We all know that social media marketing is essential for developing your brand, communicating with your target audience, and generating traffic to your website.
90% of social media users have interacted with a brand or Company through social media.
However, we also know (and perhaps want to ignore) that without a defined plan, any internet marketing efforts you undertake are a waste of time.
You simply cannot start promoting your business or service on social media without first creating a strategy.
A social media marketing plan is essential to making sense of your online marketing efforts by helping you define your goals, target audience, and main goals for the year. Once you set your goals and objectives and come up with a plan to achieve them, you will be able to track the return on investment of your web marketing activities and increase your efforts for years to come.
Of course, it takes time and can be frustrating for anyone just starting out, but strategic thinking is vital to achieving quantifiable results.
Getting started and figuring out how to put your strategy on paper can be difficult. So here are our eight steps to creating a social media plan.
Before we start…
In this piece, we’ll discuss the terms “strategy” and “campaign,” but do you know the difference? Your social media plan is the big picture; it outlines the “who, what, when, where, and how” of your online marketing. Meanwhile, social media strategy is part of your overall plan. You can run many campaigns in a year; each focused on a specific message or goal, such as a product launch campaign.
Step 1 – Primary Objective
To get started, you need to set your main goals and make sure they are quantifiable and achievable. Brand exposure, website traffic, engagement, conversions, and video views are examples of common, quantifiable social media strategy goals. Determine what you want to achieve and create time-bound goals, such as increasing website views by 50% year-over-year or gaining 100 new followers in three months. Don’t worry if your goals are a little off; compiling these stats for the first time can be difficult, so be sure to come back to them next time.
Step 2 – Target Audience
As part of your branding efforts, you will have defined your audience and created personas, but now that you know them, you should define them in the context of the Internet world. What are they interested in? When it comes to social media advertising, having this information will be really valuable and put you in the best position to take advantage of the vast targeting options available to you. You can target social advertising using the following:
Place – where they currently reside or have previously resided
Interests – anything they’ve expressed a desire for or which pages they like
Age, parental status, education, and relationship status
Even life milestones like a recent wedding, moving or returning from a trip a week ago.
Step 3 – Important messages
Then identify the main message of your overarching strategy. This means condensing your main statements, “who we are and what we do” of your Company or brand, into short, concise lines. These are the messages you will try to convey in all your social media activities.
Phase 4 – Important Platforms
Choose which social sites to use: will you focus on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or TikTok? Consider where your audience is located and what platforms they use. A strong presence on multiple platforms is a valuable asset – for example, it can help you dominate the first page of search engine results for your brand – but there’s no point in building a profile on a platform your audience doesn’t use or creating an account and then abandoning it. Remember that each platform has a unique purpose, style, and audience, so make sure it’s right for your Company.
Step 5: Strategic activities
This is where we get into the specifics of your strategy: organizing your social media activity. Research your primary message, goals, and audience, then outline the actions, initiatives, and activities you will do to achieve those goals. You achieve this by setting a goal and strategically preparing a specific effort to achieve it. Will you be participating in social listening? Would influencer marketing help you reach your target audience? Blogging can potentially help generate visitors to your website. There’s a lot to get excited about here, but always keep your goals, audience, and core message in mind.
Step 6 – Create a plan
You then need to plan your social media marketing campaigns for the entire year. Identify critical periods for your business, consider holidays or events you want to integrate, plan when to launch certain campaigns, and set aside time to evaluate activities. It’s helpful to see it as a year-round calendar.
Step 7: Create the content
Now is the time to develop the material necessary to implement your strategy: blogs, photos, videos, graphics, and so on. Make sure your content is valuable, high quality, and suitable for each platform. In addition to different forms of content, there are differences in tone, copywriting, and messaging for each channel. Consider your content strategy: what types of blogs will you create, will you include user-generated content, and how will you reuse evergreen content for different purposes? Schedule time to develop content at different times of the year.
Step 8 – Implementation
Now you are ready to implement your plan on all your social platforms! This is where you put your plan into action by following your marketing calendar, publishing content, posting advertising, and executing planned events. You can look at social media scheduling apps like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and Later to help you with the onboarding process.