Most social media strategies begin surprisingly late.
The first questions are often:
What should we post? How often? Should we be on TikTok? Do we need more Reels? What are our competitors doing?
Those questions matter.
Just not yet.
Before deciding what content to create, a business needs to know who it is trying to move, what that person wants, what stands in their way, what the brand should mean to them and what role marketing should play in moving them forward.
Without those answers, social media can become very busy without becoming very useful.
At Beyond Your Stay, that is why our marketing process does not start with a platform or content calendar.
It starts with direction.
That thinking became The Compass, the framework behind how we approach marketing and social media strategy for experience-led hospitality and leisure brands.
A compass does not tell you every step you will take.
It tells you which way you should be moving.
What is a social media marketing strategy?
Social media marketing is the activity.
A social media marketing strategy explains the logic underneath it.
- Who are we trying to reach?
- What are we trying to change?
- What should people understand or feel?
- Which platforms have a role in that journey?
- What kind of content should exist?
- And how will we recognise progress when it happens?
That distinction matters.
"Post three times per week" is not a strategy. "Create more video" is not a strategy. "Grow Instagram" is not a strategy either.
They are decisions inside one.
Most current social media marketing frameworks correctly include goals, audience research, platform selection, content pillars, cadence and measurement.
We agree with those elements.
We simply start one question earlier:
What story is the customer already living before they find the brand?
North: find the customer's story before creating the content
One of the central ideas behind Donald Miller's Building a StoryBrand 2.0 is that the company should not cast itself as the hero.
The customer is the character moving through the story.
The business becomes the guide.
StoryBrand organises that idea through a character, a problem, a guide, a plan, a call to action and the consequences of success or failure.
That framework influences the way we think about hospitality marketing.
A hotel might think:
we have comfortable rooms, a good breakfast and a quiet location.
The guest might be thinking:
we have barely seen each other properly for weeks and need two days away.
A restaurant might think:
we cook seasonally and have an open kitchen.
The guest might be thinking:
I want my anniversary to feel different from another normal dinner out.
A wellness retreat might think:
we have treatment rooms, saunas and packages.
The visitor might be thinking:
I want a few hours in which nothing is asking for my attention.
An attraction might think in rides, tickets and opening hours.
A family might be thinking about the kind of day their children will still be talking about in the car home.
Both perspectives matter.
But they do not make equally useful starting points for marketing.
This is why The Compass separates a customer's problem into three layers.
The external problem
The practical thing they need solved.
The internal problem
How their current situation makes them feel.
The philosophical problem
Why they believe things should be better than they currently are.
A guest may externally need somewhere to stay.
Internally, they may feel exhausted.
Philosophically, they may believe that a weekend away should actually feel like getting away.
The room solves the external problem.
The full experience can resolve something deeper.
That difference shapes much stronger marketing.
Within The Compass, this is North: Find the Story. It asks who the customer is, what they want, what is in the way and what transformation they are looking for.
Content comes later.
East: decide what you want to mean
Understanding the customer gives you another problem to solve.
Why should they remember you?
That is the work of positioning.
Target audiences are often defined through demographics because demographics are easy to document.
- Age.
- Location.
- Income.
- Household.
Those details can help.
But they rarely explain the entire decision.
Two people of exactly the same age and income can want completely different experiences from the same weekend.
One guest may value silence above almost everything.
Another wants to be in the middle of the city.
One diner might choose a restaurant because of technical cooking.
Another wants a place where five friends can lose track of time.
Psychographics therefore matter.
What does the customer value? What are they tired of? What worries them? What do they hesitate over? What do they need to believe before choosing? What evidence reduces that uncertainty?
Once those questions become clearer, positioning becomes more precise.
"Boutique hotel" is a category. "Fine dining restaurant" is a category. "Wellness retreat" is a category.
They describe what the business is.
They do not establish why it should matter.
The same problem appears in brand language.
If every hotel is personal, every restaurant is passionate and every spa offers relaxation, those words stop creating much distinction.
Good positioning needs edges.
What do existing guests repeatedly notice? What do competitors all say? What space is genuinely yours to occupy?
Inside The Compass, this is East: Choose Your Position.
Know who you are trying to move.
Then decide what you want them to remember.
South: turn the story into a social media system
Only now do platforms become useful.
Not because Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or LinkedIn are unimportant.
Because they deserve a reason to exist.
