Key Points

WAYS TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN THAT WORKS!

It is vital to learn how to create a social media marketing plan to help your business thrive. Social media marketing on different accounts and platforms can become very disorganized. Hence the importance of a detailed plan. Elistatus has combined ten different strategies that work, despite the nature and size of your business. Just follow the steps outlined in our guide, and you will soon be on the way to optimizing your performance on social media platforms.

1. Write Down Your Objectives

The first step to establishing any strategic social media marketing plan is to decide on the objectives that your project aims to achieve. Be very clear on what exactly you hope to accomplish with your social media marketing plan for your business and write it down.

Make sure that your goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

The next steps on how to create a social media marketing plan are to track your progress.

2. Set Up Ways to Track Your Goals

The next step in creating an efficient social media marketing plan is to find out how you are going to track your achievement of the goals set up above. Designing and implementing a complicated social media marketing strategy involving numerous posts on multiple platforms is useless unless you know whether it’s attaining the expected results.

The tracking metrics which you choose will depend on the goals that you hope to reach with your strategy. For example, if your objective is to increase revenue by $10,000, you should track:

Website sessions from social media channels
The conversion rate for users coming from social media sites
The average sale price for conversions from social media platforms
The total amount of revenue from social media channels

It’s also essential to track the performance analytics and metrics of individual social media websites and personal social media posts. This is the best way to find out which parts of your social media strategy work best and which need improvement.

Depending on how you set up your business, there are different ways in which you can track these metrics. With regards to individual posts and platforms tracking, each social media site offers its analytics section. Concerning your business-wide parameters, you can usually track those on Google Analytics. The point is to make sure that you have all metrics set up for tracking before you start marketing your business on social media sites.

3. Audit Your Social Media Marketing Plan and Performance

Another way to create a social media marketing plan is to take stock of what you’ve been doing so far and what results from you’ve been able to achieve. Go through each of your social media accounts on various platforms and check whether you’ve been able to get the best results. Simultaneously, make a list of the things which have produced sub-optimal results as well.

Despite the need to use best practices from various industries across the globe, the best source of information and data for your social media plan is your own business’s experience. Audit your social media performance up to now, and use the conclusions you draw in enhancing your new strategy.

If you’ve never marketed your company on social media, you can skip this step.

4. Choose the Most Relevant Social Media Platforms for Your Brand

No digital marketer can succeed on all available social media networks. There are simply way too many of them, each with its requirements and best practices. Trying to be active on too many social media sites will only make you spread too thin and leave severe gaps in our social media marketing plan.

It is much more advisable and responsible to select 3-4 social media platforms for your business. You have to make this choice based on the nature of your business, your target audience, and your digital content creation capacities and expertise.

For instance, if you focus on creating marketing videos, then it’s logical to include a YouTube channel in your digital marketing strategy. If you rely heavily on photos and other images, you should consider Instagram.

Meanwhile, a few social media networks which work for just about any business and any type of content, regardless of your customer personas and geographical location, include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

5. Create Favourable Business Social Media Accounts

On the event that you already have accounts on the above mentioned social media networks, you need to make sure you set them up in the most optimal way. Each platform provides you with different features to highlight your business, and you should take advantage of them.

First and foremost, set up business accounts rather than personal ones as the former usually come with more possibilities and features. Add your brand’s logo as the profile picture. If a background image is also available, choose a photo which shows your business in the best possible light. Add a short but clear description of your business as well as your website, your physical address, phone number, and any other available information.

The more details that you add to your social media accounts, the more trustworthy you will look to leads and customers.

6. Research Your Customer Personality

If your business is not new, you already know who your ideal customers are. Now it’s time to research their habits when it comes to the use of social media platforms.

Different groups of people have widely varying habits and behaviours when it comes to social media networks. They are active on various days of the week and times of the day. These groups look for different things. Such a set of individuals engage with social media posts in multiple manners.

You have to get a good idea of the customs of your buyer personas to incorporate this factor into your social media marketing plan.

7. Create Content for Social Media Posts

Once you know on which platforms you want to schedule posts, and you know what these posts should focus on, you need to start working on the actual content.

Indeed, you don’t need to create all the digital content for your social media posts anew. Depending on the other components of your digital marketing strategy, you might be able to repurpose and reuse a lot of the content which you are already creating.

For example, blog posts, infographics, and videos are perfect candidates for scheduling on your social media accounts as well as on your website’s blog page.

Of course, you might need to create some new content for the specific needs and requirements of different social media websites. When you do that, make sure to take into consideration the image size and written text length requirements of each social media platform that you deploy.

8. Post at the Most Favourable Time for Users

Part of the research that you should have conducted on your customer personas includes the time when they are most active on different social media networks. Now you should incorporate the results of your research into your social media marketing plan. Decide on the best time to post on each channel for each audience segment.

The time for which you schedule social media posts should take into account the habits of your target users and their geographical location.

9. Continue Updating and Improving

Your social media marketing plan should remain a work in progress. Things change quite fast in all aspects of the digital marketing business. You have to do your best to stay on top of trends to beat the competition.

Check your social media posts’ performance regularly with the help of the tracking mechanisms which you have installed. This helps you understand what topics, content formats, and posting time produce the best results for your social media marketing goals.

Adjust your plan regularly.

10. Stay Organized

One of the must-have qualities of the top-performing social media marketers is the ability to be organized and strategic at all times. It is crucial not to let things in your social media marketing plan get out of control because it might take weeks or even months to get back on track.

Record everything that you do in your digital marketing strategy. Have a detailed social media calendar where you include all posts and times of posting. Track performance regularly. That’s the only way to remain on top of things.

Final Bonus Tip: Use Social Media Management Tools

Performing all the tasks required for creating and implementing an excellent social media marketing plan is time and energy-consuming. That is because you are doing it by hand. To help with the situation, ensure you get access to the best social media management tools to streamline your social media processes.

Reference: https://www.contentpilot.io/blog/social-media-marketing-plan/