Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the ever-evolving world of social media? Are you baffled by the array of platforms, features, and trends that seem to change at the speed of light? If so, you're not alone. Many businesses, big and small, grapple with the challenges of crafting an effective social media marketing plan.
With every click, like, and share having immense potential, it's essential to ask yourself: How can I harness the power of social media to fuel my success? The answer lies in a well-structured and tailor-made plan that aligns with your goals and resources.
Our aim here is to equip you with a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint to help you get started. If you are in need of a robust social media marketing plan, you have come to the right place.
Why Is It Important To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan?
Before getting into the hows, it’s important to gauge the why’s. Without having a clear starting point and clarity about creating a plan, you won't be able to make it work for your social media marketing agency. Hence, let's first understand the reasons for having it and then start creating one.
Creating a social media marketing plan is crucial for several important reasons:
Gives Clarity Of Goals
Source: Pinterest
A well-structured plan helps you define clear, specific, and measurable goals for your social media efforts. It lets you establish clear and achievable expectations, whether it's about increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, boosting engagement, generating leads, increasing sales, or providing customer support. This blueprint of SMART goals lets you remain consistent throughout the process, negating any diversions.
Helps Save Your Time
Having a strong social media marketing plan saves your brand/ agency from a lot of last-minute hassle. Since social media marketing is a trial-and-error process, you may miss out on one thing or two while considering other important factors. A strong social media marketing plan saves you time and energy in identifying that. With a streamlined content calendar as a part of your marketing plan, you need not hesitate about your next post. Social media automation tools can save that time and automate scheduling posts on different social media channels.
Tweak And Adapt Over Time
While a plan provides structure, it should also allow for flexibility. Implementing a social media marketing plan allows you to track different social metrics and compare the results with your competitor's performance to help you understand what's not working. Thanks to social media analytics tools that let you evaluate your past performance against the industry benchmarks and tweak and adapt over time. With an evolving digital landscape, your plan should also be adaptable to technological changes, audience behavior, and industry trends.
Strategic Resource Allocation For Different Socials
Social media marketing can consume valuable resources, including time, manpower, and budget. Besides, without a plan, your social media efforts may lack direction and consistency. A social media marketing plan can help you prioritize and allocate your resources efficiently, ensuring you're investing in activities that significantly impact your marketing objectives. It can also help you choose the right platforms that align with your audience and goals so that you don't waste resources on platforms that don't yield results.
Steps to Create A Social Media Marketing Plan
Creating an effective social media marketing plan involves several key steps. Here's a comprehensive guide to help you get started:
Step 1: Audit Your Current Social Performance
Whether you are just starting out or have already been in the industry for a long period of time, it's important to first audit the current social performance before starting anything firsthand. Without knowing where you stand currently and what changes you need to make it better, it's not ideal to strategize prior to that. It is as Beth Comstock iterates,“Know thyself. Know the customer. Innovate.”
Revisit your past social media marketing plan and seek answers to questions like
- What content worked and what didn't work for us?
- Which networks are giving the maximum ROI?
- Which are the resources we continue investing in?
- What we didn't do, and what did our competitors do?
- What should we keep or stop doing?
This audit will serve as a baseline for your future strategies and let you identify what's working and what needs improvement.
Step 2: Set Achievable SMART Goals
A business plan cannot ideally start without an action plan. You need to set some achievable SMART goals first to proceed towards achieving them. This will give you a clear perspective of your goals for the next 6 months. For instance, if you intend to boost your sales by 10% in the next 6 months, your social media marketing plan will comprise goals that lead straight to social selling strategies or online paid promotions.
This strategic breakdown will help you maintain your focus and make the goals attainable and realistic.
Some of the most common social media marketing goals can be:
- Generating new leads
- Increasing website traffic
- Brand awareness
- More sales conversions
- Boosting engagement
Step 3: Find Your Ideal Target Audience
This is a very crucial step, as your entire social media marketing plan will revolve around it. Your marketing plan is primarily formed on the basis of your target audience’s needs and preferences. This is why you should start creating `buyer personas to define them.
Start by analyzing their:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Pain points
- Online behaviors
- Choice of platform
- Preferred format
Along with these, answer questions like:
- What type of content do they prefer?
- Which is the social media platform they actively use?
- What’s their pattern of engagement?
- What is their gender, age, and lifestyle?
Having a clear understanding of these factors will further let you decide which social platforms you should focus on and what content you must curate for optimum results.
Step 4: Establish Metrics And Social Media KPIs
The purpose of establishing KPIs and metrics is simple. It is as Lord Kelvin iterates,“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that align with your marketing goals will help you have a clear perspective and allow you to measure progress. It helps you gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns by tracking several metrics like engagement rate, reach, clicks, conversions, and customer sentiment analysis.
However, the social media KPIs you should consider monitoring are:
- Website Traffic
- Conversion rates
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Profile impressions and reach
- Followers
- Engagement rate
- Clicks
- Audience growth rate
- Organic Page Views
- Hashtag performance
- Social shares
These KPIs will let you dig into data and see if your efforts match your vision.
Step 5: Curate Engaging Content
There is no hiding here! Your social media marketing plan hinges on your content. By this time, you have rightfully followed the above steps; you are sure to know what type of content would resonate with your target audience's preferences.
However, even with all the homework that you have done, curating content can be a little overwhelming as you can't be too promotional or too random. To get that perfect balanced content, create a content calendar that outlines the type of content you'll post, the frequency of posting, and the themes you'll explore.