We often look at the customer journey as:
Discover → Feel → Trust → Consider → Act
Someone seeing a Reel for the first time is not necessarily ready to book, visit or buy.
They may simply be discovering that the place exists.
Another piece of content may make the experience feel relevant.
A founder story may build trust.
A customer review may reduce doubt.
A website may answer the practical questions that appear during consideration.
A campaign or clear next step can then support action.
Different content therefore has different jobs.
And different platforms can too.
Instagram might function as the visual home of an experience-led brand, helping people discover and feel it.
TikTok
TikTok might be more useful for discovery, personality and less polished moments.
LinkedIn might build authority, partnerships, hospitality employer branding or B2B consideration.
Facebook may still matter for an established local community or a particular demographic.
There is no universally correct platform mix.
The better question is:
What job does this platform perform for this audience?
The same logic changes content pillars.
"Rooms" is a subject. "Food" is a subject. "Behind the scenes" is a subject.
A strategic content pillar needs a purpose.
The Compass uses four useful functions as a starting lens:
Desire
Show the future the customer wants.
Authority
Show the thinking, craft and care behind the experience.
Humanity
Show the people and personality behind the place.
Proof
Use real experiences and evidence to reduce uncertainty.
Those functions can work across very different businesses.
For a hotel, Desire might be a slow morning in the forest.
For a restaurant, it might be the table after the second bottle of wine arrives.
For wellness, the moment the treatment-room door closes.
For leisure, the anticipation just before the ride begins.
The subject changes.
The strategic purpose remains.
Feature becomes moment, feeling and desire
The Compass also uses a simple progression:
Feature → Moment → Feeling → Desire
Take a terrace.
The feature is the terrace.
The moment is the first drink outside as the evening begins.
The feeling is that nobody needs to leave yet.
The desire becomes:
I want to spend Friday evening there.
Or take a hotel window.
The feature is the view.
The moment is opening the curtains in the morning.
The feeling might be space.
The desire becomes:
I want to wake up there.
Features are still useful.
Customers need to understand what exists.
But marketing becomes more persuasive when the customer can understand what those features allow them to experience.
That is where social media content starts carrying a story instead of simply documenting a product.
West: measure whether people are actually moving
Once content is published, strategy can quickly collapse into a few visible numbers.
- Views.
- Likes.
- Followers.
- Reach.
Those numbers provide information.
They do not provide meaning on their own.
A discovery video may do its job when it reaches many relevant new people and holds their attention.
A piece of educational content might succeed through saves and shares.
A trust-building founder post might lead to meaningful profile visits or direct messages.
A conversion-focused post may reach far fewer people but produce actual enquiries, reservations or bookings.
The metric should follow the job.
Inside The Compass, we therefore look at signals across the journey.
Discover
Reach, non-follower reach, views and watch-through.
Feel
Watch time, shares, saves and comments that show recognition.
Trust
Profile visits, quality comments, saves and DMs.
Consider
Website visits, link clicks, availability checks and meaningful enquiries.
Act
Bookings, reservations, qualified leads or calls.
Not every business should use exactly the same scorecard.
The principle matters more.
Judge the content against the reason it was created.
Then use the results to learn.
What should stay? What had the right idea but weak execution? What keeps consuming effort without moving the right people? What is one useful thing to test next?
Strategy is not a set of decisions you make once.
It is a direction that becomes more precise as you read the signals.
The Compass is the layer before the content calendar
The Compass is built around four directions:
North → Story
Understand the customer, their desire, their problem and the transformation they want.
East → Position
Decide who you want to move and what you want to be remembered for.
South → System
Turn that direction into platforms, content pillars, formats and a clear role for each touchpoint.
West → Signals
Measure whether people are actually moving in the direction you intended.
The order matters.
Starting with South creates familiar questions:
How often should we post? Which trend should we use? Should we be on TikTok? What do we put in next week's calendar?
When North and East are already clear, those decisions become easier to judge.
Does this content belong to the customer's story? Does it reinforce the position we want to occupy? Does this platform have a defined role? Which part of the journey does it support? What should happen if this particular piece of content works?
If none of those questions have an answer, the business may not have a content problem.
It may have a direction problem.
A strong marketing strategy is not there to generate the largest possible list of things to do.
It should make it easier to decide what not to do.
Because social media marketing should not begin with the feed.
It should begin with the person on the other side of it.
