11 Steps to Creating the Perfect Social Media Marketing Plan

Table of Contents

It is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media network to achieve marketing, branding and sales goals. Thus, it involves activities like posting text messages, images, videos and other content to drive traffic to websites by engaging the right audience. It also includes a paid form of marketing.

What are the 6 types of social media?

Social Networks. Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn.
Bookmarking Sites. Examples: Pinterest, Flipboard, Diggs.
Social news. Examples: Digg.
Media Sharing. Examples: Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo.
Microblogging. Examples: Twitter, Facebook.
Blog comments and forums.
Social Review Sites.
Community Blogs

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The main reason that makes social media marketing plan an effective means of reaching the consumers is because digital consumers spend at least 3 hours on social media. So it is an important avenue to showcase your products online and eventually sell the products to interested customers.

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The first and foremost activity before you begin on the social media marketing plan is set your business goals.

Questions to be answered are :

What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing plan ?
Who is your target audience?
Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?

For example, travel and ecommerce business can be promoted on Instagram and interest as it is visual based busines.A business-to-business or marketing company might find in Twitter or Linkedin more useful.

Whatever maybe your business goals For example increasing website traffic, raising brand awareness, creating brand identity and improving communication and customer interaction. The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve your marketing goal on your agenda.

Ready to get started with marketing on social media? Read further.

Social media Content Planning– It is important to do the keyword research to find what the customer is searching for and also do the competitive research to find what other related businesses are doing to engage and interest the audience.

Great Social Content: It is known that content is the king in the online marketing platform including social media. One must post regular and unique content that offer truly valuable information that the customers will find helpful and interesting. It could be social media images, videos, infographic, and simply an article to maintain a relationship with the online community.

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A Consistent Brand Image

Building a brand image with the help of social media enables to your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media plaforms. While each platform has its own unique style and voice , yours business’s core identity must be consistent

Social media marketing is best to channel and share your content with your readers. Once you have a sufficient number of followers on social media, you’ll be able to reach your audience instantly every time you have great content to post online. Hence content marketing and social media marketing benefit each other to achieve their target.

Tracking Competitors

It is important to spy on your competitors as they provide valuable information on keyword research and other social media marketing insight. If your competitors are using certain social media channel which seems to be working for them. You can also follow the same but by doing better than your competitors.

Measuring Success with Analytics —

It is not possible to determine the success of your social media marketing plan without tracking data. Hence, for this purpose Google Analytics is useful tool to measure the success of the marketing strategy. This can be done by attaching tracking tags to social media marketing campaigns to monitor performance of your content.

Understand and Find Your Audience

The first step in creating good social media marketing for business is to understand and find your audience for your product. It is necessary to focus the audience demographics to find out who your ideal customer is and which social media platforms they visit. If you already a great buyer persona then it lot easier to promote otherwise you have to build your social media strategy from the scratch to create new one.

Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

To market your products and services well it is required to know who your target customer is. The better you define your ideal customer it is easier to sell your products or services to them.

For example : If you have identified you target market as physical fitness then this not provide sufficient insight if you want promote a product on weight loss. So an ideal customer would a person who is overweight, lives in United States , aged between 30 to 60 and is earning over $100000 and uses Facebook.

Capture the information below to help you create a highly focused customer avatar:

Age
Location
Career/Job Title
Income/Finances
Purchase Behavior
Goals/Challenges/Pain Points
Most Frequented Social Network
Backstory
Lifestyle

There are a lot of social media platforms on internet and you don’t have to join all of them. Just select the ones that are relevant to you and your audience.

Claim Profiles and Make Branding Seamless

Brands need to deliver the same experience from one social media profile to the another, both visually, textual and tonewise. This is important for brand recognition.

One of the best ways to make brand seamless is by optimizing each of your profiles.

As lot of time is spent on creating good and relevant content and scheduling your social post and it is equally important to focus on the information included in each of your profiles.

Your profile should be able to speak about your brand and it should have relevant visuals and compelling copy.

1. Complete All Sections of Your Profile:

Fill out your profiles completely. Every field for information is an opportunity for you talk about your business better. You can describe what you do, what your business offers, and how you can add immense value to your customer’s lives.

