A social media marketing plan lists everything you want to do and hope to accomplish on social media. It directs your behaviors and informs you whether you are successful or failing.
The more detailed your strategy, the more effective it will be. Keep it brief. Make it as lofty and broad as possible without becoming unreachable or impossible to measure.
We’ll lead you through a nine-step process for developing your own winning social media marketing strategy in this post.
Build a social media marketing plan by following these steps:
Step 1: Determine social media marketing goals aligned with corporate objectives.
Step 2: Find out everything you can about your target demographic.
Step 3: Research your competition.
Step 4: Conduct a social media assessment.
Step 5: Create accounts and enhance profiles
Step 6: Look for ideas.
Step 7: Create a content calendar for social media.
Step 8: Produce engaging content
Step 9: Monitor performance and change your strategy as needed.
Step 1: Determine social media marketing goals aligned with corporate objectives:
Set S.M.A.R.T. objectives.
The first stage in developing a winning plan is defining your objectives and goals. You can’t gauge performance or return on investment if you don’t have goals (R.O.I.).
Each of your objectives should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
The S.M.A.R.T. aim framework is as follows. It will direct your actions and ensure that they result in tangible business results.
Step 2: Find out everything you can about your target demographic:
Make audience personas.
Understanding your audience and what they want to see on social media is critical. This allows you to develop material they will enjoy, remark on, and share. It’s also essential to convert your social media followers into clients for your company.
When it comes to your target consumer, you should know things like age, location, average income, typical work title or industry, interests, etc.
Step 3: Research your competition:
Because your competitors are almost definitely using social media, you may learn from their actions.
Conduct a competitive analysis.
A competitive analysis enables you to discover who your competitors are and what they excel at (and not so well). You’ll get a clear sense of what’s needed in your business, which will help you create your own social media objectives. It will also help you find opportunities. Perhaps one of your competitors is strong on Facebook but hasn’t put much effort on Twitter or Instagram.
Rather than luring followers away from a dominant player, you may choose to focus your efforts on networks where your target population is neglected. Utilize social media listening.
Another approach to maintain tabs on your competition is through social listening.
step 4: Conduct a social media assessment:
Take stock of your efforts so far if you’re already using social media. Consider the following questions:
What works and what doesn’t?
Who is conversing with you?
Step 5: Create accounts and enhance profiles:
Choose which networks to utilize
.You will need to describe your strategy for each social network as you pick which ones to use.
Angela Purcaro, Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, told eMarketer, “For our cosmetic lessons… we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories.” Twitter, on the other hand, is for customer service.”
Step 6: Look for ideas:
While your brand must be unique, you can draw inspiration from other successful businesses on social media.
Success tales on social media
These are generally found in the business area of the social network’s website. (For example, here’s Facebook’s.)
Case studies can provide valuable insights that you can apply to your own social media strategy.
\Accounts and campaigns with multiple awards
Step 7: Create a content calendar for social media:
Of course, sharing quality material is vital, but it’s also critical to have a plan in place for when you’ll distribute information to achieve the most impact.
Your social media content calendar should also include time spent interacting with the audience.
These are frequently found in the business area of the social network’s site.
Make a posting schedule.
Your social media content calendar specifies the days and times when you will publish different content on each channel. It’s an ideal location for organizing your social media activities, including photos, link sharing, re-shares of user-generated content, and blog articles and videos. It involves both regular posting and material for social media initiatives.
Step 8: Produce engaging content:
Remember those mission statements you developed in Step 5 for each channel? It’s time to go a little deeper now, i.e., present some examples of the type of content you’ll post on each network to meet your mission.
Keep your material aligned with the objective of each network; Show other stakeholders (if applicable) what kind of content they can anticipate seeing on each web.
Step 9: Monitor performance and change your strategy as needed:
Your company’s social media plan is an important document, and you can’t expect to get it right the first time. As you begin to implement your approach and monitor your results, you may discover that specific techniques may not work as expected while others perform even better.
Examine the performance metrics
In addition to the analytics provided by each social network (see Step 2), you can utilize UTM parameters to follow social visitors as they navigate your website, allowing you to determine which social media posts are bringing the most visitors to your website.