Social media marketing may be effective, but only if you’re using the right techniques on the right platforms. This varies depending on your industry, as the audience you want to reach and the ways to engage them will vary according to each industry. So a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works, especially in a highly competitive landscape.
This gets even more challenging as businesses struggle to keep up with changing algorithms and new platforms. With each platform requiring a different approach, it’s hard to build a social media strategy that effectively covers all the platforms they need.
In this guide, we explore advanced social media marketing techniques tailored to specific industries. We outline which platforms work best for each industry, helping businesses optimize their approach and stay ahead of the curve in 2025.
Industry-Specific Social Media Strategies
Ecommerce and Retail
Key Platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok
For ecommerce and retail brands, it’s best to focus your social media marketing plan on platforms that engage a general audience and come with direct shopping features. This means Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
All three platforms let you set up a social media storefront and create shoppable posts where customers can browse and buy products directly within the respective apps. TikTok Shop buyers can even discover products through a dedicated “Shop” tab where they get personalized offers and recommendations.
This simplifies the buying journey and removes barriers to purchase, resulting in increased sales. In fact, the latest social media stats show that 25% of consumers have bought something directly on social media.
On TikTok, in particular, you can even collaborate with TikTok Shop influencers to drive product discovery and direct purchases. Influencers will choose products from your TikTok Shop and create content with shoppable product links where their viewers can buy those products directly within the app.
Another effective social media marketing technique for ecommerce and retail brands is to use retargeting ads. This involves delivering personalized ads to users who have previously interacted with your brand. You can use social media retargeting to re-engage shoppers who abandoned their purchase, showed interest in specific product categories, haven’t made a purchase in a while, and so on.
Case Study
Barbour is an excellent example of an ecommerce business that benefited from Instagram’s shopping features. After implementing the platform’s shoppable product tags, the brand was able to increase their sales from Instagram by 42%. Moreover, Instagram sent 98% more traffic to the brand’s website.
Healthcare and Wellness
Key Platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube
For businesses in the healthcare and wellness industries, it’s all about building trust with your target audience. This is where it makes the most sense to leverage social media marketing tactics like patient testimonials, reviews, and video content.
You can use YouTube to share impactful video testimonials from your patients and stories from the medical experts behind your team. Meanwhile, Facebook can serve as a platform to build community, with Groups offering the perfect channel to provide healthcare advice, gauge your audience’s pain points, and engage with community members.
Additionally, it’s important for healthcare and wellness brands to maintain a strong LinkedIn presence. This is where companies can share industry news, thought leadership pieces, and original insights to build authority. Effective reputation management on the platform can help you establish your expertise and attract high-value clients.
Case Study
Charlie Health uses LinkedIn to regularly share content that helps to boost their reputation as a leading mental healthcare provider. This includes informative posts to educate their audience as well as news articles and podcast episodes featuring the company’s CEO and Co-Founder, Carter Barnhart. As a result, Charlie Health has built a solid LinkedIn presence with over 66k followers.
Tech Startups and SaaS
Key Platforms: X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube
Marketing your tech startup or SaaS solution is all about increasing user understanding to drive adoption. So the focus should be on informative content like video tutorials and live product demos, typically through YouTube.
Additionally, the tech community is highly active on platforms like X (formerly Twitter). Use it to foster a strong community around your brand and products. Engage with users through Q&A sessions, polls, and trending conversations. X could also be an excellent platform for addressing customer support questions.
In the case of tech solutions that target other businesses, LinkedIn is an excellent platform to drive awareness and engagement. You can use the platform’s advanced targeting capabilities to reach decision-makers in niche industries.
Case Study
Pimly made use of LinkedIn ads to target prospects with enticing lead magnets and ease them into the B2B sales funnel. Since the Pimly software requires a heavy financial commitment, they chose lead magnets as a less aggressive alternative to a demo or meeting invite.
LinkedIn gave them the platform to target highly relevant B2B leads and re-engage those who have previously visited the company’s website. Within five months, they managed to see double their expected results with 60 leads generated. Pimly also closed a $100,000 deal within the first two months of the campaign.
Hospitality and Tourism
Key Platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube
For businesses in the hospitality and tourism industry, it’s all about selling an aspirational lifestyle. It’s important to draw the audience in with attractive visuals and immerse them in experiences that would compel them to take a desired action.
Make the most of visual-focused platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to showcase visually stunning content so users can aspire to enjoy those experiences in real life. Put a spotlight on travel destinations or share hotel experiences in a visual format that would captivate the audience. You can even use Instagram to encourage user-generated content that would simultaneously serve as social proof while triggering FOMO (fear of missing out).
