How Effective is Your Social Media Strategy in 2024?

With only six months left in 2024, now is a good time to evaluate how effective your social media strategy is.

Using social media for digital marketing is essential and requires ongoing adaptation and evolution. However, using social media to advertise is not as simple as placing ads and content on every platform imaginable. For example, if you owned a plumbing business, sharing content on TikTok would likely be a waste of money.

A good social media strategy must align with your brand voice, utilize the right platforms, and feature on-trend content.

Which social media platform suits your needs?

Understanding the difference between advertising on Instagram and Facebook is more complex than understanding reels and stories. You must choose social media platforms based on your brand, target audience, and goals. Then, the content you generate must adhere to the proper messaging, tone, and form to reach your target audience.

It does not stop once you’ve posted your ads either: tracking the performance of your advertisements is half the battle. If the social media platforms you select are ill-considered, it doesn’t matter how strong your content is.

With hundreds of platforms to choose from, a common mistake businesses make is to simply pick the most popular ones to post content to. Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok — the sheer number of active users on these platforms can be a major draw to getting your brand noticed. However, if your target audience is unlikely to frequent these platforms, you might be wasting your time and money.

Consider the following when choosing which social media platforms to advertise on:

Brand

Understanding your brand is the foundation of all business. You should already have a strong understanding of the industry your business operates within. The size, competition, and consumer-base of your industry help decide where you should target your content.

But where does your business fit into that industry? Are you like Media Rebel and rebel against the industry norm? This will impact the messaging of your content, but it might also affect the platforms you’re advertising on. It all comes down to the audience you’re attempting to reach.

Target Audience

The more specifically you identify your brand’s audience, the more likely your social media strategy will be effective. A plumbing company seeking corporate clients for a contractual agreement will market differently to one attempting to reach homeowners. 

Understanding your audience is not as simple as logging standard demographic indicators, such as age. Though demographics can be a vital resource, your target audience has specific wants, needs, behaviors, and experiences. What does your audience need that your business can offer? Where is your audience looking that your business can market to?

This extends beyond merely what platforms your target audience is active on; how they use social media is just as important as what they use. Two Instagram users will engage with the platform in very different ways, from features to trends. Taking clear note of what content your target audience is consuming and tailoring your content to fit their preferences is key to success.

Advertising Goals

Most importantly, the goals of your marketing campaign will have a significant impact on the platform you advertise on.

Understanding how to set and measure your goals is a complicated step. The technical terms can be inaccessible without the help of a digital agency. Hiring a digital agency to interpret your goals, build a strategy, and measure the success will maximize your investment.

Measuring the return on investment, however, isn’t always about profit margins. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you may not see a direct correlation in sales numbers. Instead, you’ll want to create a plan to increase site traffic or build your email list.

If you don't clearly establish your goals and expectations from the beginning, you will wonder where your money went. Once all parties are clear on these details, the content generation can begin.

Content Creation: User-Generated and Employee-Generated Content

If you’re looking into social media marketing, chances are you’ve seen the acronyms UGC and EGC. These stand for user-generated content and employee-generated content respectively. UGC and EGC are an integral part of digital marketing in 2024.

UGC is all content created and posted by users of a platform. A video posted to Youtube, for example, is a form of UGC. EGC is a form of UGC specifically created by an employee of an organization for that company's purposes.

In the current digital world, users have become increasingly disengaged with highly polished, professional advertisements on social media. Surrounded by UGC that appears informal and personalized, these highly produced ads stick out like a sore thumb.

Creating on-trend EGC is an excellent way to market on social media. You can take it a step further, however, by motivating your audience to create related UGC to your campaign.

If you're trying to promote a new product, prompting your audience to post themselves using it is an obvious method. The trend-loving algorithms of TikTok and Instagram incentivizes content like tutorials and product testing. Relying on this strategy, however, is risky if you don't already have a significant social media presence.

Instead, a savvy business will find innovative tools and strategies to further motivate engagement.

Consider Media Rebel's "The Rebellion Booth" for example. This interactive photo booth for events allows users to take and upload photos to social media within an instant. By encouraging guests to create UGC using this fun and interactive experience, brands are boosting engagement and brand awareness.

Social media marketing in 2024 means creating content that aligns more closely with the preferences of your target audience. Balancing authenticity and expertise can be tricky, but failing to align with the current digital trends risks appearing outdated.

Data-Driven Insights: Analytics Drive Optimization

Analytic insights are the best way to evaluate your current social media performance. This gives you the best information on how your impressions, reach, clicks, and conversions are performing consistently. To evaluate 2024, look at how your numbers have been trending since January.

Using social media and google analytics to track and improve strategy

Evaluate analytics based on your goals, you will want to measure the performance of your social media campaign using several different indicators. The term KPI refers to Key Performance Indicators, which prove the success or shortcomings of your strategy. The KPIs for your digital marketing plan will vary depending on your needs.

If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, your KPIs will be metrics that measure attention. These include direct site visitors, an increase in organic traffic on social pages, and an increase in followers. If you’re trying to generate leads, your KPIs will take the form of clicks and conversions. These include form fills, subscriptions, purchases, etc.

Another useful KPI for most social media posts is engagement. This takes the form of likes, comments, shares, followers, etc. Having a plan to increase conversions from engagement, however, will always be essential.

This merely scratches the surface of performance metrics, KPIs, and measuring a successful campaign. Without the experience and training to understand KPIs, these can be complicated to interpret. By hiring a digital agency like Media Rebel, you can ensure that your strategy is meeting the right KPIs.

If your strategy is underperforming, a digital agency can quickly advise and redirect your campaign to improve success. Consistent evaluation and adaptation are just as essential parts of the marketing process as planning and generating.

Conclusion

Predicting the future of digital marketing is impossible. The trending content style and preferred platform may vary at a moment's notice. A savvy EGC that rakes in high engagement may appear outdated within months. That's why a digital agency that understands how to navigate today's digital landscape is more useful than ever.

Remember, your brand, target audience, and goals should influence your strategy — not the other way around. For a step-by-step process to digital content strategy, read our guide here.

For more on Media Rebel's mission and what drives us, read our blog here.