How to Develop a Stable Social Media Marketing Strategy (And How We Can Help)

Let’s be honest, whether your business is 20+ years old or you’re just starting out, you know (or, you will soon know) that social media marketing is starting to get a little ridiculous to keep up with. Every month there’s something: a new feature to learn, a trend to jump on, or an algorithm change that makes any progress you’ve made moot. Big companies have the pleasure of hiring their own marketing team, but that’s not realistic for the local businesses that keep America running every day. But it’s also not realistic to expect the business owner to be a videographer, photographer, copywriter, data analyst… I could go on. The point is, what options do you have?

I wrote a post not too long ago about DIY marketing and if it’s a good choice for your business, but I didn’t cover what digital marketing actually entails – or what we at Luck Dragon Media do every day. In this post, I’ll break down the best strategies, give away my secret tips and tricks, and as always, let you decide what’s best for your business.

Key Points

• Strategic Goal-Setting is Essential: Effective social media marketing starts with clear, measurable goals like increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or improving customer service. Without focus, ad campaigns can harm your brand rather than help it.
• Know Your Audience and Platform: Understanding who your customers are, where they spend their time online, and what content resonates with them is foundational. Each social platform has a different tone, culture, and content preference that must be considered.
• Content Should Serve a Purpose: Every post should align with business objectives and reflect your brand’s voice. Engaging, original, and consistent content (especially video) helps establish trust, build community, and drive conversions.
• Use Tools and Teams Wisely: DIY tools (like Canva or Buffer) are helpful, but they don’t replace professional skills, so if you’re solo, learn the foundations first. Whether working solo or with a team, having structure and workflows improves efficiency and results.
• Analyze and Adapt Constantly: Regularly track performance metrics, refine your strategy based on what works, and keep up with platform trends and algorithm changes. Continuous optimization is key to staying relevant and effective, and its what our team at Luck Dragon Media does for our partners every week.

Set Clear, Measurable Goals

Ads don’t work if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, and can even negatively effect your business. Even besides the time and resources wasted on a failed campaign, an unfocused or generic advertisement can damage credibility and make your brand appear low quality to potential customers. This is especially true on social media, where users scroll quickly, attention is limited, and first impressions matter. According to Marketing Brew, “most Americans say they only remembered 1%–10% of the ads they’d seen in the past 24 hours,” so it’s important to make your ad memorable. At Luck Dragon Media, when talking to our partners, we look at what their business goals are, and adapt them to their social media marketing strategy. Here are some of the most common goals we’ve seen, why they’re important, and what social media metrics to follow based on them:

Increasing Brand Awareness

First, your customers need to know who you are! Building brand awareness and trust is a great place to start for any small business, and is great even for well established businesses to revisit and reestablish in the ever-changing markets.

Social media metrics to follow:

• Reach measures the total number of unique users who have seen your content, helping you understand how far your post, ad, or campaign has spread across a platform.
• Impressions refer to the total number of times your content is displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked or not. Impressions count every view, including multiple views by the same user.

Generate Leads and Sales

Once you have some reputability and trust, your business’s social media can focus on converting leads into loyal customers. Whether you’re collecting emails, booking appointments, or selling products directly, a good call to action can start making your marketing campaign feel worth it.

Social media metrics to follow:

• Conversions measure the effectiveness of an ad by tracking the number of users who take a desired action after engaging with your social media content, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form.
• Influencer ROI measures the value a brand gains from its partnership with an influencer compared to the cost of the collaboration. If you’re just starting out, making an influencer deal probably shouldn’t be on your list of priorities just yet.
• Employee Advocacy measures how often and effectively employees share and promote a company’s content on their personal social media channels. Employees can often be fantastic brand ambassadors, though it’s obviously not required.
• Return on ad spend measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on a social media advertising campaign, and can help you adjust your ads for success in the future.

Grow your Brand’s Audience

Expanding your audience helps increase the impact of your messaging and creates a larger pool of potential customers. With smart content strategies and consistent engagement, your social channels can become a magnet for new fans, and their friends and family too!

Social media metrics to follow:

• Follower growth tracks the increase or decrease in the number of people following your social media account over time. It indicates how well your content and engagement strategies are attracting and retaining an audience.