YouTube is another vital platform for brands in the hospitality and tourism department, with the ability to create immersive experiences through travel vlogs and behind-the-scenes tours. Expand your reach by collaborating with travel influencers who can share their authentic experiences and reviews to build trust.
Case Study
Klook Travel partnered with 20 creators across the U.S. and Southeast Asia to promote travel experiences in Japan. With over 100 pieces of content created on Instagram and TikTok, these creators helped to trigger FOMO and encourage their followers to book a trip to Japan with the travel company. The campaign saw significant engagement, with an average engagement rate of 1.46%.
Local Businesses and Services
Key Platforms: Facebook, Google My Business, Instagram
For local businesses and services, social media marketing should focus on getting in front of a relevant local audience. Of course, this all starts with optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing for local SEO, so your business is highly visible when people search for a related product or service in their area. It’s also important to collect tons of positive reviews to help you build trust and encourage more people to visit or buy from you.
On Facebook, you can make use of geotargeted ads to reach a local audience. This will help you engage prospects with relevant offers and boost foot traffic to your establishment.
You can also use Instagram Stories and Reels to engage your local community. Share behind-the-scenes videos of how things are done at your business or how your team is participating in the community.
Case Study
Denny’s used Facebook to show how they’re supporting those affected by Hurricane Helene. By showcasing their community involvement, the restaurant chain managed to engage local audiences and build a connection with them. The Facebook post about their Mobile Relief Diner generated over 1.8k likes with 1.6k shares. Meanwhile, they also leverage Instagram to share engaging videos of customer experiences at their diners.
Advanced Techniques for Emerging Social Platforms
Maximizing TikTok’s Viral Potential
TikTok has already amassed over 1.2 billion active users, according to the latest Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. But that’s not the only reason why brands should leverage the platform. TikTok has the potential to make things go viral — from TikTok challenges to songs to products.
Regardless of industry, brands can make use of hashtag challenges to encourage user-generated content and improve their chances of going viral. Alternatively, they can participate in trending TikTok challenges by putting a unique twist to viral videos. A popular strategy to maximize reach is by getting influencers to promote your branded hashtag challenge.
However, hashtag challenges aren’t the only way to collaborate with influencers on TikTok. With the popularity of authentic creator content, TikTok can be an excellent platform to partner with nano and micro-influencers. Engage these smaller influencers in your gifting programs and have them create authentic reviews to boost brand credibility.
You can also make use of the TikTok algorithm so that your creative content gets in front of the right people. The goal of niche targeting isn’t to become an instant hit. Rather, it allows you to gradually build up visibility and engagement within your niche until you eventually become a viral sensation.
The Gymshark 66-Day Challenge is the perfect example of a TikTok challenge that went viral. The brand encourages the fitness community to participate in a 66-day challenge and share their journey using the #gymshark66 hashtag. To date, the hashtag has over 22k posts, with many videos garnering thousands of likes.
With the brand consistently sharing this type of challenge along with creative gym-related content, they’ve since garnered over 5.7 million TikTok followers.
Leveraging Threads and Short-Form Video
Instagram Threads is another fast-growing social media platform introduced as a competitor to X (formerly Twitter). The latest Threads stats show that it has already amassed almost 200 million users after just over a year of launch.
While the platform is mostly text-based, like X, it also supports visual media formats like images and videos. So it’s the perfect place to leverage the popularity of short-form videos while simultaneously tapping into the power of an emerging social media platform. Most people are still using Threads primarily to share text-based content, with a few image posts every now and then. That means your video will stand out in people’s feeds, giving you the perfect opportunity to engage them.
See how Sephora uses short-form video to share the process of developing the Soft Services buffing bar. This behind-the-scenes glimpse is a great way to engage the audience and help them understand what goes into the products they buy.
You don’t even have to create separate videos just for Threads. Simply integrate it into your cross-platform strategy and use your Reels as short-form videos on Threads. At the time of writing this post, Instagram doesn’t yet have the option to automatically share Reels to Threads during posting. But you can use the share button once the Reel is published and share it on Threads.
Beyond short-form videos, Threads is also an excellent platform to engage your audience in authentic conversations. With the platform still being fairly new, users are highly engaged and willing to participate in relevant conversations. So you can come up with Q&A sessions or conduct polls to drive user engagement.
Leveraging Data and Analytics for Smarter Social Media Marketing
Predictive Analytics for Campaign Success
With the social media landscape moving at such rapid speed, it’s important for brands to stay on top of the latest trends and conversations. The meme you create today could easily be old news by the time you share it the next week. So a key social media marketing tip, regardless of industry, is to anticipate audience behavior and trends using predictive analytics.
