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Social Marketing: How to Use Social Media for Business Growth
Optimize social media for better customer journeys and business results
Social media is consistently a top CMO channel investment. But marketing often struggles to tap its full potential.
The key to improving social marketing performance and impact lies in understanding your current level of social marketing maturity and closing capability gaps.
Download our definitive guide to learn how to:
Assess your social marketing maturity
Build a social marketing improvement plan aligned with KPIs
Audit social content to optimize content strategy with the right content mix
Use social media marketing to drive better business outcomes
Fast-changing capabilities and customer behaviors challenge CMOs to create a social marketing strategy that stays agile, robust and relevant to buyers while maximizing ROI. Focus on these key areas.
- Fine-Tune Content
- Focus Channel Investments
- Audit and Assess
- Maximize ROI
- Try Our Digital IQ Index
Keep your social media marketing content agile, robust and relevant
Marketers believe social media is one of the most effective platforms across the customer journey — for brand awareness, demand generation, sales conversions, and customer loyalty and advocacy. But fueling a multitude of social media channels with impactful content is a constant challenge — and algorithm changes in the most popular platforms have led to decreased ROI and high costs to reach narrow target audiences.
As your brand expands across social platforms, the pressure is high to produce differentiated content that appeals to both audience needs and platform algorithms. The key to a successful social marketing content pipeline is to plan smarter to ensure the right content, on the right channel, in the right format and at the right time.
To get the most from your social investments:
Evaluate existing high-performing content to inform the content pipeline. Measure the effectiveness of your social marketing through dedicated social analytics, marketing management tools and data provided directly from social networks. Score and analyze each piece of content to determine which assets to keep, refine or retire — and then see if there is any correlation between quality, brand integrity and performance. Be sure to differentiate between organic and paid social content. Then focus on the content that is most impactful with customers and follow the same templates and structure for future content development.
Develop new content with an agile and efficient approach. Based on your social strategy and objectives, the type of content your organization focuses on in social media will vary. Armed with your social content audit and performance insights, streamline and speed up your social content creation efforts by ensuring you:
Know where your brand stands on relevant issues
Develop guardrails to guide your new content creation
Synchronize social content development and distribution tactics across channels
Identify consumer expectations of your brand on social media
Gear content to younger generations’ preferences
Supplement your content pipeline with curated and cultivated user-generated content. In both B2C and B2B, social marketers can benefit from two distinct approaches to capitalize on the positive consumer impact of user-generated content (UGC):
UGC curation involves identifying relevant content that’s already out on social networks, including content created by employees.
UGC cultivation requires investment in continuous or time-bound campaigns where a brand actively encourages the creation of UGC.
Before venturing into UGC, consider how this content can help support your social strategy. Then evaluate the people and technology resources needed to properly execute your plan. It’s one thing to find or encourage the creation of social content. It’s another to manage the content by gaining the appropriate approvals, tagging it to the proper categories for use in your social and multichannel campaign efforts, and publishing the content on your channels.
Maximize social marketing engagement by investing in the right channels and content
While daily use is up across social media marketing platforms, monthly rates of consumer interactions with brands are down.
Consumers who do continue to engage with brands on social media are worth pursuing: 53% of social media users fall into this category. Social media users who meet these criteria (i.e., do any of the following activities) are in your open-to-brands sweet spot:
They follow brands on social media.
They like and/or comment on content from brands.
They share branded content to their own feeds.
They are more likely than non-brand-engaged social media users to use social media to research new products or services they are thinking of purchasing.
To draw brand-engaged consumers to your content on social channels, take three factors into consideration:
The platforms on which consumers are most open to branded content
The nature of the content they’re most likely to engage with
Their favorite platforms
Less than a third of any platform’s overall user base reports that all three of these criteria apply to that platform. But platforms that overlap in two of the three criteria — i.e., openness to brand content and favorite platforms — have a high likelihood of mass-market social media engagement.
Identifying where consumers are likely to actually see and engage with branded content is a key piece of a successful paid social strategy. But the tone and nature of the content also contribute to the likelihood of engagement with that content.
Once you’ve increased the odds that the viewers of your branded content are on a platform where they (1) enjoy spending their time, and (2) are more open to branded content, you can focus on perfecting the content by keeping the following points in mind:
Open and engaged social media users increasingly prefer branded content — even ads — to not look like advertising.
Younger consumers have an even more pronounced preference in 2022 for ads that don’t look like ads.
Funny or inspiring/uplifting content continues to hold strong at the 1 and 2 ranked spots for types of branded content on social media overall.
Ensure your social media strategy meets customer needs and business objectives
A mature social media marketing strategy is the key to increased audience engagement and market share.
