-to-action, and how to match the content to the audience’s readiness to act.
For example, if you are launching a new product, you can create a series of teaser social media posts leading up to the launch, followed by a limited-time offer post with a direct link to buy.
If you are promoting a webinar, you can post educational snippets that build interest and then use swipe-up stories, pinned posts, and countdown timers to drive registrations.
Instead of posting random promotions, you map the customer journey from awareness to interest to action and craft posts that move people naturally through that path.
How to Create an Effective Social Media Strategy
A strong social media presence is the result of clear planning, intentional actions, and ongoing adjustments based on what works.
Here’s how to build a strategy that keeps your social media efforts focused, efficient, and effective.
1. Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Every successful strategy starts with knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve. General goals like “grow our Instagram” or “get more followers” are too vague to drive real action.
Set measurable goals that define the outcome you want, the expected timeline, and the social media metrics you will use to measure progress.
It’s also important to tie your goals back to your broader business objectives, whether that’s building awareness, driving engagement, generating leads, or reinforcing brand positioning.
For example, instead of setting a vague goal like “grow our Instagram,” set a clear goal like increase Instagram followers by 20% over the next 90 days by posting five Reels per week and responding to every comment within 24 hours.
This kind of clarity shapes what content you create, how you allocate resources, and what social media success looks like.
Some great KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) include engagement rates, click-through rates, lead generation numbers, or actual conversions tied to social media marketing campaigns.
2. Research Target Audience and Pair with Suitable Platforms
Knowing your audience is one thing. Understanding where they spend time and how they behave online is what makes targeting effective.
A strong social marketing strategy starts by digging deeper than basic demographics.
You need to research your target audience preferences, their preferred social platforms, and what motivates them to engage.
If you run a B2B company and you’re targeting key stakeholders, LinkedIn should be a top priority. It aligns closely with professional networking and decision-making for your B2B business.
If you’re reaching Gen Z consumers, focusing on a short-form video app like TikTok and Instagram Reels will often outperform traditional formats.
Effective business research helps you uncover these patterns early to understand your audience’s needs better. It sets you up to deliver more impactful content that actually moves them to act.
3. Create Great Content + Engage
Effective marketing strategies using social media rely on a steady mix of valuable content, clear brand storytelling, and real interaction.
For example, you could build a monthly content calendar that mixes educational tips, behind-the-scenes moments, and user-generated content.
Mapping your content to audience personas ensures every post speaks directly to what your customers care about most. For example, you can add some aspirational content to inspire your audience’s future goals and boost their emotional connection to your brand.
Also, work with content creators and jump on social media trends to amplify your brand reach.
But no matter how good your planning is, you’ll eventually hit a point where new ideas slow down. Here, you can come up with cyclical content.
Cyclical content includes evergreen content ideas and posts you can refresh and reuse around key seasons or themes. You can use an AI rewording tool to update older content and maintain consistency without always starting from scratch.
Here’s one example of a brand starting a trend to engage customers.
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Brands that stay active in posting and interacting build loyalty faster than those who only broadcast and disappear.
4. Analyze Results and Make Improvements
No strategy stays perfect forever.
A strong social strategy builds in regular reports to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.
Regular reports also make it easier to share clear feedback to stakeholders on how social media efforts impact business goals. They make sure that your social media activities stay tied to your overall social and business goals.
If you’re using a social media management tool, tracking content performance is so much easier. Tools like provide a social media marketing dashboard where you can pull custom reports without getting buried in spreadsheets.
If you’re working with influencers, make sure you get an influencer marketing report to see if they’re actually driving traffic and conversions, not just likes.
The more you stay on top of what’s really happening, the easier it gets to plan smarter for your annual campaigns. You can sharpen every new post and interaction, and spend your time (and budget) on what’s actually driving real social media success.
Final Thoughts on the Strategic Role of Social Media
Social media is a strategic asset that can drive real business growth if you use it with purpose.
But remember, real engagement requires responding to customer feedback in real time. That’s why you need a social customer care team, not just a content management team, to keep your brand conversations active and meaningful.
Stay alert for early signs of content stalls, when engagement plateaus, so that you can refresh your approach before momentum drops.
Also, stay consistent, keep learning, and apply the smart social media tips covered here.