This is where data comes in, allowing you to detect patterns in conversations and customer behavior to forecast future trends and events. Make use of AI-powered social listening tools like Brand24 and Sprinklr to quickly analyze billions of conversations and get real-time insights to power your predictive analytics.
Use these insights to understand what types of content people are paying attention to, which topics they’re discussing, and how they feel toward certain topics. This will then allow you to forecast trends, anticipate potential brand crises, and discover conversations that are gaining popularity. You can then inform your campaigns and social media strategies accordingly.
Companies like Brut have successfully leveraged audience analytics to identify topics of interest and adjust their content strategies accordingly. They used the Meltwater platform to dig deeper into audience conversations to understand how they behave and react to certain topics. This allowed them to make predictions about the types of stories that would interest their audience and produce content accordingly.
The Role of A/B Testing in Optimizing Campaigns
Another vital strategy for businesses across different industries is to test, test, test when it comes to your social media ads. A/B testing different aspects of your ads like your visuals, copy, and targeting, will help you see what works and what doesn’t. So you can adjust your ad creative, targeting, and platform investments accordingly.
For example, if you run several tests across Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn and find that your Instagram ads perform the best, you may want to focus your resources on the platform. Alternatively, you may run two ads with different images and see which one delivers a bigger impact.
These adjustments help you improve return on your ad investments, so your marketing dollars are put to good use. This means you can minimize spending money on ads that don’t generate the desired results.
Vestiaire Collective launched an A/B testing campaign starting with eight influential TikTok creators. Each of these creators came up with videos incorporating the brand’s desired CTA but gave it a unique angle.
They then analyzed the performance of these posts to identify the most impactful video. This was then amplified through paid advertising to further optimize reach and engagement. As a result of this campaign, Vestiaire Collective saw 4,000 new app installs with a 50% reduction in cost per install.
Advanced Reporting and Dashboards for Actionable Insights
Beyond A/B tests and predictive analytics, you need comprehensive performance data to inform various aspects of your social media marketing efforts. This includes everything from the types of content you create to the timings that work for you. Additionally, you’ll also want to attribute real business outcomes to different social media strategies.
So it’s crucial to create custom dashboards that integrate data from multiple social media platforms to get a holistic view of your performance. This includes analytics from all your social media channels as well as your Google Analytics.
You can use tools like Tableau or Google’s Looker Studio to connect multiple data sources and visualize your performance. This makes it easier to extract valuable insights and act on them.
Shiseido Japan went from manually checking each social media account or waiting on agency-provided reports to unifying all their social media analytics in one place. While they previously struggled to respond quickly to any issue, they could now get comprehensive real-time data through customized dashboards. This meant that their teams could easily validate ideas, adjust campaigns, and predict trends. As a result, their owned media account performance increased by 244%.
Enhancing Engagement with Community-Building Techniques
Building Brand Communities on Niche Platforms
All types of businesses can benefit from a connected and engaged community. And to build this community, it’s important to look beyond the mainstream channels and opt for niche platforms like Reddit, Discord, or even private Facebook Groups.
In particular, Reddit and Discord are known to drive authentic conversations on niche topics. Whether it’s a question about which diaper brand is the least likely to cause rashes or a question about whether the latest iPhone model is living up to expectations — people engage in all sorts of conversations to form their opinions and make buying decisions.
This makes them the perfect place to engage with your brand community and build trust organically. You could answer questions, address concerns, resolve problems, and more. Companies like Binance even use Discord to host an Achievement Hunt, which creates the opportunity to simultaneously engage the community while rewarding participants. With a highly engaged community, the Binance Discord server has now grown into over 111,000 members.
Real-Time Engagement and Social Listening
Another great way to engage your community is by driving real-time engagement through live audio or video sessions. Clubhouse or X Spaces are some excellent tools for this, although you can also make use of native live streaming features on various social media platforms. You can use them to host Q&A sessions, panel discussions, and feedback sessions for genuine interactions.
These types of real-time engagement tools encourage authentic, unfiltered, and unedited discussions that involve your audience. This results in a deeper brand-consumer connection, which is necessary for a thriving brand community.
X Movies used X Spaces to promote the Borderlands movie through a live session featuring the cast with Fandango at the San Diego Comic-Con. The session saw over 25k viewers tuning in during the broadcast and generated over 303k views in total.
Additionally, you can make use of social listening tools to track consumer sentiment around specific topics and campaigns. Based on these responses, you can adjust your strategy to better connect with your brand community.
