What Is Social Media Marketing? A How-To Guide - Klaviyo
2026-03-10 23:30 Diff
https://www.klaviyo.com/products/social/what-is-social-media-marketing

Social media marketing is using social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp to build brand awareness, connect with customers, drive website traffic, and increase sales.

Here, we’re distinguishing social media marketing from paid social advertising. Social media marketing refers to specifically organic social efforts that may involve sharing:

Beyond publishing content, social media marketing teams cover two-way brand communication, since social media is an easy way to reach out and get in touch. In these conversations, they often end up fielding customer service questions in DMs or comments.

Social media marketing connects to the rest of your marketing strategy once someone becomes a known contact in your CRM by signing up for updates or making a purchase. Once this happens, you can connect their social media activities to their customer profile, which gives you more information about each customer and makes it easier to personalize marketing and customer service.

The most successful B2C brands are all over social media. It’s a free way to get in front of customers and bring in new audiences, while getting eyes on your brand.

In the past, organic social was a bit of a black hole. Your social team would create and publish content, engage with the community, answer DMs, and repost customers, all without being able to tie these activities back to individual customers or revenue.

But now, there’s better attribution and tracking for organic social media. Brands can justify higher investments and use social to improve customer relationships and build customer loyalty.

According to VaynerX and Ipsos’ The Growing Power of Organic Social report, 79% of marketers have increased their investments in organic social, and 70% say it’s helped them cut costs by up to 50% while still reaching the right audiences.

Your social media marketing strategy helps you get clear on who you’re talking to, what you’ll share, where you’ll show up, and how you’ll measure progress.

When your social media marketing is well connected to your greater marketing team and strategy, it opens up new opportunities to get to know your existing customers better, bring in new customers from your target market, and generate revenue.

Before you invest in social media marketing, map out your goals. These might include:

  • Growing brand awareness
  • Engaging with your community
  • Improving customer experiences
  • Generating trackable revenue

Depending on your goals, you’ll want to focus on platforms and strategies that can help you reach your intended audience and translate social media success to business outcomes.

Here’s how to build a social media strategy that fits your brand and goals:

1. Choose the right social media platforms

There are two main factors to consider when choosing social media platforms: target audience and business goals.

According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index, the social networks that consumers are most likely to use are:

But your own brand’s demographic might show up differently on social, which is why it’s important to first figure out where your target audience lives online. Try surveying your existing customers to find out where they’re most active on social media, and looking at where you see brand mentions and tags or receive DMs most often.

Then, start with the top 1–2 platforms from your research. Finally, consider which platforms will help you reach your business goals. Many B2C brands want to be able to bring social media conversations and activities into their direct marketing channels, so look for platforms that support direct messaging, link-based opt-ins, or product tagging.

2. Grow your social media audience organically

In B2C marketing, organic social growth comes from turning casual viewers into followers. To do that, people need a clear reason to keep up with your brand, like styling tips, educational videos that help them get more out of their products, or giveaways.

Here are a few ways to grow your social media audience:

  • Create a few regular series. Just like an email newsletter, if people grow to expect certain content series on a regular basis, they may be more likely to tune in and follow you to see the next one. Try a weekly educational video series showing people use your products, or a monthly customer spotlight to get new followers.
  • Run contests or community activations. Use your existing audience to get new followers. Run a contest where followers have to tag a friend who doesn’t currently follow your brand to participate. Or, encourage your followers to share a post featuring your brand’s products and tag you for a chance to win a free item or bundle, exposing you to their own followers.
  • Share social content across other marketing channels. Include posts from social media and calls to action (CTAs) to follow your brand on other marketing channels like email, your brand website and product pages, in text messages, or even in real life in your stores.

3. Partner with creators and influencers in your social media marketing

Recent data from Sprout Social shows that more than half of B2C brands partner with 6–10 influencers at any given time. These partnerships lead to increased audience engagement, trust, and revenue growth, along with better loyalty and retention, according to the research.

