Social Media as a Marketing Tool

 Introduction

Social media is a diverse and powerful tool. It provides mankind with educational content, entertainment, inspiration, and opportunities to connect with people from all over the world. But that’s not all! For many, social media also serves as a powerful and effective marketing platform. Whether it be one individual trying to get his startup off the ground, or one of the largest established companies in the world launching a large-scale campaign, social media marketing has been used by just about everyone. That being said, there is most definitely a right way to market on social media, and there is most definitely a wrong way to market on social media. Thankfully, there are a plethora of helpful tricks, tips, and strategies out there on the internet to help the not so social media savvy find their way to marketing success! This post is going to be providing you, dear reader, with a quick breakdown of an article titled “How to Build a Winning Social Media Strategy in 8 Simple Steps” that was published by none other than the American Marketing Association on April 24, 2025. With the AMA name attached to the article, you know the information in here is vetted, effective, and reliable. 

What is Social Media Marketing?

Before we break down the actual strategies in the article, it would probably be best if we actually defined the concept of “Social Media Marketing.” AMA summarizes the practice as “showing up where your audience already is, and making meaningful connections.” It goes on to highlight platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X as some of the primary platforms that are most effective for social media marketing due to their huge user bases.

When social media marketing is done correctly, visibility is created, trust is built with the audience, and increases brand awareness; taken together, these three individual outcomes drive sales on a large scale.

Now that social media marketing has been defined (albeit, maybe a little loosely), we can  move on to defining the essential components of a social media marketing strategy. AMA lays out the essential components of a social media marketing strategy in the form of five strategies: goal setting, audience understanding, platform selection, content planning, and metric tracking. AMA then breaks these five core strategies down into eight individual steps. These steps are as follows: set SMART goals, research your audience, choose the right platforms, identify key metrics, create engaging content, plan and schedule your content, conduct a competitive analysis, and evaluate and evolve your strategy. 

A Brief Overview of the Eight Steps

SMART Goal Setting: According to AMA, the goals you set at the beginning of a campaign act as guide rails that shepherd the entire campaign. Additionally, AMA recommends using the SMART goal system - set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So for example, instead of setting a goal like “grow our audience,” opt for something more like “Increase instagram followers by 20% over the next six months to support our brand’s awareness campaign.” The latter of these goals is SMARTer, and thus, much more likely to be met due to its specifications. It’s not ambiguous and leaves no gray area for success or failure.

Research Your Audience: It is critical that you know who you are trying to target; if you do not identify who your target audience is, there is a pretty big chance your content won’t resonate or connect with anybody regardless of the content’s quality. AMA suggests researching things like age, gender, 

profession, location, and what kind of content the individual interacts with on the internet.

Choose the Right Social Media Channels: Similarly to how even great content will miss the mark if it's not targeted to the proper audience, choosing the wrong platform will likely result in less than desirable brand awareness statistics. AMA drives the point home that “you don’t need to be on every platform, you just need to be on the right ones.” Different people spend time on different platforms; identify where your target audience spends their time, and on which platforms give yourself a higher chance of success.

Identify the Proper KPIs: Establishing KPIs is a necessary part of tracking how effectively your campaign is performing. Depending on your campaign goals, you may choose different KPIs. What matters is that you identify the KPIs that are most pertinent to your goals and can track them effectively. 

Create Interesting Content: If your content isn’t interesting, your campaign may as well have not even started. It is critical that your content is engaging in order to grab the attention (and eventually dollars) of your audience. AMA suggests focusing on making content that is visually engaging, communicates brand themes and values, and that encourages interaction. Focusing on these things will create resonance and connection with your audience.

Plan and Schedule Your Content: By creating a content calendar, you are able to view the entirety of your marketing campaign. This allows you to plan for the possibility of things not going entirely to plan and establish measures to address those possibilities; it allows you to be proactive, rather than reactive. AMA describes a content calendar as a “type of tactical roadmap for executing your social media marketing strategy with intention and consistency.” It’s important to note that you need not post every day; consistently posting engaging material on the right platforms will suffice. An additional advantage of a content calendar is that it acts as a type of record that allows you to look back and see which posts resonated best and worst with your audience, thus informing your future posts.

Conduct a Competitive analysis: Every company and organization has rivals with whom it is always competing. In order to perform well and exceed its competitors, it is critical that a company understands its competition. Conducting a competitive analysis is an excellent way to gain greater insight into the competition and the strategies that they are using to market themselves and drive sales. AMA states that a properly conducted competitive analysis should reveal “what content performs well in your industry, where your competitors are winning (or falling short), untapped opportunities for your brand to differentiate, best practices worth adapting, and mistakes worth avoiding.” According to AMA, a good competitive analysis consists of the following five steps: Identify top competitors, audit their social presence, analyze content and performance trends, evaluate engagement tactics, and identify opportunities to differentiate. As long as a competitive analysis follows these steps, it is sure to be an effective tool that serves to enhance your marketing strategy on social media.

Evaluate and Evolve Your Strategy: AMA states that “a social media marketing strategy is not a one time project, it’s a dynamic process.” A social media marketing campaign is best treated as a living system that grows, develops, and evolves over time. It is necessary that the project changes and progresses in accordance with its successes and failures; therefore, regular evaluation of the project is key. AMA suggests implementing things like quarterly performance checks, regular experimentation, and occasional total strategy audits to ensure that the project is on track and heading in a successful direction.

Personal Thoughts

It seems to me that this article lays out some pretty reasonable and fairly logical guidelines for crafting an effective social media marketing strategy. After giving this article a thorough read-through (or two), I think that I could  strategically employ the steps outlined in this article, and even have some degree of success in  marketing a service or product. Although I have very little (basically zero) marketing experience, the steps and practices outlined in this article seem sound to me. If I were in such a position that I needed to market a service or product, I would not hesitate to follow these strategies from AMA. 

Article/Photo Source:8 Steps to Build a Successful Social Media Strategy