Gamification and Interactive Content to Boost Engagement
There are several other ways to drive community engagement for brands on social media. This may involve the use of various social media features to create interactive content. It may also involve the use of rewards and challenges to encourage community participation.
Gamified Challenges
Social media challenges and competitions help you create gamified experiences that encourage user participation. Come up with fitness challenges, photo contests, idea contests, and more to foster the community spirit around your brand.
Quizzes and Polls
Make use of Story stickers and polling features to create interactive polls and quizzes to actively engage your audience. Have them vote their favorites or guess the correct answer to create interaction opportunities. The more they interact with your brand, the more they can feel more connected with the community.
Reward Systems
Foster a sense of belonging through loyalty programs that make customers feel like part of an exclusive community. Thank them for their loyalty with rewards that matter to them. For example, give them a chance to earn points in exchange for engaging with your content, like sharing or liking a post, creating user-generated content, or tagging friends in your posts.
Spoonflower regularly comes up with design challenges to engage its community of designers and small business owners. The brand chooses a theme, designers submit their designs, and people get to vote for their favorite. The Spoonflower brand account now has over 500k highly engaged followers on Instagram.
Mastering Paid Social Media for Maximum ROI
Advanced Targeting Techniques for Paid Ads
With unpredictable algorithms and declining reach, your organic social media efforts can only go so far. It may take years to build up the kind of reach and following that you dream of. So it’s important to accompany your organic tactics with paid social media to amplify your visibility.
However, you need to be strategic with your targeting to make sure that your ad spend is used toward reaching only the types of people you want to reach. Think: showcasing your extravagant butterfly hairclips to people who’ve previously shown an interest in quirky fashion accessories. Or promoting your fantasy football app to people who follow certain football teams and consistently interact with football-related content.
This improves the chances that they’ll find your ad relevant and engage with it. You can use lookalike audience targeting to find potential customers who share the same characteristics as your high-performing customer segments. You can also retarget users with ads tailored to their interests and needs after they’ve engaged with specific content.
Kia Germany used Facebook’s advanced targeting features to display ads to potential customers at various stages of the buying journey with an income of over €3,000. They also reached out to people on Meta apps who had previously shown an interest in electric vehicles. Additionally, they ran retargeting campaigns to connect with people who had seen their reach and video view ad set. The brand reached 18.2 million people across Facebook and Instagram and generated a 5.3-point lift in brand awareness.
Multi-Platform Ad Campaigns for Greater Reach
If you want to maximize your reach through ads, you may need to shift your focus from one platform to a multi-platform approach. This involves integrating your ads across all the platforms where your target audience is present and targeting users at different stages of the buying journey.
For instance, someone who interacted with your Facebook ad but didn’t end up buying could be retargeted with an ad on Instagram. You can also run multiple ads simultaneously across different platforms to reach your target audience effectively.
Make sure to coordinate your creative assets between all these platforms to ensure consistent messaging. This isn’t just limited to using the same visual elements but also making sure that your ad copy and calls-to-action are aligned across all your ads.
A restoration and reconstruction firm ran paid advertising campaigns across Facebook and LinkedIn to effectively generate leads. The campaign aimed to draw in business owners in need of a plan for emergency preparedness and recovery. They also ran an additional LinkedIn ad campaign targeting insurance agencies to create generate awareness. The campaign generated over 20 million impressions across the two platforms.
Using Behavioral Data for Hyper-Personalized Campaigns
The effectiveness of your social media ads depends on their relevance. If you’re delivering ads that address someone’s unique pain point or are tailored to their specific interests, there’s a greater chance of getting them to engage. This makes it crucial to deliver hyper-personalized ads tailored according to user behavior.
Analyze individual user behavior, such as their content interactions and page visits, to serve ads that are personalized to their needs or interests. You can also retarget users based on specific actions like clicking on a product or adding an item to a cart. Additionally, make use of your first-party data to get deeper insights into user preferences and create tailored content or offers.
BEARPAW used visitor data to run a dynamic catalog retargeting campaign across Facebook and Instagram. Customers were shown ads encouraging them to complete their purchases to buy something else from the winter collection. This personalized advertising approach resulted in over 58k website clicks with over $257k ad sales at a return on ad spend of 6.23.
Dominate Your Industry with Powerful Social Media Marketing
A strong social media presence is the key to setting your brand apart from the competition. Make sure to use our industry-specific social media marketing techniques to help you get started. Don’t forget the other advanced strategies highlighted above to strengthen your social media marketing efforts.