That makes sense: when you partner with influencers, you’re working with people who already have trust and credibility with their followers, rather than starting from scratch. Your brand shows up where people are already paying attention and in a voice they recognize, making your message more relatable and impactful.

Here are a few ways to think about working with influencers:

  • Choose creators based on audience alignment. Look for creators whose followers overlap with your target buyers. Review comment sections and past brand collaborations to understand how their audience responds. A smaller creator with a highly relevant audience often drives more meaningful engagement than a large account with broad reach.
  • Give clear goals instead of scripts. Share the outcome you care about, like highlighting a specific product benefit or answering a common customer question. This gives creators direction while allowing the content to feel authentic to their audience.
  • Be clear about how content can be reused. If you plan to repost creator content on your own social channels, in email, or in ads, agree on that upfront. Usage rights define where and how long you can reuse their content. Aligning on this early helps you get more out of strong creator posts beyond a single placement.
  • Evaluate partnerships over time, not after one post. Track indicators like saves, comments, profile visits, and traffic over multiple posts. If engagement stays strong and the creator consistently attracts the right audience, that’s a signal to keep working with them.

4. Incorporate social media marketing into your omnichannel marketing efforts

If you’ve grown a strong follower base on social media, it’s only valuable to your brand if you can activate that audience to grow and drive revenue.

Turn social media followers into known contacts in your direct marketing channels like email and text messaging, where you can continue the conversation by using social media activities to guide more personalized marketing that leads to purchases.

Here are a few ways to bring social media audiences into your omnichannel marketing efforts:

  • Add social media data to customer profiles in your CRM. Connect the dots between social, email, and mobile, and enrich customer profiles in your CRM with information from social media engagement. Use a B2C CRM that automatically captures Instagram mentions, DMs, and comments in customer profiles when you have a contact that subscribes to email and text message marketing, and has an Instagram handle in your database.
  • Convert followers into loyal subscribers. Get social media subscribers to head over to your website and sign up for ongoing communication, or collect opt-ins right from social media interactions like Instagram DMs. Offer exclusive access to promotions, giveaways, and more to get people to sign up.
  • Automate social media-triggered flows. Launch automated marketing messages based on social media DMs, tags, and UGC posts. If a follower posts about how much they love a product and tags your brand, for example, enroll them in an automated flow that asks them to write a review on the product page, then send them a thank you gift or bonus loyalty points.

Swimwear brand Kulani Kinis collects social handles during sign-up alongside email and phone number, which allows the team to see how subscribers engage on social. When customers and ambassadors post about the brand, they receive acknowledgements or rewards that encourage repeat advocacy.

Women’s fashion brand Evereve, meanwhile, announced a giveaway on their Instagram, offering a $2,000 shopping spree for one lucky winner and their friends. To qualify, followers had to DM the brand and subscribe to email or SMS.

Evereve’s Instagram giveaway attracted over 4,500 giveaway entrants, 1,400 of whom converted to net new subscribers in a matter of days. Over the next 3 months, these giveaway entrants generated over $500,000 in net sales.

5. Measure and optimize your social media marketing performance

Align social performance with your goals. Use a combination of in-platform analytics and CRM analytics to understand the big picture of social media marketing impact.

Here are a few ideas for thinking about social media marketing performance, based on the goals we identified earlier:

  • Growing brand awareness: Analyze followers, engagement, brand mentions, and tags.
  • Engaging with your community: Look at likes, saves, replies, and DMs.
  • Improving customer experiences: Review DMs, and use social listening to see customer sentiment in social media mentions.
  • Generating trackable revenue: See how many social media-sourced subscribers you’ve generated in your direct marketing channels, and how they spend and engage with your brand marketing.

And here are a few ways to use social media analytics to improve your overall performance:

  • Use native analytics to improve what you publish. Look at post-level performance to identify which posts encourage meaningful actions, like sign-ups, replies, or profile visits. Double down on the formats and topics that create those actions, and retire the ones that attract attention but do not lead anywhere.
  • Look for patterns in audience response. Review platform insights to see when your audience is most active and which formats consistently earn saves or replies. These patterns help you decide what to repeat and what to retire.
  • When you test changes, keep it simple. Change one variable at a time, such as the hook, format, or posting window, and compare performance across similar posts. This helps you isolate what actually drives response, so you can repeat what works.