To be sure that your social media marketing strategy addresses audience needs and preferences across the customer journey, focus on first determining and then advancing maturity levels in these five dimensions:
Business impact: How social media contributes to achieving overall business objectives
Organization and roles: How the company and marketing teams are set up to support social media marketing
Strategy: How social media marketing is set up to meet audience expectations and adapt to new social media platforms and content types
Content: How social content is structured, delivered and prioritized to navigate audience journeys, and how it complements other owned channels such as advertising, website and email
Data and technology: How analytics and tools are used to support social media strategy execution and are tied into the larger marketing and communications measurement and listening infrastructure
Before determining how to set up or optimize your social media presence, take the following actions:
Familiarize yourself with the five parameters above.
Create a cross-functional team to oversee and execute the assessment process. Include teams such as communications, brand, product, legal, and compliance that are involved in content creation or management.
Develop a plan to increase maturity in each dimension by identifying the actions needed to advance (including relevant KPIs and checking performance against business objectives).
Audit social content frequently and engage in continuous social listening to inform and optimize content strategy.
Clearly articulate the business impact and marketing objectives that social media marketing maturity will help achieve in the near and long term.
Ensure internal stakeholders are committed to investing the time and money to align social media marketing strategies to not only key business objectives but also audience needs and preferences.
Refine your social media marketing strategy to support business goals
Social advertising remains a top CMO investment priority. To create a social marketing strategy aligned with your organization’s goals, begin by defining business objectives, marketing goals, and measurement.
Define business objectives
Many digital marketing leaders launch social media marketing programs with nonspecific goals and objectives in mind. Defining the business objectives for having a presence on social media helps you be strategic with your resources and efforts to maximize potential.
For example, if you’re trying to grow the number of new checking accounts but haven’t defined that as your objective, your content calendar may end up with many posts that don’t support that action directly. Or, if you’re trying to reach Gen Z but you didn’t define this in the strategy or you still use platforms such as Facebook (favored by older demographics), you aren’t accounting for Gen Z preferences.
Start with a list of overall business goals and organizational objectives and then identify which of those goals could be affected by your social media marketing efforts.
Define marketing goals that will support business objectives
Once you have a solid list of overall business or organizational goals and objectives, identify the social media marketing tactics and social campaigns you plan to use to achieve those goals.
It’s easier to demonstrate the value of social media programs when there is a direct link to how these initiatives are contributing to the organization’s overall growth and success. This link is critical for justifying social media marketing investments and getting ongoing support and resources from stakeholders.
For example, using our earlier example, while a vanity metric such as the number of followers may help with brand perception, it may not directly tie back to a business objective, such as growing new checking accounts. Instead of focusing on follower numbers, driving website traffic to a landing page highlighting the benefits of a checking account would be much more valuable.
Connecting social media program activities to company goals ensures social media initiatives contribute to the organization’s overall growth and success.
Define how you plan to measure success
Forty percent of marketing leaders report that one of their pressing problems in 2024 will be their inability to measure their impact on business outcomes. A key reason for this is that multiple marketing activities can occur across social marketing platforms, each with distinct goals and KPIs.
One way to easily identify and measure social advertising’s impact on business objectives is by designing and implementing a structured plan that maps your brand’s key marketing goals and measurement metrics to each phase of the customer journey.
Measure your brand performance
The Gartner Digital IQ Index is a proprietary research tool that lets you benchmark your brand’s digital performance.
This impartial, outside-in benchmarking solution offers concrete marketing performance insights and a clear read of the industry landscape to help you:
Assess your individual brand performance and improve digital maturity
Compare your brand’s performance and digital footprint against key competitors and leading brands
Understand the top trends impacting your industry to inform your key actions and decisions
We rank brands by industry or digital channel, based on evaluation across hundreds of distinct data points, to give you a clear framework for prioritizing your digital efforts.
Our CMO and marketing leader clients use the Digital IQ Index to:
Measure digital reach, growth and effectiveness in context
Identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to optimize
Prioritize investments
Maintain brand relevance across channels
Get specific, actionable recommendations on how to boost brand performance
Learn more about the Digital IQ Index and request a demo here.
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FAQ on social marketing
What is social marketing and why is it important?
Social marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with audiences to build the company’s brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. This includes paid, earned and owned media efforts and involves listening to and engaging customers, publishing content and cultivating brand advocates through social media channels.
Social marketing is important because it guides the customer journey and can help improve bottom-line business value for your brand.
What are the benefits of social media marketing?
The benefits of social media marketing include increased awareness, consideration, conversion and advocacy.
How do you create a social media strategy that works?
A viable social media marketing strategy includes the following steps:
Establish clear, realistic goals and objectives.
Research your audience, their online behavior and the social media platforms they use.
Choose your platforms and set up profiles.
Create a content calendar to help you with consistent flow and a way to track your progress.
Monitor your activity and results.