Provide Outstanding Customer Care

Once you have a following, your customers will want to interact with you through questions, comments, and reviews. The best way to make your following feel heard is to be attentive, respond quickly, and respond humanly. With AI chat bots numbing interactions, people are craving some real connection, and with the right strategy, your brand can create a passionate and loyal following.

Social media metrics to follow:

• Average first reply time measures how quickly a brand replies to a user’s first message or comment on social media. It reflects customer service efficiency and can impact audience satisfaction and engagement.
• Response rate is the percentage of user messages or comments that a brand replies to on social media, further indicating how actively a brand manages customer interactions.
• Support resolution rate measures the percentage of customer issues or inquiries on social media that are successfully resolved by your brand, and again, reflects the effectiveness of your brand’s customer service.

Drive Traffic to your Site

Getting people from your social channels to your website is a key goal for many businesses. Whether it’s to learn more, make a purchase, or sign up for a service, driving traffic helps illustrate the ROI of your social efforts and keeps your sales funnel active and measurable. This is the end goal for most social media marketing: getting your customer to your virtual storefront!

Social media metrics to follow:

• Website traffic is the number of visitors who come to your website from social media channels, and can give insight as to how customers react to your content.

Put It all Together

If this is sounding like a lot, that’s because it is. Our team at Luck Dragon Media keeps track of all of this and more for several of our partners every day. Unfortunately for the DIY marketer, all of it is important. It helps us communicate with our partners better about what’s working and what’s not, so we can adjust our future strategies with them together. But businesses don’t have time for a lot of trial and error with their ads, which is why this guide doesn’t end at step one.

Say it With Me: Know Your Audience

If you’ve been following our blog or even just researching marketing strategies on your own, then you already know what I’m about to say: know your audience! It’s exhaustively pushed by every marketer out there, but it’s for good reason: it’s so easy to make mistakes in this stage of your social media marketing campaign. And it’s so easy to not know until it’s too late.

Get To Know Your Clients

The first step to finding your audience is easy. It’s something most small business owners already do: talk to your customers. Don’t scare them away by asking personal demographics questions, obviously, but take note of the type of people you talk to most and the patterns there. Some markets will be easy to identify – if you’re a home security company, you’ll be targeting homeowners, etc. Some markets might be more challenging and diverse, though, so make your discovery period in this step as detailed as you reasonably can. The market you thought you had, versus the market you actually have, might surprise you!

Learn Where To Find Them

If social media marketing was that easy, then knowing your audience would be enough. But there’s also the issue of finding your audience in the infinitely vast world wide web. Social media platforms are like parties, and a lot of people go to them! But people are going to hang around their friends, family, and people like them, so each platform attracts very different audiences. Social media demographics can help you narrow down where your business needs to be.

Learn What They Like

But wait! There’s more! There is a lot of nuance to what will land on each social media, and how to make your posts actually land well with the customer base that you’ve spent so much time researching. Once you’ve identified where your audience is, you need to understand how they engage, what kind of content they interact with, what tone resonates with them, and what times they’re most active. Each platform has its own culture and language, and within that, each audience has its preferences. Below is a very, very short breakdown of the most popular socials and what seems to be working on them now:

• X, Bluesky, & Threads: Even though I grouped these together, it’s important to note that these three sites, even though they are all text-based, high-engagement platforms, have incredibly different cultures. Your text-centric ads are all going to look pretty similar here, but should have vastly different language and content based on who your audience is. These three are most similar in the way they look and feel, and can be great if you’re looking to highlight your outstanding customer service, though.
• Instagram & TikTok: Visual storytelling is everything these days. TikTok leads the charge with short-form videos, but Instagram’s Reels are catching up fast. These platforms are great for trends, behind-the-scenes content, tutorials, and anything with high visual impact. Plus, Instagram makes it easy to cross-post to Facebook, meaning you can get double the reach for just one post.
• Facebook: While younger users may be less active here, Facebook is far from dead. Facebook is the place to build a community, and Meta takes no shortcuts making advertising accessible to any business. If you only have time to manage one social media account, this is probably your safest and most versatile bet.
• LinkedIn: The go-to platform for B2B marketing and professional networking. It’s growing quickly and offers strong organic reach for businesses that share industry insights, case studies, and company updates.
• Pinterest: Perfect for visual, inspirational content, Pinterest is great for unique, idea-based advertising, like mood boards, DIY guides, and lifestyle pictures. If you sell a product, find a way to build it into an idea (like a recipe or home project), and Pinterest will help you drive traffic and intent.
• YouTube: Owned by Google, this platform doubles as a powerful search engine. Video is the most effective content type across all platforms, and YouTube supports long-form, searchable video that can easily be repurposed elsewhere. If you’re investing in video content, this is where it should start. (Also, it’s what we specialize in!)
• Reddit: A rising star in the search and discovery space, Reddit has a highly engaged user base. This one’s tough to get started on though, as ads need to feel authentic. Overt selling is often frowned upon, so instead, aim to contribute meaningfully to discussions or offer real value to the community, and avoid embarrassment.

