Creating Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2024

There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding social media management, the most common one being – “social media is just about posting without planning”.

Truth is, social media makes for the most chaotic marketing ecosystem, where new trends gain traction and fade into the background at breakneck speed. Creating a strong presence in such an unpredictable landscape requires a lot of on-your-feet thinking backed by solid vision and strategy.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you require to create a promising social media marketing strategy for 2024.

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Before we get into a step-by-step breakdown of how you can create your social media strategy, let’s get some clarity on what all it actually entails.

Your social media strategy should encompass your goals, how you’re going to create posts and ways you’ll grow your audience across multiple platforms. Meaning, it will cover things like your content’s tone, design guidelines, posting frequency, engagement tactics, paid campaigns, measuring tactics, and more.

There’s a lot of forethought that needs to go into creating a comprehensive social media plan, so let’s take this step by step.

Create your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2024

1. Set your Goals 

You need to have a very clear understanding of what you want to achieve out of marketing your business on social media. Here are a few goals that marketers typically set for themselves before creating their social media plans:

• Brand awareness

One of the most common and important reasons why brands work hard towards creating their social media presence is to make people aware of their existence. In order to do this, you should create engaging content that effortlessly conveys your brand’s personality as well your product/service’s USP.

• Community engagement

Social media platforms are great if you want to engage with your audience and also build a community of loyal followers. The point here is to create content that will drive your audience to interact with your brand on social media.

• Driving traffic to your website

Driving website traffic is a pretty specific goal, but social media channels can prove to be very effective in redirecting traffic to your website. You can share blogs, or boost your social media posts to gain maximum clicks.

• Generating sales or increasing conversions

It’s 2024, so your audience is spending a lot of their time on social media. Dropping regular product updates on your social channels, or telling your audience about the discounts you’re offering can help drive sales.

2. Define your target audience

Creating the right buyer personas is essential for any marketing campaign’s success. So if you haven’t sketched out your buyer personas already, do it before launching your social media campaign.
Start by filling out basic details like your ideal buyer’s name, location, age, gender, occupation, etc. Then also go in-depth into details such as their interests, dislikes, hobbies, pain points, and the challenges they face regularly. Since you’re creating a strategy for social media, try to find out which social media platform your ideal buyer prefers or hangs out on.

Create 3-4 detailed personas, and you should be good to go!

3. Decide on your KPIs

Social media marketing is measurable and can be extremely ROI-driven, don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. If you choose the right metrics that are directly linked to your goals, you’ll have a clear perspective on the performance of your social media marketing efforts.

Here are a few key metrics you should look into:

• Reach: Number of unique visitors that saw your posts in their timeline
• Clicks: No. of clicks on your posts or links
• Engagement: The number of interactions on your posts, divided by the number of post impressions.
• Likes: The number of likes or comments your posts received.
• Sentiment: This reflects the overall sentiment of your customers when they engage with your brand or content. For example, were they happy, angry, offended, or excited after reading your posts?

4. Choose your Platforms Wisely 

There is a whole range of social media platforms that people actively use these days, and companies typically need to maintain a presence on 4-7 social media platforms simultaneously.

But, if you’re just starting out, it’s better to focus on just one or two platforms where your target audience mostly hangs out. For example, if you’re a B2B business, you can heavily focus on building a strong footprint on LinkedIn and post occasionally on other platforms.

5. Create Engaging Content

It’s difficult to encompass this into one step because more than just being a step in your social media strategy, your entire social media presence depends on the content you roll out through your channels. So here are a few tips that might help you:

• Create a content/design theme

If you go through an established brand’s social media page, you’ll see that their creatives and content copy follow a similar tone and style that is unique to their brand. This helps build consistency, and users can recognise a brand through its creatives.

Choose a colour scheme and content tone/voice for your brand, and make sure it is conveyed in most of your social media posts.

• Invest in Videos

Most markets believe that videos work wonders on social media and usually see high engagement from the audience. With the rise of TikTok and Insta reels, both short-form and long-form videos are being heavily consumed and liked by the social media audience.

• Make your content relatable

People go to social media primarily to connect and network with others, so keep that in mind while creating your social media posts. The best way to engage your audience is to create relatable and shareable posts that are unique to your brand’s personality. This increases the chances of your audience instantly interacting with your content.

6. Measure your Performance and Keep Improving

The social media landscape is pretty unpredictable, and things move fast. Chances are, by the time you find out about a social media trend, your audience will have already participated in it and moved on.

This is why you always need to be on your toes when it comes to analysing your performance on social media. This way, you can always stay on top of what’s working and what isn’t, and accordingly refine your social media strategy.

Top Social Media Marketing Trends 2024

1. Short Video Adoption

With Instagram announcing that it will favour video content, YouTube introducing YouTube shorts, and TikTok dominating social media content consumption, social media campaigns are largely going to be centred around short and easily consumable videos.

2. Social Commerce

In social commerce, the entire buyer journey happens on a social media platform. Customers discover a product, click-to-purchase, and also receive post-purchase support – all on one platform.
Purchasing directly from social media gives customers the convenience of a swift and seamless omnichannel experience, which is why every year this trend grows. In 2021, a Statista study revealed that 8 in 10 US buyers think that they’ll be selling their products on social media in the next 3 years.

3. Social Media for Customer Service

Brands are increasingly recognising that social media platforms are also their audience’s preferred customer service channels. Users very frequently reach out to brands on their social media handles for queries and grievances as they believe it is a very direct way of communicating with businesses, and brands are also bound to respond promptly in order to maintain their image online.
Also, consumers value speedy issue resolution over the quality of customer service, which is why an increasing number of customers are using social channels to raise complaints.

4. Brands will focus more on Social Listening

According to Hootsuite’s social media trends 2022 survey, organisations feel that social listening has increased its value over the past year. Tapping into social conversations will give you a very authentic insight into the overall sentiment surrounding your brand and the industry you operate in.
Social media can furnish you with extensive data insights that will really help you create viable and precise marketing and branding strategies. 

In Conclusion…

Charting out a well-researched and carefully thought out social media marketing strategy in 2024 can do wonders for your brand’s online presence. Just make sure you plan everything out in a very actionable and achievable manner.

Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.