Here are a few ideas to consider:
- Visual content with images, videos, infographics
- Tips, how-to guides, informative articles
- Polls, contests, and questions to spark conversations
- User-generated content
- Live Videos
- Memes
- AMA sessions
- “Behind-the-Scenes” Videos and Photos
- Infographics
- GIFs
- Podcasts
- Carousel content
- Themes
- Interviews
Besides this, you can also repurpose your old content with the highest engagement and create an infographic out of it. You can take inspiration from these content ideas to build a strong online presence.
Step 6: Pick Up The Right Channels And Best Posting Times
With around 4.74 billion social media users worldwide, not all social media platforms are created equal, and each has its unique user base and content style. Select the platforms that align with your audience and goals. Some popular options include:
- Facebook: With 36.8% users worldwide, Facebook has built-in shopping tools, support videos, and communities,
- Instagram: With 263.8 million users, it is great for visual content and reaching younger audiences, beauty transformations, or short behind-the-scenes videos.
- Twitter: With 544 million monthly active users in total worldwide, it is suitable for real-time updates, trending topics, and engaging with a broad audience.
- LinkedIn: With 40% monthly active users on LinkedIn, it is perfect for B2B marketing and professional networking.
- Pinterest: With 5.4% of people using Pinterest every month, it is ideal for sharing visually appealing and lifestyle-oriented content.
Remember that it's better to excel on a few platforms than to spread yourself too thin across many. However, regardless of the channel you choose, it's important for you to decide and asses the best times to post on social media for your brand/agency.
Statusbrew recommends these posting times:
- Instagram: Between 10 A.M. & 3 P.M. is the best time of day to post on Instagram.
- Facebook: 9 A.M. for higher visibility as people are just starting with their work and tend to go online.
- LinkedIn: 9 A.M. until 5 P.M, since it's the start of most people's workday.
- Twitter: Maximum engagement is 9 A.M. for all days of the week.
- TikTok: Almost throughout the week.
Step 7: Invest In A Social Media Management Tool
With a consistent busy schedule and other managerial tasks, it becomes difficult for social media managers to manually manage a content calendar and analytics. It leads to burnout and mismanagement of tasks as well.
If you face similar challenges, consider pivoting to a social media management tool to streamline your marketing efforts. Here, we proudly present Statusbrew as an industry-leading social media management suite that helps you automate, engage, and analyze your social efforts.
Being perfect for businesses of all sizes, Statusbrew is the closest alternative to Sprout Social, which lets you manage your community from a unified inbox and gauge how you stack up against your competitors. Besides this, our AI comment moderation is the first of its kind that lets you tackle the spam, bots, and trolls in your comments section.
But that's not all! What's more in store? Check out below.
Intriguing right? So, stop wondering and reach out for a FREE demo today!
Examples Of Social Media Marketing Plans
Certainly! Here are 4 real-life examples of social media marketing plans from well-known brands:
Zomato
Zomato, a leading food delivery and restaurant discovery platform, strategically utilizes various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, and YouTube, as a part of its marketing plans. It mainly focuses on its content strategy, leveraging “moment marketing” and curating witty social posts out of any trending topics, events, and holidays. For instance, check out how they have utilized the occasion of Independence Day to hook its target audience through humor and relatability.
Dove
Dove sets a prime example of a brand using social media to promote a message that goes beyond product advertising. Dove's campaign aims to challenge beauty stereotypes and promote self-confidence. They share empowering and relatable content on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, featuring real women of various body types and ethnicities. Dove takes major initiatives to feature diverse models and real people in their campaigns to challenge beauty standards and promote inclusivity. The brand creates heartwarming and emotional videos that resonate with their audience and foster a strong emotional connection.
Durex India
“Content is king,” and Durex India’s content does the best job of proving that! Durex India adopts a witty and playful tone in its content, focusing on sexual health and relationships. They often use humor and puns to make the conversation around sexual health more approachable and primarily target their target audience on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The USP of Durex India is that they have included various sexual innuendos in their marketing strategy whilst keeping it subtle and funny. Here’s one witty tweet to check out!
One small step for partners, one giant leap for pleasure-kind! ?
— Durex India (@DurexIndia) July 16, 2023
Click the link to buy - https://t.co/UvF1SLDyg8#DurexRealFeel #Chandrayaan3 #NotACondom pic.twitter.com/UxcsjD7IuI
Taco Bell
Taco Bell understands its target market well, which is why its social media plan revolves around creating buyer personas that match its strategy and niche. It focuses on targeting a youthful audience on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok and creates the best content effortlessly. Taco Bell is big on paid promotions and develops stellar social media campaigns to promote new menu items, limited-time offers, and special promotions, enticing followers to visit their restaurants. Here’s one example of a unique promotional post.
Kick-Starting Your Social Media Marketing Plan
Well, nothing is still final! Just as social media is fast, it's unpredictable simultaneously. There is no single best method to make your mark in the digital world. The competition is high, and so is making a digital footprint.
But calm down, folks! There’s nothing to be disheartened about. While there is no single best method, that doesn't mean you cannot make yours. As new networks emerge, your business will go through periods of change as well. Embrace that and review and adjust as needed.
If you require any assistance during the review and analysis process, pivot to Statusbrew and see for yourself how we can help you in different ways. Take our assistance today and see the difference yourself!
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