Building Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2024

Fine-tune your social media marketing strategy for 2024

Social media is so much more competitive and complex than it used to be.

A new welll thought out strategy will help your brand reach its goals with a sense of purpose.

That’s why we will help you put together a comprehensive strategy to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

Whether you’re totally new to social or just want to double-check your priorities in 2024, this guide has you covered.

  1. Set goals that make sense for your business
  2. Take time to research your target audience
  3. Establish your most important metrics and KPIs
  4. Create (and curate) engaging social content
  5. Make your social presence as timely as possible
  6. Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how to keep improving

1. Set goals that make sense for your business

Let’s kick things off with a quick question:

“What do you want from social media, anyway"?

Social media strategy planning starts with your goals.

Perhaps you want to build a community or a more dedicated following. Maybe you want your social accounts to drive more revenue this year.

Either way, your goals will define your content strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.

Sample social media goals for 2024 and beyond

What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals .

Emphasis on “realistic,” by the way. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

We will help you:

  • Increase you brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness , avoid solely publishing promotional messages.
  • Generate leads and sales. Whether online or in-store, followers aren’t going to make social purchases by accident.  For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos?
  • Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
  • Boost community engagement. Explore ways to grab the attention of your current followers. 
  • Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. We can help you better determine your ROI from social media .

Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than muddling it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and stick with ’em.

2. Take time to research your target audience

Making assumptions is bad news for marketers.

And thanks to the sheer wealth of demographic data and  social media analytics tools  out there, you really don’t have to anymore.

Remember: different platforms attract different audiences

Take today’s  social media demographics , for example. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways as of 2024:

  • Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
  • The majority of Instagram and TikTok‘s users are millennials or Gen Z , signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
  • Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the  highest average order value  for social shoppers.
  • LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more complicated than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

Don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active.

Do your homework on your existing social media audience

Although the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.

That’s why many brands use a  social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.

With a well designed Dashboard you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.

Consider also that there’s plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics or even your best-selling products.

All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social selling.

3. Establish your most important metrics and KPIs

No matter what you’re selling, your social media strategy should be data-driven.

That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, brands are tasked with digging into data that aligns directly with their goals.

What metrics are we talking about, though? Check out the breakdown below:

  • Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content actually reaching users’ feeds?
  • Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourage people to buy.
  • Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
  • Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
  • Organic and paid likes: Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
  • Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.

An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into a context that circles back around to your original goals.

4. Create (and curate) engaging social content

No surprises here. Your social media marketing strategy hinges on your content.

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goal and brand identity. You probably feel confident in which networks to cover, too.

But what about your content strategy?

From filters to captions and beyond, many brands rely on the same content formats and creative touches time and again. These content themes can help you become more consistent and zero in on a content strategy that makes sense.

“Which types of content should be part of my 2024 social media marketing strategy?

5. Make your social presence as timely as possible

Timeliness is arguably more important than ever for marketers.

Not only are you expected to put out fresh content on a regular basis, but also always be “on” for your followers.

But you can’t always expect customers to operate on your clock. Timeliness is a tall order when you’re strapped for resources or are part of a small team.

As social algorithms go through continuous updates, organic content has an increasingly tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who do engage and lose out on sending more down your marketing funnel.

 

6. Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how to keep improving

By now you should have a big-picture understanding of your social media strategy.

However, it’s important that you’re able to adapt your strategy as you progress throughout the year.

Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s eye view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective. This means looking at your top-performing content and adjusting your campaigns when your content stalls .

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes.

So much of how to do social media marketing right starts by being diligent about your data. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next major strategy.

Reporting on data is also important for the sake of sharing valuable insights from social with your coworkers and colleagues.

Our Index data notes that there’s a growing expectation for marketers to report on results and ROI with their higher-ups. Doing so not only holds you accountable for your efforts but also highlights the role and the unique data points that your social strategy is able to produce.

Based on your data, you can better assess whether your KPIs make sense based on bigger company goals or whether they need to change. With instant access to easy-to-share data, pivoting and making changes can be done sooner in a timely manner.

And with that, we wrap up your social media strategy guide for 2024 and beyond!

Is your social media marketing strategy sorted out for 2024?

We can assist you in sorting out the moving pieces to a modern social presence.

That said, putting together yours doesn’t have to be a drag.

If you set actionable goals and address each of the steps above, you’ll already be way ahead of the curve when it comes to your social media marketing strategy.