Create Something Engaging

At the heart of it, Luck Dragon Media is a media company, so is it biased for me to say this is our favorite part?

Crafting content that truly resonates with your audience is where creativity meets strategy, and it’s what we specialize in. Our resident movie-makers Brad and Michael are, of course, partial to video content, as our reel shows below (and they’re right, it’s super popular right now), but graphic and text based content can have a high impact too, especially once you’ve learned what works on the platform you’re posting on.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, people like consistency. Establishing your strategy and voice early on is key to creating a recognizable brand, even if it has to be tweaked in the future.

Apply your Goals to your Content Strategy

It’s easy to get swept up in posting just for the sake of “keeping the page active,” but content without intention is wasted effort. Every piece of content you produce should align with your business goals, whether it’s building brand awareness, driving sales, or growing your community. This focus ensures that all this time you’re spending researching and creating content isn’t wasted.

Strategy-based content idea examples:

• Create a coupon that attracts visitors to your site.
• Have an employee take over your socials for the day to build trust.
• Make a multi-part series to encourage viewers to follow for more.

Making a meaningful step toward your objectives doesn’t have to be loud, though. Sometimes your call to action will be clear: “follow for more content like this!,” “contact us today!” But other times, content can be simple, and human: an update of some decor in the office, or a cool new machine your company has invested in. Your excitement rubs off on people, and meanwhile, you can subtly push your products that that, “cool new machine,” makes.

Define your Business’s Voice

Your brand voice is your business’s personality online, and it’s how people come to know and remember you. Is your tone professional, playful, inspirational, or authoritative? Consistency here helps your audience connect and trust you. This is especially clear on text-based media’s like X, Bluesky, and Threads, where some companies have gone viral for their casual or comedic voice. Wendy’s is probably most notable for their social media voice, with their “roast” X (Twitter, at the time) campaign becoming an integral part of their marketing in 2017 and beyond.

When you’re focused on running a business, it can be a challenge to keep up with a consistent voice, especially if it’s different than how you’d talk online normally. At Luck Dragon Media, we help businesses find that unique voice that sets them apart, and keep up with making quality posts that stick to it.

Be Unique

In a crowded social media landscape, originality wins. Your origin story, your team’s fun energy, or your lovable mascot is what your audience will remember you by. Don’t be afraid to take creative risks or showcase the authentic story behind your brand. Customers crave realness over perfection.

Content only you and your business can make:

• Authentic stories of what led you to where you are now – even the messy stuff.
• Day-in-the-life posts of what you and your team does every day.
• Employee takeovers that highlight a single person or team and shows off their skills.

Sure, a lot of these things have been done. But what makes them you is you! Spacing story-telling content throughout your regular promotional material can help lessen advertising fatigue for your audience as well, and keep them engaged – even when they’re not ready to buy.

Collaborate

You don’t have to build a strong media presence alone! Social media is all about community, and collaboration can be one of your strongest marketing tools.

With Influencers

Partnering with influencers can boost your reach and credibility by tapping into existing, engaged audiences. The right influencer can instantly increase your brand’s visibility, especially when their audience overlaps with your target market. But alignment is more important than follower count: choose influencers who genuinely match with your brand values, energy, and audience. Small influencers (people with 1k–100k followers) often have higher engagement and more trust with their audience – if their content feels real and their values match yours, that collaboration could be perfect!

