A Guide to Creating a Successful Social Media Marketing Plan
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Loading... - Brenda Gregory
- 24 May 2022
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Social media reached critical mass well over a decade ago and continues to expand. Regardless, some businesses still question the benefits of using it to drive brand awareness and business.
Those who don’t appreciate the benefits of social media marketing are those without a plan, a list of goals, and a full understanding of the metrics.
It’s true social media is not as direct as other traditional inbound marketing strategies, but social media’s efficacy as a business growth tool is undeniable. The key is knowing and understanding the ins and outs of building and maintaining a quality social media strategy.
Once you’ve taken the time to create and execute a social media marketing plan, the benefits will speak for themselves.
Follow these steps to create an effective social media marketing plan:
· Run a social media audit
· Evaluate your competitors
· Identify your target audience
· Set measurable goals and make a plan
Overview: What is a social media marketing plan?
A social media marketing plan encapsulates audience research, content ideas, posting schedule, and goals meant to drive brand awareness, website traffic, and conversions. Think of it as a subset of your overarching marketing plan.
It’s a collection of all you hope to do and achieve on social media to prosper your business. It benchmarks successes, failures, and improvements.
If you’re a freelance social media marketer, this plan is essential to develop winning social media proposals for your clients.
How to create a social media marketing plan
Follow the four steps below to create a social media marketing plan, using research, evaluation, and benchmarking.
Step 1: Perform a social media audit
Before crafting your social media marketing plan, you must understand your audience, their demographics, interests, and behavior patterns.
With this information, you can shape your marketing goals without throwing everything at the wall, hoping something will stick. A social media audit is a perfect way to ensure you’re not wasting your time with useless content.
I’ve written a detailed social media audit guide and created a fully functional audit template that will help you organize your data. Take advantage of these resources if you need them.
Tips for conducting a social media audit:
Social media metrics are meaningless unless you understand what they reveal. Use these tips to determine the value of your social media content.
· Identify your most popular content types: A social media audit is not just an inventory of your social media data. More than that, it identifies what types of social media content were successful and why. Then duplicate and amplify your success with similar strategies.
· Match up posts with spikes in website traffic: This tip goes hand-in-hand with the first. Social media has one goal: build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. Cross reference your website analytics with your social media data to identify content that sends the kinds of leads you are looking for.
Step 2: Evaluate what your competitors are doing
Your competitors are your adversaries, but also an invaluable resource in developing a social media plan. Learn from their successes and acquire tried and true ideas that’ll help you boost your social media efforts. Often their efforts will inspire new marketing content ideas you’d never thought of before.
Tips for evaluating your competition:
· Identify their successful content types: Obviously, you won’t have access to their social media analytics, but it’s pretty obvious which content types are getting more traffic than others based on the numbers of likes, comments, shares, and retweets you see on each individual post.
· Identify their comparative advantage: Once you’ve found successful posts, determine what makes their content successful. Is it post descriptions, images, videos, or their willingness to respond to their comments? Whatever it is, try to find what makes their content different from yours.
Step 3: Identify your target audience
Now that you understand your current metrics and where your competition stands, use that information to develop your newly formed target audience profile, including:
· Age range
· Job title
· Income range
· Location
The demographics analytics contained in your social media audit will indicate who is actually visiting your page. If these demographics align with your target profile, then it’s clear your messaging is on point. But if your demographics are way off, it’s clear something has to change with your marketing plan.
Tips for identifying your target audience:
Define your audience and you can create quality content that’ll spark interest in your website, product, or service. These tips will identify your target audience and find what they are looking for:
· Create an audience persona: Your audience persona summarizes who you are hoping to target, including the who, what, where, when, and why of your audience.
· Conduct a survey: Surveys are a perfect way to gather audience insights to ensure the techniques and methods you’re using appeal to your target audience.
