A guide to mastering social media marketing strategies

Social media has often been viewed as a retailer’s marketing channel, but with customers demanding more personalization than ever from D2C brands, social media has become a digital storefront, a customer service desk, and a community hub rolled into one platform. As platforms evolve and consumer behaviors shift, staying ahead requires more than just posting regularly or running the occasional ad campaign.

That’s why robust segmentation, audience knowledge, and personalized customer experiences are more important than ever. This post will dive into key elements of social media strategy that drive results. Whether those purchases happen in-app or on your website, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help you build your audience knowledge, design campaigns, and measure your efficacy.

Understand your audience inside out

You wouldn’t launch a product without understanding your target market, right? The same goes for your social media strategy. To start, leverage social listening tools within your MarTech stack to monitor conversations about your brand and industry. What are people saying? What problems are they trying to solve? Analyze your competitors’ social presence to understand where they are winning — and losing — in the market. 

Remember: different platforms attract different audiences. The age, gender, estimated purchasing power, and market segment of your target audience will often determine where on social media is best to reach them. 

Use platform-specific metrics to understand where to find your audience and how they behave. You may discover your Facebook followers crave detailed product information, but your TikTok followers love behind-the-scenes product videos.

This research, combined with accurate zero-, first-, and third-party customer data and your CDP, will help you create Customer 360s that go beyond demographics. They help gather general insights into your users’ online behavior, preferred social networks, and additional context on their interests and preferences. In aggregate, you can quickly understand whether short video content on TikTok or a strong visual brand aesthetic for Instagram will attract your customers and plan work accordingly. 

Once this information is in place, you can create segments accordingly and personalize messaging to each segment. Rather than guess which segments will be interested in your products demographically, you can leverage psychographic information to demonstrate precisely how well you know your customers and serve them only what they are interested in. 

Conversely, you may already know where your customers spend their time online but are curious about how to message across those channels to create an omnichannel experience. A CDP can help you tailor your messaging for each platform, and the specific audience you know interacts with your brand on that platform.

Create compelling content for social media marketing

Whether you have a strong following on one platform or customers are split across platforms, you can use a CDP to help determine how to prioritize your channels and when and whether to repurpose content and tailor your approach to each platform.

If you market to Gen Z audiences and have aligned your brand strongly with modern aesthetics, it makes sense to grow an audience on TikTok, where trends most frequently arise, and you can capitalize on them quickly. 

Once you’ve created videos, you can also identify secondary markets that fit your persona’s behavior: an effective strategy many retailers have chosen is repurposing TikTok videos to Instagram Reels to reach younger millennials. 

This works primarily because of commonalities among users of both TikTok and Instagram — using an example of a fashion retailer, similar content should perform well on both TikTok and Instagram because both platforms prioritize fashion content, and the purchasing habits of both groups indicate that social media plays a large part in influencing purchasing decisions. 

Another strategy some take is offering special discounts to your social media followers in exchange for a deeper connection to them, such as providing 10% off first orders when you sign up for an email newsletter or survey.

Harness the power of influencer partnerships

There’s plenty of buzz around influencers — and for good reason. Influencer marketing on social media is a powerful tool when used right. First, look for influencers who align with your brand values and have an engaged audience that matches your target demographic.

Influencer marketing is where you can get creative. Consider product seeding, co-created content, affiliate programs, and account takeovers. For example, you can partner with a skincare influencer to create a 30-day skin transformation challenge using your products.

Here’s where you can get creative. Consider product seeding, co-created content, affiliate programs, and account takeovers. For example, you can partner with a skincare influencer to create a 30-day skin transformation challenge using your products.

If you’re using influencer marketing, measure reach, engagement rates, sentiments in comments, and, most importantly, conversions.

Optimize paid social advertising

Organic channels are essential to any marketing strategy, but to move the needle, consider paid advertising strategies. Every social media platform offers ads as another way of reaching people who fit your target audience but may not necessarily follow you or be aware of your business. 

Some successful paid strategies include retargeting users who have shown interest in your products but haven’t converted or recently abandoned their carts or using interest-based targeting to reach users who follow competitors or relevant influencers.

Once you know where your ideal audience lives, you can choose ad formats that showcase your products best on each channel. Video ads can demonstrate product use and results, whereas Instagram Story ads can offer immersive experiences.