2. Have a Consistent Brand Image:

If you are using picture on one channel then use the same picture on all the platforms. For example: same picture to be used in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

3. Add Keywords for Enhanced SEO:

Make a list of Keywords to used be for Search Engine Optimization. You can also use this in all sections of your profile like your bio copy, experiences, interest, photo names carefully to help boost your search engine optimization.

3.Define Success Metrics

It is important to set your business goal before you start your journey of social media marketing . For better results it is necessary to measure the metrics to understand the areas of improvement and subsequent measures to be taken. You can also have goal on the order of importance like primary and secondary goals. Your goal should be business oriented and not just likes, shares and comments. The metrics can be as follows:

Drive website traffic
Raise brand awareness
Generate new leads
Boost brand engagement
Nurture leads
Establish authority and expertise in the industry
Build a community around your brand

4.Analyze Competition

To make your campaign more successful it is necessary to run an efficient competitive analysis to get inspiration and ideas to boost your own social strategy. But it has to be unique content. You have focus on the most engaging content that is popular within your own social circle and those of your competitors as both have similar ideal buyer personas. You need ask yourself the following questions:

What are your competitors talking about, and do those topics result in high audience engagement?
Which marketing channels are your competitors using, and are they finding success in those channels?
Are there any areas in your social strategy where you are outperforming your competitors?

You do this you simply do a Google search to spot your competitors. This can be done by typing the important keywords and industry terms. The result that you get organically and through Google Ads is your competition.

5.Determine Your Brand Voice

It is know that different brands have different voices and social media is a unique opportunity to stand out from the masses. You need to find creative tactics to help you stand out positively and not being sarcastic. . Creating a brand voice will also allow you to maintain a consistent voice among all your social media channels and help you come up with the right content that attracts your audience the most of the time.

It is important to do a complete audit of your social presence so that you know where you stand, and what your weaknesses and strengths are. By doing you will be able to understand what works and what doesn’t work like how much of old content should remain and what should be deleted. You will be able to determine if it requires a full social media rebrand or just modifying and tweaking the existing brand would be sufficient. You need also focus on SEO and web structure.

The areas which require attention is as follows:

Which social platforms are you active on?
Are those networks optimized? (this includes cover images, photos, bio, URL, etc.)
Which social networks are bringing the most value to your business?
How do your company’s profiles fare when compared to your competitors?
What types of posts resonate the most with your audience and receive the most engagement?

So here are the seven steps to follow to help you define a perfect social media marketing for business

1. Brainstorm Content Ideas:

You need to think about content ideas that can entice and engage your audience. You can highlight your business areas which are doing well by turning that into engaging content as well as you can also reformat and repurpose popular content for social media channels.

2. Choose Your Content Types:

When selecting the right content types to use, opt for content that will not only keep your audience engaged, but also benefit your brand the most.

Examples of the most popular types of content to use on social media include:

Interactive content
Videos
Live streaming
Quizzes
User-generated content
…and much more.

3. Create a List of Relevant Keywords:

Your next step is to collate all the relevant keywords associated with your brand and use them in your content creating process as well as when sharing your content. You can also participate in social media listening to help identify keywords that are most often used.

4. Create and Curate Engaging Content:

Content is the king on social media, and it should be your top priority to create good quality and engaging content. Now that you are aware that who your target customer is, and you’ve used that information to create a social media marketing plan, it should be easy for you to start creating and curating engaging content.

5. Optimize Your Content:

Your content needs to be optimized so that your content is visible to the audience in today’s overcrowded social arena. It can be done by following some tactics like shorten links, add hashtags, include images and so on. These tactics will help you maximize your reach and boost audience engagement.

6. Decide How Often You Should Post:

It is important you stay active on the social media platform and it can done by posting information frequently.

Facebook – Once or twice per day

Twitter – Three to ten times per day
Instagram – Once or twice per day
LinkedIn – Once or twice per day
Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week
Pinterest – Five to ten times per day

7. Find Optimal Posting Times:

Research has shown that posts done on certain time of a day yields better engagement on social media. So you need to experiment with different times when starting out. After posting for a week you can find out which time is the best suited for posting.

9.Post and Review Performance

10.Revise Strategy

11. Monitor and Evolve

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving field because what works today may not work tomorrow. Hence it is necessary to be updated on the marketing strategy and adopt it in your campaigns.