Succeeding with social media marketing relies on listening closely to your audience, keeping up with trends, and tying social performance to brand outcomes.

Here are a few best practices for making the most of your brand’s social media marketing:

Vary the types of content you post

Variety is the spice of life, and it’s also the secret to social media growth. Mix up the types of content you share, and see which posts tend to resonate with your followers. Don’t just jump on trends because everyone’s doing it. Be thoughtful about what makes sense for your brand goals and audience.

Here are a few options for types of content that B2C brands find often work for them:

  • Social proof like UGC: 67% of consumers report that ratings and customer-submitted content like UGC has influenced them to buy something, according to the 1WorldSync Product Content Benchmark Report. Tell your followers to post about your brand, and in exchange, feature these posts on your page by reposting or sharing to your stories.
  • Educational videos: Show exactly how customers can use your products in videos like Reels, TikToks, or YouTube Shorts. Think: product demos or ”how it works” videos, styling tips, “day in the life” videos that incorporate your products, or “get ready with me” (GRWM) videos using your products. GRWM videos have over 99 billion views on TikTok alone.
  • Storytelling content: Give your audience an inside look at your brand to build trust and show your values. Try sharing videos from your founder or behind-the-scenes content. The 2025 Sprout Social Index found that consumers want to see brand content that’s authentic, relatable, and entertaining, and storytelling content hits on all of these traits.

Use AI to produce content and drive more engagement

Social moves faster than any team can realistically keep up with. AI can help you produce creative content more efficiently.

Here are a few practical ways teams can use AI in social today:

  • Create content from scratch. AI marketing agents help you brainstorm campaign ideas and spin them into on-brand social content for channels like WhatsApp, so you can get marketing out the door faster.
  • Use social media insights to guide marketing content. Integrate social media content and signals with your AI marketing agent to create and personalize content for specific audiences and segments.
  • Repurpose content. Take your existing brand imagery and use an AI photo editor to reimagine your content for different campaigns, like changing the background for a seasonal promotion or showcasing a new color of a bestseller.
  • Deliver campaign and sentiment insights from UGC. AI can analyze UGC posts to surface campaign or sentiment insights, helping you extend the life of UGC for customers.

List your products directly on social media platforms

Social commerce, like TikTok Shop and Instagram Shop, is projected to grow by double digits between 2025 and 2029, according to data from EMARKETER. This same report found that in 2025, TikTok Shop drove $15.82 billion in sales (18.2% of all social commerce sales), and overall, social commerce drove $87 billion in 2025 (nearly 7% of all retail ecommerce sales).

Add your products directly to social media shops so your followers can make purchases as they scroll. When you use a CRM that allows you to connect these activities to customer profiles, you can attribute social activities directly to revenue. Use detailed descriptions and high-quality images, and incorporate UGC that shows your products in action.

Bring social into your CRM to enrich data and grow smarter audiences

Social is often where customers signal interest first. They ask questions, tag your brand, share experiences, or reach out directly.

When those interactions stay confined to social platforms, they’re fleeting. When they connect to your CRM, they shape what happens next across marketing and customer service.

That connection makes social data actionable. When a customer shares a social handle during sign-up, or when you can associate social activity with an existing profile, engagement adds context about recent interests, questions, or advocacy.

Social media marketing becomes effective when identity, context, and intent live together. In Klaviyo B2C CRM, social engagement sits next to direct-channel data, so teams can see not just what customers bought, but how they are engaging now.

Klaviyo Social builds on this by linking actions like DMs, verified product tags, and approved UGC directly to customer profiles. When you know who’s behind the interaction, social engagement becomes something you can act on intentionally. That might mean reinforcing advocacy, suppressing a promotion, or prioritizing support.

With shared context and real-time signals from your audience, you can do more than personalize marketing and support. You can also grow your business.

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