Next, get smart with targeting. Using your MarTech stack and CDP, you can identify anonymous and unknown users on your sites, create lookalike audiences based on your best customers, and segment accordingly. Some successful strategies include retargeting users who have shown interest in your products but haven’t converted or recently abandoned their carts or using interest-based targeting to reach users who follow competitors or relevant influencers.

The key is to continuously test your messaging and channels. Compare different ad copy, visuals, CTAs, and landing pages, then let the data guide your decisions. With the right strategies in place, you can track ROAS, take advantage of the boost in visibility from a successful initial campaign, and iterate.

Build a thriving community on social media

Social media goes beyond broadcasting your product. Nowadays, consumers want to be engaged with and entertained by tailored content. Set up systems to ensure timely responses to comments and messages. Some brands rely on chatbots for instant responses to common queries. 

Encourage and showcase user-generated content, such as creating a branded hashtag or featured customer stories. This makes your customers feel valued and provides social proof for your brand. Finally, foster engagement with interactive content. Polls, Q&As, and challenges can get your audience engaged, and the more they interact with your brand, the more connected they will feel.

Refine your audience personas

As you build rapport with your target audience using your initial content strategy, your CDP will gather additional data points on their interests. There is a difference between people interested in fast fashion and those who are interested in sustainable fashion, also known as “slow fashion.”

You can use this information to create better-targeted ads. To generalize, someone who shops fast fashion may not be swayed by an ethically sourced and handmade quilt coat like someone interested in slow fashion might be.

If you’re using a Cloud Data Warehouse and CDP together, your customer data will help showcase customer preferences. They can also offer insights into which factors in a user’s life may determine their purchasing habits, buying power, and when they tend to purchase more frequently. 

You can use this information to craft personalized content that helps your audience better understand their alignment with your brand, such as emphasizing the cyclical nature of your clothing business to a slow fashion audience or your commitment to stylish clothing made by workers who are paid a living wage. 

You can also offer discounts timed for the moments in an audience’s purchasing cycle to incentivize purchases before specific events like weddings, school seasons, or seasonal changes. 

Activate and respond to insights in real time with a CDP

CDPs can revolutionize your real-time audience insights. Simon’s identity resolution feature, for example, can help you pair known customer profiles with your website traffic. It allows you to target better and message customers who abandon their carts or have visited a specific product page multiple times. 

With this information, you can set rules to trigger pop-ups or emailed discounts when someone has visited a product page more than three times in a month. Simon’s out-of-the-box predictive models can also help you determine who to send such an offer and when to deploy those offers. 

You can also nudge a prospective customer into purchasing something they have considered on your site by running ads that feature that specific product. For example, an ad could show someone how to style a garment they’ve been looking into, by either offering styled outfits or videos from influencers you work with, showing how they’ve incorporated the garment into their wardrobe.

A CDP can also give you insights into when campaigns derail. If a campaign reaches an unintended audience, you can rein it back in to protect your engagement data and more accurately measure reach. It can also offer you information about why the campaign derailed — perhaps an influencer in multiple markets cross-posted something, or a common hashtag was repurposed and gained new meaning. 

Even if the answer isn’t as obvious, figuring out what does work will be easier with a CDP, as you can access other insights into your customer’s interests and desires to design toward.

Measure and improve social media marketing strategies

Your social media marketing strategy shouldn’t be set in stone. Use your CDP and data to continuously refine your approach. Track key metrics like engagement rate, conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). And don’t just collect data — analyze it. Look for trends and insights that can further inform your strategy.

The best part about using a CDP is its all-in-one nature: once you build a campaign, you can track your social media ROI using CDP analytics. For both short-term and recurring campaigns, you’ll build a knowledge base about your customers’ behaviors that is accessible in the CDP and can therefore feed back into your segmentation model.

For example, a cohort of customers that regularly interacts with your social media can be suppressed from ads in their feed. Similarly, you can identify customers with a high LTV and remarket to them easily — and specifically — by designing new programs or offerings that are tailored to their buying habits. 

All of this can help reduce your customer acquisition cost and encourage repeat purchases — while your existing campaigns are still running.

Conclusion

Creating a successful social media strategy for your brand isn’t about jumping on every trend or being on every platform — and figuring out where and when your customers are most likely to make purchases doesn’t need to be complicated.

Using a CDP like Simon Data’s can streamline insights into your social media presence by providing a single source of truth about how your customers are interacting with your content, which allows you greater flexibility when designing campaigns and can strengthen your segmentation. This means you can personalize marketing experiences, offer only the most compelling deals at critical times, and iteratively refine your strategy as you learn more about your audience.