Not sure where to start? Look at your own followers. Someone local, active, and passionate about your industry may already be a fan, and that’s the best kind of partnership!

With Employees

I mentioned earlier that employees can make great ambassadors. Employees who love where they work naturally become your best marketers. Creating a comfortable work environment can encourage your team to share behind-the-scenes content, success stories, or their personal experiences with your brand. Encourage them to share milestones, shout-outs, or even their own photos from team events or customer wins. This humanizes your business and builds trust.

This not only adds authentic content to your feed, but it shows your business culture in a way no graphic ever could.

Keep Up

The social media world moves fast, and having an active page is essential to avoid falling behind. Lately, algorithms seem to be rewarding pages that post content often – some say daily, some say weekly, but I personally think that it changes too fast to matter. Just post as often as the time within your budget allows, and whatever it is, will be good enough for your small business. Quality content is better than fast content; your audience will know when you’re being lazy.

Use the Right Tools

When used correctly, the right tools save time and improve the quality and effectiveness of your marketing. But tools can’t replace the learned skills of a professional. When you pay for a graphic designer, videographer, or marketing director, you’re paying not just for their time, but their knowledge and skills too. This is what a lot of DIY marketers make mistakes on the first time: Canva, Later, and Metricool cannot replace the taught skills of typography, video editing, color theory, data analytics, or marketing knowledge.

In the same vein, knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make someone a graphic designer or artist either. There is nothing wrong with using Canva and free tools like it, as long as they’re used correctly.

Tools that might be handy for the DIY marketer:

• Buffer: Simplifies scheduling and analytics.
• Zoho Social: Basic tools for small teams to manage campaigns (we use this here at home!)
• Canva: Quick design tool for those starting out.

Manage your Team’s Work Flow

Management tools can be a great way to help define clear roles, schedule regular check-ins, and manage projects to keep your team on track. An unorganized team slows down progress, and the social media world is not going to wait for you to catch up.

Whether you’ve got a few helpers or just you, having a workflow helps:

• Set roles: Who’s writing, who’s posting, who’s replying?
• Use a shared calendar: Plan at least 2 weeks ahead.
• Check-ins: Keep them short, but regular.

Even if you’re solo, creating structure can help you stay consistent and save a lot of headache. At Luck Dragon, we use Zoho a lot to communicate what’s going on in the office – and that little monthly payment is so worth it.

Keep Up with Engagement

Social media is a two-way street. Responding promptly to comments, messages, and reviews nurtures relationships and boosts your visibility in platform algorithms. Platforms prioritize content that generates conversations, and reward you for joining in. So whether it’s a simple “Thanks!” or answering a customer’s question in DMs, take the time: people notice.

Analyze and Optimize

Keep track your campaigns’ performance, test different strategies, and refine your content based on what’s working best. Data-driven decisions lead to better ROI and growth. What works today might not work next week, and that’s okay. Great marketing isn’t about being right all the time. It’s about testing, learning, and improving.

We review analytics for our partners monthly, and we look at:

• What post had the most engagement?
• What platform drove the most traffic?
• Where did people drop off?
• What keywords kept people most engaged?

Then adjust. If your audience loves short behind-the-scenes videos, make more. If they ignore product shots, rework the format or timing, or cut them out for a while. Content and advertising fatigue is real, so respecting your audiences time makes all the difference.

Our partners love us for our optimization services. The less our partners have to stare at and analyze data, the better! And with every data point, we get sharper, faster, and more creative in driving your business results.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is… a lot. Strategy, consistency, creative production, data tracking, audience research, ad targeting, and staying current takes time. At Luck Dragon Media, we bridge the gap for small and mid-sized businesses that don’t have the luxury of a full in-house team, but still want to show up like the pros. We create high-quality video content, manage social media strategies, collaborate with creators and influencers, and continually optimize campaigns based on real-time performance. You don’t have to be a content machine or spend hours trying to reverse-engineer a viral post; that’s our job, so you can focus on yours!

If you find that DIY marketing isn’t for you, our phone is available Monday through Friday – give us a call at 520-869-9649 or contact us today!